Welcome back to this brand-new, explosive, visionary, investigative edition of Light 'Em Up.

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On this episode we focus on and explore emerging ways of addressing critical issues in the criminal justice system and policing — drilling down on and beginning a focused conversation as to:

Rethinking how law enforcement is deployed and all too often traffic stop by police.

Public safety has long been treated as the near-exclusive province of law enforcement agencies.

Police are tasked with countless challenging and many dangerous duties, including but not limited to:

— Responding to active crime scenes

— 911 calls for service (that are made all the more unpredictable by the prevalence of guns on our streets and gun ownership in the U.S.)

— People who are in the grips of a mental health crisis
— Domestic violence situations

The most common 911 calls include: business checks, disturbances, suspicious persons, and complaints.

Simply put, the police are over-tasked and vastly undertrained to deal with a myriad of complex issues that 21st Century Policing encounters and demands — especially those that center around mental health.

The risk of being killed while being approached or stopped by law enforcement in the community is 16 times higher for individuals with untreated serious mental illness than for other civilians.

For the safety of the public and law enforcement officers equally, we have to begin to re-think, re-examine and re-engineer these concepts, whether it be the biased enforcement of traffic laws by police which drive racial disparities in the criminal justice system or topics like we’ve covered in the past such as “DWB” or Driving While Black in America.

— Police in the U.S. conduct more than 20 million traffic stops per year
— Some 42% of African Americans say that police have stopped them just because of their race

— 59% of the U.S. public believes that this practice of racial profiling is widespread

— 81% disapprove of it — or at least express the concept that they do

Civilian first responders dedicated to traffic and road safety can better serve communities by resolving traffic and safety issues without the potential for punitive law enforcement action.

Racial profiling is a significant policing and social problem. We all witnessed how fast the police incident with Miami Dolphins star wide receiver Tyreek Hill escalated quickly from the body worn camera of the officer on scene.

To mitigate the risk of harm to both the police and the public, many municipalities have tasked unarmed, non-law enforcement responders to address nonviolent social and medical issues such as mental health crises or have narrowed the scope of police discretion and duties in traffic enforcement.

How many times have we seen in the past where a citizen is pulled over for a minor traffic infraction and it has escalated into a deadly encounter?

— An expired registration
— A crack in a windshield
— Littering

It happens every day, don’t be fooled!

Click here to see the list of the top jurisdictions that have first responder programs across the U.S.

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