Opinion: Costs of the pandemic to local, state governments must be covered by the federal government
Unless the federal government provides funding to make up the losses, there will be a catastrophic retreat from progress, says guest columnist Robert Brand.
(Photo by Flickr user wyliepoon, used under a Creative Commons license)This guest column was written by Robert Brand, the founder of Work for Progress for America.
Local and state governments are facing fiscal crises that if not addressed will cut even the inadequate efforts to create a more just society and will challenge the ability of government to respond to the demands for justice that are all around us.
Unless the federal government provides funding to make up the losses of local and state governments from the pandemic (actual costs and lost tax revenue) there will be a catastrophic retreat from progress. Just to get us in the right frame of mind we should understand that we are starting with a mess.
The economy is broken with 40 million unemployed, tens of millions with reduced income, debt ballooning and huge uncertainty.
The Black Lives Matter movement has focused national attention on the history of racism that has harmed our nation and the crisis of unaccountable police which requires thoughtful and agile responses that reallocate resources and assure there is sufficient funding for preventing harm and responding to community problems.
The healthcare system is broken with treatment not available to millions, unequal treatment by race, gender, income and geography; pathetic abandonment of public health and conservatives willing to sacrifice the elderly, people of color, the frail, those in congregate housing (nursing homes, institutional care, prisons), the immune compromised — literally served up to risk death and illness to pretend that the world has not changed.
Our politics are broken with the polarization keeping the majority from organizing for a new, new deal; a green new deal, equal rights, police and justice reform and simple direct voting rights.
Our very planet is broken, with a ticking clock on whether we will make the reforms necessary to prevent global catastrophe and make a world that offers hope to our children and which tackles the massive threats to our food systems, our global health, education and opportunities to live with enforceable human rights.
Our military is broken, eating up our resources and substituting force for reason in ever widening failures which squander lives, wealth and opportunities.
The pandemic has created an extreme crisis for local and state governments and for basic voting rights.
Unlike the federal government, most local and state governments must have balanced budgets to begin their fiscal years. All are facing revenue shortfalls totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. At the same time the federal government is threatening to defund the U. S. Postal Service which would have an extreme negative impact on voting by mail.
Everything we want to accomplish requires that the federal, commonwealth and local governments work to correct the crises which grow directly from the pandemic and resulting collapse of so much of our economy and opportunities.
This means that the entire costs of the pandemic to local and state governments, the entire cost of healthcare related to the pandemic, the lost income of low- and middle-income people, and the cost of preparing for the ongoing testing, PPE, case tracing and preparedness for future disasters must be covered by the federal government. Otherwise government will not be able to help those calling for justice and fairness, much less businesses and workers trying to rebuild their lives.
While there are many more tasks that government should take the lead to implement, it is essential that government at all levels also make a commitment to voting rights and a fully funded system that makes elections fair, encourages voting and counts the votes, quickly, efficiently and accountably.
There are people in our country who want to restrict voting. We must overcome their decades long campaign to keep control of government in the hands of a self-serving minority. This means funding of federal elections, offering assistance to states to make voting easier during the pandemic and funding the Postal Service to facilitate mail voting.
Every elected official must commit to these fundamental reforms.
Local governments should support and fund local activists to educate our neighbors, engage elected officials and build an unstoppable movement for these initiatives.
Opinion: Let’s take these immediate steps to move from policing to community safety
“From a good government point of view it is important to establish a zero-based budgeting approach to the Police Department,” says guest columnist Robert Brand.
“Despite our comfort, our policing and prosecutions do not make us safe,” says guest columnist Robert Brand.
(Photo by Chris Henry on Unsplash)This guest column was written by Robert Brand, the founder of Work for Progress for America.
Let’s start with the obvious. We all want to be safe, in our homes, on the street, in schools, wherever we are. But many of us feel or believe we are not safe.
The Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the extent to which our neighbors are not safe walking, driving, jogging, in school, or even in their own homes. 1,000 people each year are killed by police. Millions are subjected to arrests for trivial behaviors.
All of these problems are linked to a pervasive and persistent racism and inequality that infect our society. We spend billions of dollars every year on private security employees beyond our tens of billions of dollars on police. We have imprisoned or jailed 2.4 million of our neighbors and arrest an additional 11 million people per year.
When we discuss safety we have to begin by identifying who is not safe. People struggling with the essentials to survive are not safe. For them just plain surviving is primary. They want safety but the very potential of achieving safety is way beyond them. For our country, the richest country in the world, and the richest country in the history of the world, we need to look at how many people are so consumed with survival that safety is but a dream.
