Two things can be true at the same time. Our nation’s police departments, large and small, can be rife with cultural problems and discriminatory practices while the strong plurality of Americans would prefer to see an increase in funding for police rather than a decrease. Clearly, the idea of dedicating fewer resources to policing is not a politically popular response to racially lopsided law enforcement brutality and other disparate and systemic problems in the system of justice.

Changing the culture of policing is a long-term project, but at least for the larger departments with the biggest budgets, I think we should start talking about changing the job description of a police officer rather than spending fewer resources.

There will always be a place for the neighborhood cop. It’s important for police to have a deep knowledge and established relationships with the communities they’re charged with keeping safe. But it would be a good idea to have specialized teams on call to deal with different kinds of crimes. We already have this with homicide detectives and SWAT teams, for example, but what if we also had teams specifically trained in domestic disputes and substance abuse?

There are usually specialists who are trained to deal with hostage situations or someone threatening to jump off a building, Someone like that should be on call to respond to a person having some kind of psychological break, perhaps because they’ve stopped taking their medication. I hear a lot of the importance of training cops to deescalate situations, but maybe it’s better to train just a few cops really well in this than to train them all inadequately.

A better way of putting it is that we are asking police officers to do too much. They deal with potentially lethal problems, but also with petty theft. They’ll help get your cat out of a tree, but they’re also grappling with organized crime.

In some ways it’s easy to understand the problem when we talk about the challenges our armed forces have encountered during our failed nation-building efforts during the War on Terror. Soldiers are often asked to do things they’re simply not trained to do, and then we get angry when they have moral failings or simply do a poor job. If you want someone to direct traffic in downtown Baghdad, you don’t need or even want an infantry soldier. I don’t know why you want a beat cop dealing with someone having a psychotic episode on streets of Philadelphia. If someone is very good at recovering stolen property, they probably shouldn’t be working on missing persons. A cop who is trained in deescalating domestic disputes talents are wasting on noise complaints.

I know all kinds of objections can be raised. Response times, for example, could be unacceptably reduced if the cops have to wait until a specialized team is available. But there are ways to manage these things. For one, responding cops can be trained to stabilize a situation and call for specialized help according to clearly defined criteria.

These kinds of reforms aren’t easily applicable to small police departments, obviously. If you only have a sheriff and two deputies, they’ll have to be able to manage as best they can all the various types of situations that come up in the line of duty. But even a medium-sized police force would benefit from divvying up responsibilities as much as possible. I’d like to see the police take on a more constructive role in dealing with addiction-related crime. Getting people into treatment should be a priority, and the departments should employ people who have deep experience in the world of recovery.

If we re-envision what a police officer does and move away from our current do-it-all model, we’ll attract a different kind of officer and wind up with a different culture. So much of the violence we see from police originates from officers who are not well-equipped to deal threatening situations. And a lot of crime goes unchallenged simply because it doesn’t rise to the level that it merits the attention and resources of the departments. We wind up with deadly incidents that should have been resolved peaceably and people going to jail who should have been taken to get psychiatric care or to a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility. Meanwhile, basic police services like dealing with property damage or theft are unsatisfactory.

The people want good policing which is why they generally want to give the police more money, not less. But the problem may be that we need to focus on changing the job description of a police officer. They might need to have a lot of different job descriptions and a lot fewer responsibilities. This certainly seems to have more political promise than defunding, and that’s actually a prerequisite for successful change.