Over these past few weeks globally, we are having important conversations about the issues of systemic/systematic oppression, racial inequality, and police brutality, which have affected Black communities for hundreds of years.
We are all taking a hard look at what it means to be an anti-racist, and how we can help support systemic change in the short and long term. Granted, it’s a LONG overdue conversation, but perhaps it’s the tiniest spark contributing towards igniting the fires of change.
In an effort to reduce escalation during encounters with the police, many lawmakers and citizens are advocating to hire social workers to respond to calls alongside police officers, in an effort to de-escalate the situation.
If you’re a clinical social worker, in your post-MSW (Master of Social Work) clinical experience, depending on the type of setting you work in, you learn how to be able to calm and regulate versus escalate in mental health crises. So, of course, including social workers in the team would help to reduce instances of police brutality and solve the problem, right?
Not really.
It sounds like a simple solution in theory, one that could be implemented almost immediately. A quick fix, which is exactly what we, the American people, love!
But as Licensed Clinical Social Workers, many of my colleagues and I are concerned that adding social workers to the equation will not solve the issues that we are encountering between Black communities and the police force.
Adding a social worker to a completely broken system does not mitigate how broken it is.
It’s like trying to put together a broken tea cup with craft glue. The kind that holds together popsicle stick houses. Sure, you might get it to a place where it looks like it’s holding together and is somewhat “fixed”, but the minute you put any tea in that cup, it’s still going to spill out everywhere and break apart.
Social workers in this scenario are the craft glue trying to hold together the broken tea cup.
Yes, we are trained to de-escalate mental health crises, but most police calls are not mental health crises. And use excessive force is not just occurring during a mental health crisis, it is happening every day as people just exist. Countless instances of police brutality never warranted police involvement or force to begin with, and that is the problem in and of itself.
The systems need to change at their core in order for there to be any meaningful shift. As social workers, we can use our knowledge of the micro, mezzo, and macro system levels to help create policies in collaboration with Black communities, that address systemic/systematic racism and police brutality at their core. Or we can be the ones supporting the mental health of those directly or vicariously impacted by racism and prejudice. That’s where our knowledge and expertise are better spent.
Even social work systems themselves, such as our child welfare systems and foster care systems, need to be looked at under the microscope and re-conceptualized. We need to look at how we can better support Black communities and other non-Black people of color communities with resources instead of punitive action. These communities are disproportionately negatively impacted by the very systems that are intended to “help”.
So if we want to see change, REAL change, we need to dig deeper, and implement much broader, more comprehensive policy shifts than adding social workers to the emergency response team alongside police. We need to break it all down in order to rebuild with foundations not rooted in racism and inequality. We need a new system where accountability is expected and demanded, where there are actual legal consequences, including jail time, for abuse of power. Every. Single. Time.
Let’s not take the quick fix. Let’s do the hard work and truly dismantle the systems that serve to oppress.