People living below the official federal poverty level are not safe. About 30 million of our neighbors, including one in four children under six live every day with exposure to the lifelong harm of poverty.
People living with food insecurity — chronic hunger — are not safe. 37 million people, one person in 10 of our neighbors live with hunger that affects their health, their ability to learn, their performance at work and their energy to participate in their communities.
More than 3 million Americans are homeless They are not safe. If we add those living in substandard, actually dangerous and unhealthy housing about 20 million of our neighbors are not safe.
Abused or neglect of children continues to grow. Most of this group are neglected (78.3%) and nearly all of them live in poverty. They are not safe.
People of color are 5 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites. They are not safe.
Every day more than 200,000 of our neighbors are held in jails simply because they do not have the money to pay for their release until trial. They are part of a revolving door involving 11 million of our neighbors who were arrested every year. They are not safe.
The plague of gun violence threatens the safety of many of our communities. We cannot ignore the more than 30,000 suicides each year committed using guns or the more than 10,000 accidental shootings. No one is safe.
Toxic chemicals and air pollution are far more common in low-income neighborhoods, especially low-income communities of color. In fact, communities of color face higher exposure to bad air even when they are not low income. With these exposures come higher levels of illness. These illnesses not only kill and incapacitate individuals but also tear at the fabric of communities. They are not safe.
Our system of punishment/justice has a clear belief that punishment, close surveillance, arrests, cash bail, jails and prisons make us safer. But there is a pretty strong consensus that punishment or the threat of punishment do not deter criminal behavior.
For deterrence to exist there would have to be a widespread understanding that criminal behavior will be detected and the person will be arrested. However, a substantial percentage of crime is never even reported because crime victims don’t have faith in the system. Of reported crimes, many are never solved. Police spend the overwhelming part of their time interviewing people who have been the victims of crimes and writing reports. When arrests are made, police and prosecutors offer deals — less incarceration for a guilty plea — so that 95% of trials are plea bargained.
Despite our comfort, our policing and prosecutions do not make us safe.
At times policymakers believed that criminal behavior was caused by race, ethnicity or even the shape of one’s head. Therefore we imprisoned people to assure safety of the greater community.
At times we have believed that punishment was required or justified by Scripture.
At times policymakers have believed that the weakness of some communities, not exclusion or inequality, caused crime which required punishment.
At times policymakers have believed that punishment is a deterrent to crime.
All of these turn out to simply not stand up to scrutiny and consideration of evidence. But each of these errors controlled public policy for decades (and some still do).
Our current system does little to promote safety but creates extraordinary harm and inequality. Inequality, exclusion, punishment and mass incarceration prevent improving safety, building community and achieving justice. We can fundamentally change our current punishment system to a system of fairness and justice for all — crime victims, crime perpetrators and the general public.
Let me suggest some immediate steps we can take in Philadelphia to set a new course for building safe communities.
From a good government point of view it is important to establish a zero-based budgeting approach to the Police Department. This means that every budget cycle you start with questioning whether the tasks being accomplished are the right tasks and if so how to do them in an efficient manner. With regard to the police there are a set of tasks that are better handled by other types of services. There are other tasks that they just don’t do very well. And, there are tasks that are just the wrong things to do.
Mental health calls would be better handled by a special corps of mental health professionals working in the Health Department. They would be unarmed. Their training would be very specific in responding to and sometimes preventing mental health emergencies and getting people through them safely. They would also have the power to ask for police support if that were necessary and to keep the police away from an incident if that would escalate the tension. Systems like this exist in the United Kingdom and in Oregon among other places. Given that mental health calls account for between 20% and 30% of all 911 calls, creating a new civilian, professional mental health corps would transfer substantial revenue from the Police to an expanded service in the Health Department.
Moving the Traffic Division from the Police to the Streets Department would also benefit the City and the budget. People who direct traffic do not need to be armed. Their training should be different and probably their pay scale while still being City civil service would allow some savings in the budget. Again this would move a significant number of people out of the Police Department and into other City civil service jobs. It would also allow us to change the incredibly wasteful policy of police sitting in their vehicles all day babysitting a construction site that obstructs traffic. There would be savings not only in personnel but also some in vehicles. The Streets Department could also maintain the traffic obstacle LED signage but shift responsibility to contractors to pick up the signs, transport them to the site of construction, maintain them and return them.
Removing police officers from schools and investing in social service workers to minimize conflicts in schools has been widely discussed and should be done. We do not want children arrested when alternatives exist.
