Illumination Writing Challenge

The Time Needs to Be Now

Response to the question of when we can start trying to solve important issues

This story was prompted by B. A. Cumberlidge.‘s excellent observation that there are still significant issues that we need to tackle as a collective society in this eye-opening piece:

As we muddle our way through this time of pandemic, I have occasionally noted that there are a few silver linings to the Coronavirus cloud that hovers above us all. I think there is one potential benefit that could arise from skyrocketing global unemployment and the complete rethinking of what a “normal” workplace or workday looks like.

The potential benefit of this impact might be a sense of awareness that simply was not present before we were all ushered into our homes and told to stay away from one another. Now that the workaday blinders have been removed, we have all had an opportunity to expand our view more widely to the world around us.

People are experiencing a new joblessness, and certainly for some that may continue for a while, and even indefinitely. That is not good. However, there is a much larger segment of folks that experienced temporary joblessness, and I believe we can find some good in that.

Anyone that faced the threat of being suddenly without employment that then subsequently recovered, likely has a newfound appreciation for how unexpectedly some sort of tragedy or downturn can affect any of us.

Those that have experienced the luxury of a roof over their head and employment all their lives sometimes have a tendency or bias that the same existence it available for anyone that wishes. The Coronavirus pandemic shook up that paradigm, and without any reasonable warning millions were jobless and their housing status suspect.

I would like to believe that a large number of people were made acutely aware of what it means to lose your source of income, and the immediate and lasting impact that can have on your housing status.

Because of that, I believe awareness of homelessness and poverty are likely at an all-time high. That is the first step to affecting change:

Awareness

The second piece need to create change is to change our way of thinking and approach to how we solve wicked problems. Certainly, homelessness, poverty and starvation are wicked problems.

When I ran the Emergency Medical Services division in my fire department, it became apparent that many of the people that we saw on 9–1–1 calls were also people that had frequent contact with the police, the local hospital, the jail and the court system.

That realization sparked a conversation, and ultimately an effective work group whose goal was to change the way those five entities dealt with some of their most prolific clients that collective used up significant amounts of resources frequently and repeatedly.

We made a list of the top 25 repeat users of at least three of the involved systems (EMS, police, jail, courts, & hospital), and worked on limiting their impacts to each of the services. We had several false starts, mostly because we were using a lot of the same logic and approaches that we had been used to using.

Eventually, however, we discovered that there were private and non-profit groups that already existed and were much better at addressing our clients’ complex social and addiction needs, as well as provided housing solutions that the various governmental agencies and hospital simply could not provide.

Soon, instead of determining how to reduce the cost impact, we became a conduit for the various frequent service utilizers to find services that actually fit their need. In other words, jail isn’t a cost-effective or even reasonable answer to homelessness; neither are overnight hospital stays for minor illnesses and issued caused by lack of appropriate self-care.

Our topmost collective service utilizer impacted the five different entities to the tune of just shy of $1 million dollars annually when we tallied it up before we began addressing his use. In his case, there was a true fairy tale ending in that he eventually went into treatment and rehabilitation and was able to return to work and reconciled with his estranged family, subsequently costing those combined services absolutely nothing for the next year.

Of course, the rest of the stories didn’t have fairy tale conclusions, but that didn’t mean that the cost impact of the next 24 people wasn’t significantly decreased, not to mention they received much better service because they got it from agencies that specialized in meeting their actual needs.

While it has an unfortunately misleading name, the concept of “defunding police” is a way of replicating what we did in my city on a small scale in a much larger arena.

Let’s say that you want to have a house built and you hire a general contractor to do so. You tell the general contractor that you don’t want them to use subcontractors, but rather they must do all the work themselves.

This contractor has absolutely no experience at hanging drywall, installing electrical or plumbing, or installing roofing. But they are game, since that is what you asked for. Well, since they aren’t experienced, the whole project will take longer, and since they don’t have relationships with the plumbing, roofing and electrical suppliers, it will cost more.

Plus, actually having to perform all the work takes the general contractor away from what they do best, which is scheduling, quality assurance and oversight. So, the end result is a shoddy product that is delivered late and costs way more.

As society, and particularly in the United States, that is what we have asked our police and fire/EMS departments to do. We have asked them to deal with homelessness, addiction, poverty and mental health issues.

They are game to try and tackle those items, but they don’t have the training, resources, adequate funding or experience in doing so. In return we are getting shoddy work that takes way too long and costs way too much.

If we want to affect change in our most serious issues, we need to stop trying to solve our most important and wicked problems with the same logic and approach we have used in the past. The idea behind defunding the police doesn’t mean to cut off all funding. Rather, like with building a house, it is asking the police to do only what they are good at — and paying them appropriately for doing so.

And then, it means taking some of the money that is now going to the police in an imprudent attempt to solve problems they have no business being involved with and hiring someone that can actually do the job well, on time, and on budget.

It is using a new approach and new logic to solve problems that weren’t being addressed in the current model. That is the second piece of how we can fix our most important issues:

Alternative approaches

Brian’s original question asked, “When can we get started?” I say, for the reasons cited above, that now is the best time in recent history to begin addressing these wicked issues. From the ashes of a pandemic and social unrest have risen a new level of awareness and an appetite for coming at problems with a new perspective and with better and more efficient tools.

Thanks Brian, for asking this tough question. I would love to hear some perspective from Paul Myers MBA, Arthur G. Hernandez, Rasheed Hooda, Terry Mansfield, Bill Abbate and Joe Luca. What say you all on this tough topic?

If you like this, you might like some of my other recent writing, including my July daily roundup of writing challenges such as this one:

And a recent response prior to this challenge:

And this blast from the past:

Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. He firmly believes that bad managers destroy more than companies, and good managers create a passion that is contagious. Compassion, grace and gratitude drive the world; or at least they should. Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and join the mail list.