And the Oscar goes to...

I am constantly amazed at the good police work I see while reading the overnight police reports early in the morning. But good police work comes in many flavors. This is one you wouldn't ordinarily think of: Best Documentary Short Subject.

Officer Conan Schafer works on the bike patrol downtown. Like many LPD officers, he's just a very interesting person, who busts most of the stereotypes people have about police officers. He came to police work a little later than most, with a world of experiences in his prior pursuits. He is a deep thinker and has a lot of interests, at least one of which we share: photography.

I stopped in my tracks the other day in our assembly room, passing through on my way somewhere else. There was a video playing on one of the monitors, and Conan was watching it with a couple other employees. It was a Conan Schafer production, and it blew me away. While going about his usual job, he had collected a series of video clips using his own digital video camera.

These were clips of interviews with some of the denizens of his beat: homeless, alcoholic, mentally ill, and addicted transients who hang out downtown--the people he frequently arrests or carts off to the detox center. At home on his own time, he had done some pretty classy editing, plugged in some appropriate music and some titles, and the result was an outstanding short documentary. Conan simply asked short questions, and the film is basically the subjects talking about their activities and lives. It is incredibly powerful. If he could figure out the releases and the royalties on the music, he'd be renting a tuxedo.

Here's why it's such good police work: we need this. People in Lincoln need to understand the scope of this problem, how homelessness, addiction, and chronic mental illness have devolved upon the police, and how arrests and citations simply do not solve the problem. We can and should use our arrest authority to enforce the law when the behavior is illegal, but that is just a temporary fix for this sub population that lives on the fringe, and for whom a two-day trip to the slammer is just part of life.

Conan's film doesn't point to any simple solutions, it's just a testimony to a pernicious set of problems that this and other communities must confront. I have no easy solutions, but expecting the police can somehow make "those people" disappear if they would just clamp down and arrest them more often is unrealistic. The more people who see this work, the more people will understand these realities, and start brainstorming about what more we can do as a community. Maybe some better ideas will emerge other than just more aggressive policing.