Engagement with homeless camps is not a police function. Police sweeps of these encampments result in substantial, probably illegal, destruction of property of people who are homeless. It also escalates situations when our real goal is to help people who are homeless find a safe place which often will include necessary health care and treatment. Moving this service to the City Office of Homeless Services will focus our attention on how to help end homelessness.
We can also minimize misdemeanor arrests. Situations that can be handled by a ticket or summons should not be escalated into arrests with resulting harm to individuals, crowding of courts and lots of police overtime. Building a list of categories of encounters that should not result in arrest will better serve our community and help us focus on community building and moving funds into a community based social service system.
All of these efforts can be implemented in the next several months. They require City Council action, agreement with Mayor Jim Kenney, and educational campaigns so that communities support these changes. But they are all achievable and they begin to reshape the Police Department into a properly sized public service. They are a start which also creates time and momentum to engage the more difficult issues.
Opinion: Let’s take these immediate steps to move from policing to community safety
“From a good government point of view it is important to establish a zero-based budgeting approach to the Police Department,” says guest columnist Robert Brand.
“Despite our comfort, our policing and prosecutions do not make us safe,” says guest columnist Robert Brand.
(Photo by Chris Henry on Unsplash)This guest column was written by Robert Brand, the founder of Work for Progress for America.
Let’s start with the obvious. We all want to be safe, in our homes, on the street, in schools, wherever we are. But many of us feel or believe we are not safe.
The Black Lives Matter movement has exposed the extent to which our neighbors are not safe walking, driving, jogging, in school, or even in their own homes. 1,000 people each year are killed by police. Millions are subjected to arrests for trivial behaviors.
All of these problems are linked to a pervasive and persistent racism and inequality that infect our society. We spend billions of dollars every year on private security employees beyond our tens of billions of dollars on police. We have imprisoned or jailed 2.4 million of our neighbors and arrest an additional 11 million people per year.
When we discuss safety we have to begin by identifying who is not safe. People struggling with the essentials to survive are not safe. For them just plain surviving is primary. They want safety but the very potential of achieving safety is way beyond them. For our country, the richest country in the world, and the richest country in the history of the world, we need to look at how many people are so consumed with survival that safety is but a dream.
People living below the official federal poverty level are not safe. About 30 million of our neighbors, including one in four children under six live every day with exposure to the lifelong harm of poverty.
People living with food insecurity — chronic hunger — are not safe. 37 million people, one person in 10 of our neighbors live with hunger that affects their health, their ability to learn, their performance at work and their energy to participate in their communities.
More than 3 million Americans are homeless They are not safe. If we add those living in substandard, actually dangerous and unhealthy housing about 20 million of our neighbors are not safe.
Abused or neglect of children continues to grow. Most of this group are neglected (78.3%) and nearly all of them live in poverty. They are not safe.
People of color are 5 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites. They are not safe.
Every day more than 200,000 of our neighbors are held in jails simply because they do not have the money to pay for their release until trial. They are part of a revolving door involving 11 million of our neighbors who were arrested every year. They are not safe.
The plague of gun violence threatens the safety of many of our communities. We cannot ignore the more than 30,000 suicides each year committed using guns or the more than 10,000 accidental shootings. No one is safe.
Toxic chemicals and air pollution are far more common in low-income neighborhoods, especially low-income communities of color. In fact, communities of color face higher exposure to bad air even when they are not low income. With these exposures come higher levels of illness. These illnesses not only kill and incapacitate individuals but also tear at the fabric of communities. They are not safe.
Our system of punishment/justice has a clear belief that punishment, close surveillance, arrests, cash bail, jails and prisons make us safer. But there is a pretty strong consensus that punishment or the threat of punishment do not deter criminal behavior.
For deterrence to exist there would have to be a widespread understanding that criminal behavior will be detected and the person will be arrested. However, a substantial percentage of crime is never even reported because crime victims don’t have faith in the system. Of reported crimes, many are never solved. Police spend the overwhelming part of their time interviewing people who have been the victims of crimes and writing reports. When arrests are made, police and prosecutors offer deals — less incarceration for a guilty plea — so that 95% of trials are plea bargained.
Despite our comfort, our policing and prosecutions do not make us safe.
At times policymakers believed that criminal behavior was caused by race, ethnicity or even the shape of one’s head. Therefore we imprisoned people to assure safety of the greater community.
At times we have believed that punishment was required or justified by Scripture.
At times policymakers have believed that the weakness of some communities, not exclusion or inequality, caused crime which required punishment.
At times policymakers have believed that punishment is a deterrent to crime.
