Lately I’ve been struck by the similarities between library work and policing. It sounds improbable at first. Libraries are an oasis of fun and learning with staff who peddle books and do puppet shows. Police are policing. They’re showing up on most people’s worst day, and making it worse or better, depending. But, there are parallels.
I’m a librarian in a public library, so I know a little bit about being a public servant. Like the police, I’m paid from tax dollars to serve my community. Like the police, my mandate is to serve all comers, regardless of their background, race, financial resources, living arrangements or mental stability. Like the police, people who work in libraries come from all walks of life and philosophical backgrounds, and some are better at customer service than others. Some of us are happy to be there. Some of us are burned out. Some of us are excited by innovations and changes. Some of us prefer the old ways.
What’s also true about both libraries and the police is that in addition to our stated tasks and responsibilities, we are called on to deal with issues that are not part of our mission, but that land upon our doorstep because we are the only game in town. Homeless people. The mentally ill. Lonely people. Elderly in need of care. Addicts. Runaways. Latchkey kids. They all end up at our door, many in desperate need of something that we’re not equipped to provide.
Libraries help plenty of people on their worst day. Every branch in the system that I work for has their own frequent flyers that everyone knows by name or condition. When we see them coming, we hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Am I helping Mr. A find pictures of crop circles today, or is Mr. A going to rant at me for my incompetence in not knowing the direct line to the head of the CIA? Is Ms P going to come in and quietly use the computers, or is she going to cause a scene by accusing some poor random guy checking his email of trying to read her mind? Is the shabby looking guy nodding off by the magazines trying to catch a wink during his only time indoors today that he might get? Or is he overdosing? Does the person complaining to me about him have a legitimate concern, or are they just offended by the notion of sharing space with a homeless person?
When these behaviors happen in the library, we do our best to manage, contain and redirect people in crisis. But, if Ms P starts screaming at someone in the grocery store for hiding cameras in her lettuce, they’re calling the cops. And the cops, I imagine, are about as well equipped to help someone in a mental health crisis as libraries are. Which is to say they’ve watched some videos on conflict resolution. What the cops have that libraries don’t have is weapons and tools for control. They have guns and Tasers. They have handcuffs and brute force. They have prison cells.
This country doesn’t like to invest in social services or public amenities. This is a choice that we make. We don’t want to invest in community mental health services, because that’s just going to encourage people to be crazy in our community. Other communities can pay for that if they want crazy people, but we’re against enabling crazy people. Same for services for the homeless, or any other marginalized group. We don’t want to invest in services to help them, and we don’t want to see them.
When people have to perform tasks that they’re not trained or equipped to do, it’s demoralizing. If I have to ask a homeless person to leave the library because their body odor is too intense, I haven’t helped them in any way. I haven’t provided them with the means to get clean, or get new clothes. I haven’t solved the underlying problem, nor am I allowed or empowered to solve their problem, even if I could somehow, because that’s not what the library is for. They will be just as smelly tomorrow when they show up again. And if, in a fit of desperation, they decide to wash their clothes in the duck pond at the park, now they’ve broken the law, and now the police are involved. And they, like the library, do not have the solution for this person. They have weapons, and force, and jail.
This is not intended to be an excuse for any of the egregious problems we see in our police forces. It’s not an excuse for racist policing. It’s not an excuse for the over policing of certain communities because of their races or economic condition. It’s not an excuse for the militarisation of police, or politically motivated DAs or any of the other myriad issues that have caused many people to lose faith in the police.
But, as I said above, constantly being held responsible for dealing with issues that are not your mission is demoralizing. It burns people out, or it hardens people. It doesn’t matter how nice you are in your daily life, if you’re constantly being asked to remove homeless people from the taxpayer’s sight, or contain (not help, just contain) a mentally ill person in crisis until they’re safe to wander out in public again, it burns you out.
The message that all of us, all Americans, need to hear is that it’s not just our police departments that need to change. We need to change. We get exactly the services that we invest in. We have an exploding homeless population because we will not invest in services to help people not become or remain homeless. We have a mental health crisis because we dismantled our mental health infrastructure in favor of local community care, and then refused to fund local community care. Addiction help, daycare and afterschool programs, elder care all are things we will not fund, but we will call the cops if kids are playing unattended, or some confused elderly woman accidentally leaves the store without paying for something. We have chosen to criminalize those things we refuse to invest in.
A significant part of improving policing (and librarianing) has to come from our communities. It comes from investing in social services and mental health care, and calling on them when we see someone in crisis, instead of the cops, or librarians. It’s investing in after school programs and spaces where kids can go and be kids. It’s about meeting and talking to our neighbors, and bringing issues to their attention instead of never speaking to them and then calling the cops because you don’t like how they parked on the street. And it’s definitely not calling the cops because you see a brown person in your neighborhood, or looking at the magazines at the library.
As a society we’ve attempted to deal with many of these issues by looking the other way. We want homeless people, addicts and the mentally ill to just get their acts together, and until they do, ask the cops to keep them from our sight. None of these problems, none of these human beings in crisis, disappear because we refuse to help them. If we want policing to change, we have to stop using the police to handle problems we don’t want to deal with.
Random Knowledge Syndrome 