Because of what’s on the plate in front of us, Gadfly is trying to think about and get you to think about policing and our police department from as many angles as possible.
Last post Gadfly asked you to think about how the Bethlehem police represent themselves in a recruiting video.
Now let’s take a look at Allentown. Compare the two recruiting videos. What do you see?
Perhaps the most important thing to think about is how appropriate each video is in this period of intense national conversation following the murder of George Floyd.
What do these videos tell us about how each department sees its relation to the public and the kind of officer it wants to recruit?
This Allentown video below is pertinent too as we think about the nature of policing. It made me think of the “Building Trust” section of the Obama-era 21st Century Policing report that Alison Steele turned me on to in one of her Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist posts, that “Law enforcement culture should embrace a guardian—rather than a warrior—mindset to build trust and legitimacy both within agencies and with the public.”
Police. Guardian rather than warrior. Food for thought.
Gadfly knows he’s loading this post with too much, but since we’re talking about Allentown here’s their use of force policy to compare with ours.