All of these turn out to simply not stand up to scrutiny and consideration of evidence. But each of these errors controlled public policy for decades (and some still do).
Our current system does little to promote safety but creates extraordinary harm and inequality. Inequality, exclusion, punishment and mass incarceration prevent improving safety, building community and achieving justice. We can fundamentally change our current punishment system to a system of fairness and justice for all — crime victims, crime perpetrators and the general public.
Let me suggest some immediate steps we can take in Philadelphia to set a new course for building safe communities.
From a good government point of view it is important to establish a zero-based budgeting approach to the Police Department. This means that every budget cycle you start with questioning whether the tasks being accomplished are the right tasks and if so how to do them in an efficient manner. With regard to the police there are a set of tasks that are better handled by other types of services. There are other tasks that they just don’t do very well. And, there are tasks that are just the wrong things to do.
Mental health calls would be better handled by a special corps of mental health professionals working in the Health Department. They would be unarmed. Their training would be very specific in responding to and sometimes preventing mental health emergencies and getting people through them safely. They would also have the power to ask for police support if that were necessary and to keep the police away from an incident if that would escalate the tension. Systems like this exist in the United Kingdom and in Oregon among other places. Given that mental health calls account for between 20% and 30% of all 911 calls, creating a new civilian, professional mental health corps would transfer substantial revenue from the Police to an expanded service in the Health Department.
Moving the Traffic Division from the Police to the Streets Department would also benefit the City and the budget. People who direct traffic do not need to be armed. Their training should be different and probably their pay scale while still being City civil service would allow some savings in the budget. Again this would move a significant number of people out of the Police Department and into other City civil service jobs. It would also allow us to change the incredibly wasteful policy of police sitting in their vehicles all day babysitting a construction site that obstructs traffic. There would be savings not only in personnel but also some in vehicles. The Streets Department could also maintain the traffic obstacle LED signage but shift responsibility to contractors to pick up the signs, transport them to the site of construction, maintain them and return them.
Removing police officers from schools and investing in social service workers to minimize conflicts in schools has been widely discussed and should be done. We do not want children arrested when alternatives exist.
Engagement with homeless camps is not a police function. Police sweeps of these encampments result in substantial, probably illegal, destruction of property of people who are homeless. It also escalates situations when our real goal is to help people who are homeless find a safe place which often will include necessary health care and treatment. Moving this service to the City Office of Homeless Services will focus our attention on how to help end homelessness.
We can also minimize misdemeanor arrests. Situations that can be handled by a ticket or summons should not be escalated into arrests with resulting harm to individuals, crowding of courts and lots of police overtime. Building a list of categories of encounters that should not result in arrest will better serve our community and help us focus on community building and moving funds into a community based social service system.
All of these efforts can be implemented in the next several months. They require City Council action, agreement with Mayor Jim Kenney, and educational campaigns so that communities support these changes. But they are all achievable and they begin to reshape the Police Department into a properly sized public service. They are a start which also creates time and momentum to engage the more difficult issues.
Somehow the wisdom of WordPress Management believe that new accounts must introduce ourselves (or understand WordPress better than I do). So, here I am. For more than five decades I have worked to build a society and economy that is committed to equality and justice. I have worked in the union movement, government, business and a long list of organizations. Now that a pandemic is governing my time I had the thought that maybe I should try to write up some of what I have learned. In the process I will also write about my life a bit. But for now, I am hoping that the WordPress gods will accept this as introducing myself so I can launch this site.
Required Minimum Public Health Steps to Open Society and Economy after Spatial Restrictions to Overcome the COVID-19 Pandemic:
Everyone wants the pandemic to end. Everyone wants the closings, spatial isolation, staying-at-home and economic collapse to end. But the COVID-19 disease operates on the rules of viruses, not our popular vote. If we don’t understand how viruses spread and what it takes to end the risk then we will keep repeating the flare up/isolations/economic collapse/renewed deaths and hospitalizations cycle followed by an illusory search for normal. Hope for a return to a fair and resilient world must be based on the application of what we know about science, public health and fairness. We cannot continue to praise our frontline staff and bemoan the deaths of our neighbors if we do not institute policies that change how our nation, region or city confronts illness and a broken health system.
These steps are essential components of an effective program of opening up US society at the local and state levels from the restrictions implemented to save lives and flatten the curve of COVID-19. They are affordable and necessary to minimize the potential for new spikes of illness which would require new or renewed restrictions.
