My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts

by Resmaa Menakem

In a 2016 Slate video, Michael Wood, Jr., a retired Baltimore cop, eloquently describes how real community policing works: If we actually did a community policing model, designed to have decentralized power, so that the patrol officer can take care of things in his or her responsibility area. So, in a true community policing model, if I came down here and I see this overgrown brush, I have the power and the resources to get city workers or something like that down here to fix that. I should have the ability to get weed whackers and recruit people in the neighborhood. And maybe for that day of work, instead of locking people up, I came out with the neighborhood and did this, because that would have some kind of improvement overall … We have to start thinking about what are we actually doing and what are our goals. So if our goals are to reduce violent crime, we have to change our metrics. Right now our metrics are arrests…. We have to change the metrics to crime reduction, to justice, to problem solving … You should be focused on improving your post, not on locking up many of those people on your post, because if you’re taking their freedom away, how are you not going to be their enemy?105