Six lessons for police reform from the Catholic Church
NEW YORK (NY)
America Magazine
June 22, 2020
By John W. Miller
In the 1990s, Steve Hurley was a police officer in Ocean City, Md., chasing down speeding teenagers and locking up beach bums driving drunk. At 34, he traded the badge for a collar, and he is now a monsignor in the Diocese of Wilmington, Del. “People see a 180-degree turn, but in both jobs the primary responsibility is care for souls,” he says.
The Catholic Church and the U.S. law-enforcement system have something else in common: They are both powerful institutions with fiercely loyal agents who have covered up misdeeds—clergy sex abuse and police brutality—and have been in need of reform.
The outcry over the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis on May 25 has forced a reckoning with the philosophy and culture of U.S. policing. Across the country, demonstrators have marched to demand an end to police brutality and a change in the tasks assigned to the roughly 18,000 police departments and agencies across the country.
America Magazine
June 22, 2020
By John W. Miller
In the 1990s, Steve Hurley was a police officer in Ocean City, Md., chasing down speeding teenagers and locking up beach bums driving drunk. At 34, he traded the badge for a collar, and he is now a monsignor in the Diocese of Wilmington, Del. “People see a 180-degree turn, but in both jobs the primary responsibility is care for souls,” he says.
The Catholic Church and the U.S. law-enforcement system have something else in common: They are both powerful institutions with fiercely loyal agents who have covered up misdeeds—clergy sex abuse and police brutality—and have been in need of reform.
The outcry over the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis on May 25 has forced a reckoning with the philosophy and culture of U.S. policing. Across the country, demonstrators have marched to demand an end to police brutality and a change in the tasks assigned to the roughly 18,000 police departments and agencies across the country.
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