Something like a million years ago I went through a significant amount of training to physically restrain kids- big kids, mind you. 14-22 years old.
The majority of the time was spent learning about how to de-escalate the situation so you didn’t have to restrain the kid. By the time you had to put hands on the kid, you’d already lost.
So it consistently baffles me that this is how the police choose to deal with this stuff. The techniques aren’t difficult, and they aren’t hard to learn. I suppose the mindset of someone who reaches for a gun as part of a “resolution” pretty much dictates how all this goes, anyway.
That’s a lovely idea in theory, but how many panicked loved ones are going to know to specify “be sure to send a crisis intervention officer” when they call 911?
She’d called the cops before for things like this and they came minimally armed with a metal (edit: mental) health worker with them, and taken her husband to a mental hospital. She expected they would do the same this time.
See, now, there’s an important distinction between respecting the gun, and respecting the person behind the gun. The officer in this quote clearly either hasn’t picked up that lesson, or doesn’t realize that the distinction matters. Or just wishes he had a badge that was as deadly as a gun.
A device that could kill a person in a heartbeat under the wrong circumstances? I’ll respect the hell out of it unless the current circumstances are definitely non-dangerous, and even then I’ll be leery about it.
A person who will aim said device at me without a present need to use it, on the other hand, is only getting respect by proxy, and that respect vanishes afterwards.
Training is expensive. Bullets are fairly cheap. I’m not going to pretend I know an officers thinking, but from the outside looking in it feels like they care less about the people they serve and more about making it home at the end of the day (of course no one wants to be killed or think about being killed every time they go to work). So now it appears as though police view the general public as an obstacle that prevents them from achieving their goal of survival. And police act as though any interaction with the general public is a massive hassle (which it probably is).
Police need less time on the firing range and more in preventative training. Or every pairing of cops needs to have one that is trained more on the gun range and one trained more in deescalation.
It sounded a little suspect to me too, so I just spent 10 minutes doing a quick and dirty academic database search. No papers on an IQ drop in police recruits. But I emphasise it was a quick and dirty search.
I did find reference to the Jordan v. the City of New London legal case, where someone was denied entry to the police for having an IQ too high for the job (Hughes, T., 2003). Hughes also went on to review academic research which demonstrates a need for intelligence in police officers.
Also of interest is Brewster, J., & Stoloff, M. (2003), who showed a positive correlation between IQ and on the job performance. They also seem to confirm that on the whole the police aren’t terribly bright — IQ Mean=104, (SD=10, Range 84 - 128, n=71). Compared to Mean=100 (SD=15) in the general population.
There were other papers demonstrating a positive correlation between IQ, EQ and performance but they managed to obscure the raw IQ scores, presumably out of embarrassment …
Hughes, T. (2003). Jordan v. the City of New London, Police Hiring and IQ - When All the Answers They Don’t Amount to Much [article]. Policing: An International Journal Of Police Strategies & Management, (2), 298.
Brewster, J., & Stoloff, M. (2003). Relationship Between IQ and First-year Overall Performance as a Police Officer. Applied H.R.M. Research, 8(1-2), 49-50.
I don’t care whether or not you believe me. But it’s not so unusual as you might assume. The risk of shooting is very real, but if we collect statistics of how many people have the police draw weapons on them, contrasted against how many of them are shot - the shootings are a small fraction. Those instances get attention in the media for their severity, as well they should. They are all too frequent. But police do not shoot everybody they interact with.
I am not 100% pacifist, but one of my basic requirements of weapons ethics is to not ever use weapons against unarmed people, especially not lethal weapons. I do not make exceptions for police. If I changed my conduct and principles because I feared death, people would walk all over me. This is precisely what police take advantage of.
What genuinely baffles me is not the violence being done by the police, but the sheer lack of thinking that precipitates the continuing escalation and militarization of law enforcement.
I mean, by all means, escalate. By all means, import the machines and tools of violence that come from the military. Just remember that for the military, they were suppressing people as part of a foreign garrison, where in their down time they lived in ecosystems that were isolated from the civilian population. Their wives and kids were literally “back home”.
The concept of Western law enforcement is a civilian force embedded in the communities they police. Sure you can buy all that ordinance and use all that force, but end of the day, your spouse lives a life in a civilian community, your children go to school in a civilian school, and you don’t live in a bunker or a “green zone”.
There are reasons for that. Or else you might as well disband and reform as a standing army. And heaven help you if you do.
Seems like we could use an Edward Snowden of the police academy. Actual instructional materials, paper, online and audio-visual, footage of actual instructors standing in front of actual students telling them what we all know they’re being told but we haven’t explicitly seen. We know it must be there because it’s the obvious precursor of the resulting behavior, but we still need it out where we can all point to it and say this, this is a problem.
EDIT - Maybe that material is already online, not hard to get if you know where to look. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of it were classified “Law Enforcement Sensitive” and hard to come by.
I hesitate to judge a guy based on what’s publicly viewable in his Facebook profile, but if it’s the same Carballosa I see there, there’s a lot of stuff that encourages me to go “Oh, yup.”
I believed you, I was being sarcastic, laced with a bit of sad truth that what you experienced is the exception, not the rule. I feel as you do, but I don’t know if I could be as strong as you in this current climate.
