How about this: Give the police *more* funding so that they can hire social workers. Social workers are already a thing, they are dispatched to situations that call for their expertise. What people have been proposing, which is completely idiotic, is that social workers be dispatched to situations where there is an imminent lethal threat. Cops already perform the role of social worker in many situations, for example when they talk jumpers off the ledges of buildings all the time.
Suggesting that a social worker should be called in when somebody like george floyd, who had an extensive violent criminal history (he robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, among other things) and had been in prison fourteen times, which the cops *are aware of* as soon as they ID him and look up his priors, is insane. Or somebody like jacob blake, or that dude waving a knife around, or literally any of the other people that have inspired rioting this year. This is what armed police are for.. It's super easy to criticize them after the fact when it wasn't you whose life was in danger.
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