Suggested changes to policing need to be well defined

Voters in Minneapolis overwhelmingly decided not to “defund the police.” That is not a surprise. Those behind the effort struggled to define what that would mean, and what a new agency would look like. But that is not to say that people don’t want some changes to how our police departments operate. There have already been changes in policing, generally designed to increase accountability, at both the state and local levels. Just recently, the city of Milwaukee took action to ban no-knock warrants. They also created new rules stipulating police there have a duty to report acts of misconduct by their colleagues, and to protect the reporting officer from retaliation. They also streamlined discipline standards for misbehaving officers to make them more uniform. La Crosse County is likely to debate these very issues now that it has acted to create a police oversight board. This of course has been met with some resistance from those who chant Back the Blue. We should back the blue, but we also need to ensure we are protecting and respecting the rights of all citizens. Efforts such as those in La Crosse County seek to do just that. But unlike what we saw in Minneapolis, any suggested changes need to be articulated clearly if they are going to be successful.