Most political social-media meme posts are over-simplistic, and thus generally useless except as echo-chamber amusement. Now and then, however, a post inadvertently exceeds its face value.
"I'm sick of people saying cops need more training," this one began, in red all-caps type. "You had 18 years to train your child not to steal, shoot, stab, burn down buildings, laser peoples' eyes, flip cars, block traffic and attack other people."
In even bigger blue all-caps, it concluded: "The police didn't fail you. You failed your child."
Obviously, well-trained law enforcement benefits everyone, as even the poster would admit and agree. And, indeed, parents on the whole have a duty and responsibility to better raise their children.
But the deeper issue delves into the dual social investments of education and criminal justice, and the persisting problem of high criminality in the world's longest-surviving democratic republic.
Both formal learning and violent crime are primarily young people's domains. As a social civilization, we fund each--we fund schools as investments, and courts and prisons as remedies. Both have lasting effects that reach into the future, but one is constructive in nature and the other is the corrective product of destructive behavior. The former develops opportunity, the latter debilitates it.
The front-line employees in the education systems are teachers, and while salaries vary by state and within states by tenure and training, the average pay is around $64,000. In Arkansas, it's $49,800.
Most criminals who wind up serving time do so in either county jails or state prisons, where annual per-inmate costs range from $15,000 or so on the low end to more than $60,000 in high-population states like California and New York.
Before they're sentenced, however, they have to be arrested and then prosecuted. The front-line employees of law enforcement are police officers, and state pay varies broadly but averages around $67,600. In Arkansas, it's $40,500.
Some 4 million teachers are tasked with imparting learning on 50 million school-age kids. Fewer than 700,000 law enforcement officers protect and serve the national population of 330 million.
The question is whether any more training for teachers or police will trickle down to the lawbreakers at the root of our crime problem.
Almost all teachers are required to have a college degree, meaning at least 16 years of formal education. Many teachers have attained advanced degrees; a National Education Association survey indicated that six in 10 hold a post-baccalaureate degree (i.e., master's, education specialist or doctoral).
One in three law enforcement officers have a four-year degree, about half have a two-year degree, and one in 20 has a graduate degree.
Parents, it turns out, are often the least educated segment of the parent-teacher-police officer triangle. Barely 30 percent of Arkansas mothers age 25 or older have attained a bachelor's or advanced degree.
It shouldn't take a college education, however, to be able to shape our youth's expectations about the law.
With all states requiring compulsory education, and the average per-pupil expenditure around $13,000, we invest $150,000 or so in every child who makes it to high school graduation. Nearly 4 million kids graduate each year nationwide.
Despite spending all that money, far too many young adults haven't been properly trained in the bare basics of law, order and police encounters: Break the law, bad things happen. Become violent, worse things happen. Fight with police, the worst things happen.
If parents aren't teaching such truths, then maybe schools should start, at least in areas where crime is rampant. In almost every instance where police officers fire their weapons, the suspect or criminal escalated the situation by disobeying a direct command.
That one change--doing what police say to do--can change everything. For students living in high crime areas, few things they learn in school have the same life or death significance as being taught how to safely interact with police.
Police are trained to deal with criminals, to assess levels of threat, and to neutralize threats that cannot be de-escalated or that present imminent danger to themselves or others. Statistics bear out the high caliber of their training: of the 6,000-plus people killed by police since 2015, 94 percent were armed.
Aggression toward police is always extremely risky behavior, and possibly is reflective of an uptick overall in personal violence. The aggravated-assault rate in Arkansas, for example, is higher for the last three reported years (2017-2019) than it ever was in the gang-banging 1990s.
As bad as things may have been in that decade, they were worse in lots of other states. Arkansas never ranked higher than 18th in comparative assault rate data in the '90s, and for most years we weren't among the top 20 worst states.
In contrast, since 2009 Arkansas has ranked perennially in the top 10, not only in assault rates but also in overall violent crime.
The three Rs are as fundamentally important as ever for schools, but instilling a fourth--Respect for police--might be the most pressing in these times. It would undoubtedly avert tragedies, and save lives.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.