Role of law enforcement explored at University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown criminal justice forum

Mar. 22—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Are law enforcement officers being asked to do too much in their jobs?

Are they trained properly? Are more police officers needed?

Those were the questions that opened the Americans for Prosperity-sponsored Key Issues in Criminal Justice for a Better Future forum Tuesday at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown's John P. Murtha Center for Public Service and National Competitiveness. They also provided the foundation for the discussion that lasted more than 90 minutes.

Opinions obviously varied among the panelists — Americans for Prosperity State Director Ashley Klingensmith; R Street Institute senior fellow for criminal justice and civil liberties Christi Smith; state Rep. Jim Rigby, R-Ferndale; Libertarian Party of Pennsylvania Chairman Rob Cowburn; and state Sen. Wayne Langerholc Jr., R-Richland Township.

But a common sentiment was that lots of demands are currently being placed on officers.

"I think of it in terms of like a Swiss Army knife," Klingensmith said.

"They're trained to be the knife and focus on violent and property crime, and a Swiss Army knife's a great tool to have, but any of the things it does can be done better by one specific thing. and so yeah, they're spread too thin. I think refocusing the intent of what an effective criminal justice system is and what these individuals are being asked to sacrifice for is absolutely paramount."

Rigby, a former police chief, and Langerholc, a former Cambria County assistant district attorney, supported hiring more police officers.

"Walking the beat, being involved in the community, that builds relations ... if they had the time to do that," Langerholc said. "They don't have the time. We need more individuals, more law enforcement that are out there that have different specialized areas. Maybe you're just with drug interdiction. Maybe you're just with the schools. Or maybe you're just with engaging the youth, just out and about in the playgrounds, building that relationship like it was back then. We put more officers on the streets, we can do that."

Rigby compared the changing realities of modern policing to when he started.

"In the old days, it was a grab-and-go," Rigby said. "We'd drag them out and do what we had to do to end the situation. We now know that we can talk our way through a lot of things. It's not the old days of grabbing them in a headlock, and dragging them out and throwing them in the back of a car. That was law enforcement when I got into it. It was my way and then the highway."

He pointed out the effect of stresses caused by the job, such as when he had to inform parents that their children died from drug overdoses.

"Who teaches us how to do that?" Rigby said. "And who do we go to after we do that to cope and deal with that? That's what law enforcement is dealing with on a regular basis."

Smith also emphasized the need for proper training.

"I like to think of this as a little bit of quantity and quality," Smith said. "We could add another 1 million officers to the Philadelphia Police Department, but if we're still asking them to do all of the things that are not aligned with the way that they're trained, and if they do so ineffectively and they are demonized, then that contributes to the negative police-citizen interactions. So I think it's a little bit of both. We need more officers, but we also need higher-quality officers as well."

Cowburn called for society to "understand what the role of government ought to be, what the police can offer."

"We need to get them back in our communities, walking beats, not serving this investigatory, at-odds relationship with the communities they serve," he said.

Cowburn feels law enforcement has expanded into many areas where it does not belong, including dealing with non- violent consensual acts.

"When you make more and more things crimes, you're going to have more and more crime," he said. "If we get policing and criminal justice and the whole concept of what it's supposed to serve back to protecting liberty and property and investigating crime after it happens, then we would probably need less, but higher-quality, well-trained investigative officers, rather than the army of patrol officers out there looking for a plant (marijuana) in someone's car."