The System Provides Wanted Attention for Unwanted Results: Community Policing Alternatives and the Case for Functional Replacement

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

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Author's Note

This paper serves OMXUS Goals 5 and 6:

Goal 5 (replace police with community response) (replace police with community response): Fire all police, justice, and corrections staff. The system provides wanted attention for unwanted results. CAHOOTS model: 35 years running, zero people killed.

Goal 6 (re-employ displaced workers) (re-employ displaced workers): Re-employ all fired staff in functional positions. Nobody loses a livelihood. The skills transfer. The roles change.

We need to be clear about what this paper is not. It is not an argument for lawlessness. It is not an argument for the absence of public safety. It is an argument — backed by 35 years of operational data, cross-national comparisons, and the lived experience of communities who have already done this — that the institution we call "policing" is a 197-year-old experiment that failed.

The model that replaced it has been running since 1989 in Eugene, Oregon. It is called CAHOOTS. Two people in a van. A medic and a crisis worker. No weapons. No law enforcement authority. Twenty-four thousand calls a year. Zero people killed. Not in the first year. Not in any year. In thirty-five years.

The question is not whether community-based response works. The question is why, in the face of this evidence, we continue to send armed officers to mental health calls and then act surprised when people die.

The answer is structural. The policing system provides wanted attention for unwanted results. It gives officers combat training and sends them to welfare checks. It gives departments military equipment and tells them to de-escalate. It rewards arrests and punishes resolution. The incentive structure produces exactly the