Back in 2009, I spoke with a deputy chief of police in a Canadian city; it was one of the conversations that sparked my interest in upstream thinking. He believed that the police force was unduly focused on reacting to crimes as opposed to preventing them. “A lot of people on the force want to play cops and robbers,” he said. “It’s much easier to say ‘I arrested this guy’ than to say ‘I spent some time talking to this wayward kid.’ ”
My Uncle was a cop for thirty years and retired in the 1960s. He said this shift was reflected in the change from calling what cops do "police work" and calling it "law enforcement" instead. He said that changed the emphasis and turned police officers into "the procurement arm of the criminal justice system."
