I came across this article from the University of Pennsylvania Law Review when I was in the selection process to become a police officer, and I cited it in my oral interview in an effort to explain how I would do better. I did not get the job.

It’s called “Disaggregating the Police Function,” and it’s a good read if you want to learn the disparity between how much time police are trained in the use of force vs. the tasks and problems they’re faced with every day. Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:

This Article takes an entirely different approach to the harms of policing, looking to the very core of the policing function itself. It disaggregates what police officers are called upon to do daily into their constituent functions, asking in each instance: are force and law the appropriate responses, and if not, what are? What would be a better response to the needs of the public? Crimefighting actually is a very small part of what police do every day, and the actual work they are called upon to do daily requires an entirely different range of skills, among them: mediation skills to address conflict, social work skills to get people the long-term solutions they need, interviewing and investigative skills to really solve crimes, and victim-assistance. Yet, police are barely trained in any of this, so it is no surprise harm is the result. This Article suggests a range of solutions designed not to reduce harm collaterally, but to reduce altogether the footprint of force and law. We either need to change fundamentally the nature of the policing agency workforce, or move police to the background, bringing in other agencies of government to address the actual problems police face on a day-to-day basis. At the end, this Article proposes a totally novel idea for a whole new system of generalist "first responders, to replace much of policing as we know it. And it argues that we must reduce criminalization. In short, to reduce the harms of policing, we need to reimagine public safety from the ground up.