Bruce Callahan: Treating some issues as law enforcement problems is not working

To The Daily Sun,

I wish to commend David Stamps for his recent (June 16) piece, "Laconia can be very proud of its police department." While I have no direct knowledge or experience with the department, I can appreciate his clear thinking on the matter and, in particular, upon the political context. I particularly appreciate his identification of what he calls out as "the big lie of modern America."

Since the Reagan era the nation has been afflicted by the notion that government is inherently bad and ought to be minimized. Conservative activist Grover Norquist famously proclaimed "My goal is to cut government in half in 25 years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" and we have been pursuing that reckless and destructive course.

Operating under the fiction that the nation cannot afford to do otherwise, America has in recent years retreated from its greatness by its avoidance of the use of government to improve our lives, address our problems and advance our society. Where once we used to not only attempt to fix what is broken but to build a better nation, we have for roughly 30 years been running the place on the cheap, cutting corners, failing even to maintain our infrastructure, radically reducing our commitment to education and so much more. We are witness to the most powerful nation on earth, the worlds largest economy, once the most confident, embarrassingly struggling to keep the lights on, while people struggle to merely survive.

Nothing shows up our current predicament better than our failure to deal with the current pandemic. The nation that formerly lead the world in manufacturing and medical research now finds itself unable to provide simple masks for its citizens or to test the people in its nursing homes. What a spectacle we must be for the rest of the world?

The simple truth is that government is the single tool available to the people that can potentially accomplish the kind of work that needs to be done. When people find themselves in difficulty, possess the tools they need to get themselves out of their predicament and refuse to use them, perhaps for ideological reasons, or worse, conclude the tools cannot be useful, is it any wonder that the condition persists or worsens?

So, perhaps it is time to regain our confidence in ourselves, realize the power we have potentially in our grasp and commit to moving forward again. We need to reassess the role of police generally in our society and question whether we are utilizing them appropriately. We need to find better ways to address mental health and complex social problems. The police violence we have seen across the country on the one hand and the resulting lawlessness point out not only the need for law enforcement reform in some communities but the need for increased commitment to mental health services, social services and appropriate health care. Treating these issues as law enforcement problems obviously is not working.

Bruce Callahan

Thornton