Project for Opportunity and Safety

Twice in two days, black men were shot and killed by police officers. Last night, five police officers were killed while protecting a protest in Dallas. The common denominator is an eroding rule of law driven by cyclical crime, violence, and poverty. It is reasonable and necessary to both stand up against injustice and mourn the lives of the officers lost — the two are not mutually exclusive; reform will reduce crime, protecting police and communities alike.

Calls for police accountability and justice reform have grown louder in recent years. Groups like Black Lives Matter have championed this issue and garnered the support of the Democratic Party in its entirety, capturing media attention and the eyes of the nation.
Criminal justice reform: Fairer to all communities, safer for our police [Opinion]
By Phalen Kuckuck | July 8, 2016 | Comments

image: http://cdn.redalertpolitics.com/files/2016/07/Dallas-Shootings-Prot_Keen.jpg
A woman is escorted to her car by armed officers on Thursday, July 7 , 2016 in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers in the heart of Dallas during protests over two recent fatal police shootings of black men. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News via AP)

A woman is escorted to her car by armed officers on Thursday, July 7 , 2016 in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers in the heart of Dallas during protests over two recent fatal police shootings of black men. (Ashley Landis/The Dallas Morning News via AP)

Twice in two days, black men were shot and killed by police officers. Last night, five police officers were killed while protecting a protest in Dallas. The common denominator is an eroding rule of law driven by cyclical crime, violence, and poverty. It is reasonable and necessary to both stand up against injustice and mourn the lives of the officers lost — the two are not mutually exclusive; reform will reduce crime, protecting police and communities alike.

Calls for police accountability and justice reform have grown louder in recent years. Groups like Black Lives Matter have championed this issue and garnered the support of the Democratic Party in its entirety, capturing media attention and the eyes of the nation.

Criminal justice reform is not a liberal issue, nor just an African-American issue. It is not incompatible with fighting crime, it is not an anti-law enforcement agenda, and it is absolutely not a losing issue for conservatives, especially not with our police officers being murdered. If we respect our ideology and our Constitution, supporting criminal justice reform is common sense.

America has the single highest incarceration rate in the world — six times the rate of our Canadian neighbors. Law enforcement officers want to serve and protect, but the system often perpetuates the crime it wishes to fight. The War on Drugs, over-incarceration, racial components, the role poverty plays in lives of crime, they all intertwine, but we do not need to agree on all of these separate issues to break ground. We know that economic empowerment and free-market solutions are the single best objective measures in fighting poverty. Locking people away for nonviolent offenses, thus creating government burdens out of people who would have otherwise been upstanding citizens and taxpayers, flies directly in the face of sensible economic policy. The two are incompatible. If we really want to be tough on crime, we will work to lower recidivism rates and reduce cycles of crime and poverty, keeping our communities safer and the taxpayers’ wallets fatter.

We cannot dismiss these calls for reform as social justice angst, not when the same solutions will also save our law enforcement officers.

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