to police to care

I often use the term ‘to police’ in regard to our responsibilities in negotiating narcissists in our midst.

So here I will attempt to define ‘to police’ in that context.

For the longest time policing has been seen as a force, much like the sovereign’s military forces, but directed along interior lines that stratify or grid us, rather than the force at the border, the march at the edge of power. The lines inside that pave roads into streets, allowing surer movements that corral populaions into cities, also known as the polis.

As such the ordering of the police force has been along military lines, where orders descend into missions because time is critical, where reducing the argy-bargy to get results in good time, is a good thing, even when chaos fogs us up. What is lost in this forceful attitude, is the care for the city.

Most days the city not in crisis. Most days are boring. Boring is good. Boring is stable. Boring nurturs and alllows for the safety of play.

Force assumes an ongoing crisis. Its solutions may be more wrong than right in the reach out to justice. Physicality may be required…

If we were to re-make the police force as a police care, then we can perhaps see the framing I mean when I say we must police the narcissists on our side.

Re-viving policing as a caring profession rather than some toned-down military sideshow, would do wonders. Especially in regard to those frought moments when elderly women are tasered by an officer after saying ‘na, bugger it’ and treating the event an old people’s home as an emergncy equivalent to a ramraid on party go-ers. It’s not that some gormless bloke in a uniform made a mistake, that someone made a mistake in employing him, but that the military assumptions of a ‘force’ frame his actions. This is an error of framing: an error of judgement highlighted by the use of “force”. An error that policies and policing cannot undo without having a long hard look at themselves. Something force is not inclined to do, given it is developed to be used in a crisis, even if there is no crisis. Old people get more demented everyday. Dementia is not a crisis.

The same goes for psychosis and druggedness.

A Police Care wouldn’t see mental illness or dementia and drug-psychosis as military threats.

The good news is that with the now decade old requirement that police in Tasmania will enter their professions with university level educational qualifications, if not a degree. These pathways will hopefuly allow in the future more diverse studies and professional research into policing that could involve cross—disciplinary endeavours. At least more care might be possible than the cross-fit fanaticism some militarists dream of when they hear the word police state. A dual class of psychology and law outside of profiling serial whackos may be of more use on the street when dealing with, for example, dementia and psychosis, as an example.

Admittedly it will take generations even it it all goes well.

With that sort of attitude however, we may be able to police the narcissists in our midst without feeling like a bad person morally by acting just like… —a cop that we see tasering old ladies.

There is a lot of police work to be done, not in fighting crime per se, by a Police Care,  but in reducing the damage narcissists do without breaking the law, if only to sui tit to their concerns at our expense.

Crossposted at substack.com.