911? Send a social worker! Immediately!

Does that sound like a Babylon Bee satire? It is not. A real and widely retweeted tweet asserts, “Almost every role in our community a police officer fills would be better handled by a social worker.” Naomi Riley has this column in the WSJ discussing why this is wrong, most of which is obvious.

There are some places where police work and social work overlap. Dealing with mentally ill people who are a potential threat to themselves or others is a common situation. Regrettably, it often happens that neither the police nor the social workers are prepared or equipped to handle it. The answer is not to defund the police but quite the opposite. We need to fund training so that police officers know what to do in that situation. It will never be easy, but training and preparation reduce the chance of a bad result.

A second proposal is to replace all police with traveling bands of hippies singing John Lennon’s Imagine. Yes, that one is a Babylon Bee satire. The distance between satire and seriously advanced proposals seems thinner than ever these days.