. Without a vastly expanded capacity for testing we simply don’t know if we are making progress and if a loosening of restrictions will succeed. Without massive and sustained testing we will not identify people who need to self-quarantine or who need treatment. Without testing so that we know who tests positive for COVID-19 we will have people continuing to spread the virus to others. Unless the testing is free, people who are at risk will not use the tests. While the deficit in testing varies widely by state, the most reasonable estimates are that we need to be doing more than 3 million more tests each week. If positive tests are more than 3% of total tests we are not reaching enough people. In the US we are seeing 20% of people tested being positive.
. The pandemic treatment can be expensive and will include not only hospital and intensive care but also out-patient medical and mental health as well as addiction services and PTSD care. Covering everyone, including people who are not documented, for the full range of care that is needed because of the pandemic is the only way to get around the reluctance of people to use services for fear of the cost and the bureaucratic complications that many of our current health plans impose.
We have seen the extraordinary extent of disparate treatment by, race, class, gender and other groupings. Everyone is now clear that people of color, ethnic minorities, the elderly, people living without stable homes, the LGBTQ community all suffer disproportionate levels of illness and death. What we need is to document these cases and develop a database sufficient to understand what characteristics, co-morbidities, exclusions are most associated with increased vulnerability. The data exist in hospital records, state and local government databases and a host of mapping and health reform databases maintained by philanthropy. They must be put together in a usable form and states must require that data be submitted in a timely and complete fashion.
Without contact tracing we will not be able to intelligently loosen restrictions or prevent and monitor any possible flare-ups. We now know that there is an urgent need for hundreds of thousands (one often quoted estimate is 300,000) new public health workers. The Federal government is being lethargic and minimalist in its approach. We must force the Federal government to fund the training and maintenance of these workers. There are existing models for training programs so that these new public health workers can build careers of agile and smart service that assures family sustaining incomes and conditions of safety and health in their own work. We do not want to create another profession of frontline workers who live in poverty while doing high risk work.
Prisons and nursing homes as well as other high density and congregate care institutions subject residents to high risk. There is an urgent need to make these settings less dense immediately. We then need to assure adequate trained staff, increased active testing and isolation capacity. There are numerous critiques of the ways in which we provide congregate housing. While critiques of prisons and critiques of nursing homes or shelters may be very different they share a characteristic of high vulnerability and preventable mortality and morbidity. As an immediate strategy we need to have an active program monitoring these settings for the benefit of residents, their loved ones and frontline staff. This must be accompanied by an expedited process of rethinking how such institutional care is provided to improve quality, control cost and reduce exclusion.
Even with careful planning and an active program of taking the initiative for public health there will be times at which flareups happen or are threatened. When that happens our goal must be to reduce the flareups which may require re-instituting some restrictions. Planning such policies also allows us to have a public discussion of both the importance of maintaining sound prevention policies and if necessary implementing public health protections and restrictions in response to the flareups.
We have seen that there is a clear market failure in the provision of PPE. We have inadequate production and a chaotic market that drives up the costs for everyone while not getting PPE to the places where it is needed. A national program of production, reliable supply chains (domestic and international), stockpiling and emergency distribution is essential to meet needs of this pandemic and future public health needs in the US and elsewhere.
. Without federal support for these extraordinary problems we will see cuts in programs essential to minimize vulnerable populations’ exposure to this virus and a range of preventable health problems. Local and state governments have suffered a huge loss of revenue at the same time they are experiencing huge additional expenditures to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Unlike the federal government most state and local governments are required to develop and maintain balanced budgets. To meet that challenge there will be increased unemployment and further shredding of essential safety net programs which will in turn increase the vulnerability of populations to many levels of disease. National organizations of governors and mayors have estimated the federal support they need to be made whole. This is an urgent issue because most state and local governmental budgets have to be in place by June 30 or September 30.
This pandemic has shown the frailty of our hospital system. While we have some hospitals that are still profitable we also have a network of safety net and rural hospitals that are in danger of collapse. A federal program to provide funding to these hospitals accompanied by a commitment by the hospitals to serve their communities is needed to provide care now and to guarantee a future of service.
There will also need to be special legislation and funding to help the tens of millions of our neighbors whose often frail economic security has been shattered by the collapse of our economy. Defending the economic security of all of our people is not in conflict with rational public health. Working together we can emerge healthier, more knowledgeable and less polarized. That is what will end the threat of the pandemic. Nothing less.
I set up this page to have a simple way to post ideas about how to work for a better world. It is my very first venture into social media. Hopefully it will prompt me to write more and people will find the writing helpful. Critiques and ideas welcome. Thanks for giving this a view.
the every day business of life 