The job of the police is something like repair. Of course we have to solve crime, catch bad guys. But when the social fabric gets frayed it is both a cause of and a result of crime. Our job is to do our best to repair that fabric, weaving together the threads of reparative justice for victims, and restorative justice for perpetrators, bringing them back into the community.

We forget this pretty frequently, and the way that police are trained tends to promote that forgetting. We are too often trained as technocrats: human relationships are not legible to the programs and statistical models and paperwork that are the tools of contemporary policing. But they’re what the job should be all about.

As my town’s police chief, I want my work to focus on relationships, not statistics.