Leadership Quote by Carrie P. Meek

The line lands like a rebuke to a comfortable American fantasy: that public safety is a product you can buy in bulk through handcuffs, squad cars, and longer sentences. Carrie P. Meek isn’t attacking police so much as the political reflex that treats policing as the only governing tool left. “Let’s stop pretending” signals impatience with performative certainty-the kind lawmakers reach for when they need to look tough, fast, on camera. It’s a call-out of theater.

Her phrasing is deliberately double-edged. By praising “all the fine work” police do, Meek disarms the predictable counterpunch (anti-cop, soft on crime) and shifts the argument to systems, not individual officers. That move matters: it’s an attempt to widen the moral imagination without triggering the culture-war tripwires that keep policy stuck. The real target is the idea that arrests equal deterrence, that enforcement automatically translates into safety. Meek is pointing at the churn: communities repeatedly policed, repeatedly destabilized, repeatedly promised security that never arrives.

Contextually, this fits a late-20th-century/early-21st-century political landscape shaped by the War on Drugs, “tough on crime” legislation, and ballooning incarceration. Meek, a Florida congresswoman with deep ties to Black communities, is speaking into an era when the costs of that strategy were no longer abstract: crowded prisons, broken family networks, criminal records that function as lifetime penalties, and neighborhoods where policing is constant but opportunity is scarce. “Other solutions” is doing heavy lifting here-a compressed endorsement of prevention: jobs, schools, housing, mental health care, addiction treatment, credible community intervention. The subtext is blunt: if you only fund the siren, you’re choosing to live with the emergency.