There’s a whole system in the military of rules of behavior and mechanisms in which to punish people who break them. That doesn’t mean that those rules are enforced, obviously. But police, on the other hand, not only have extremely ambiguous limits to their behavior (which means they have enormous leeway to do things that would be criminal for anyone else and not have it be considered such), they also have extensive structures in place that prevent them from being held accountable at all (even when they’re overtly criminal). So while the military’s accountability may be largely theoretical, there’s still the possibility of accountability, at least.
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Nope. The same problem is prevalent there:
By June 17, 2008, six defendants had had their cases dropped and a seventh found not guilty.[6] The exception was former Staff Sergeant, now-Private Frank Wuterich. On October 3, 2007, the Article 32 hearing investigating officer recommended that Wuterich be tried for negligent homicide in the deaths of two women and five children, and that charges of murder be dropped.[7] Further charges of assault and manslaughter were ultimately dropped, and Wuterich was convicted of a single count of negligent dereliction of duty on January 24, 2012.[8][9] Wuterich received a rank reduction and pay cut but avoided jail time.[10][11] Iraqis expressed disbelief and voiced outrage after the six-year US military prosecution ended with none of the Marines sentenced to incarceration.
BTW according to this article 1 in 5 LEOs is a former soldier:
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Twenty-six soldiers were charged with criminal offenses, but only Lieutenant William Calley Jr., a platoon leader in C Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but served only three and a half years under house arrest.
The incident was little-known outside Korea until publication of an Associated Press (AP) story in 1999 in which 7th Cavalry veterans corroborated survivors’ accounts. The AP also uncovered declassified U.S. Army orders to fire on approaching civilians because of reports of North Korean infiltration of refugee groups. Some details were disputed, but the massacre account was found to be essentially correct. In 2001, the U.S. Army conducted an investigation and, after previously rejecting survivors’ claims, acknowledged the killings, but described the three-day event as “an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing”. The army rejected survivors’ demands for an apology and compensation. United States President Bill Clinton issued a statement of regret, adding the next day that “things happened which were wrong”.
South Korean investigators disagreed with the U.S. report, saying that they believed that 7th Cavalry troops were ordered to fire on the refugees. The survivors’ group called the U.S. report a “whitewash”. The AP later discovered additional archival documents showing that U.S. commanders ordered troops to “shoot” and “fire on” civilians at the war front during this period; these declassified documents had been found but not disclosed by the Pentagon investigators. American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz reported that among the undisclosed documents was a letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea stating that the U.S. military had adopted a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Despite demands, the U.S. investigation was not reopened.
Etc.
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“Occupying force” is certainly a hostile attitude either way; but cops seem to be able to develop it without the need for a war zone(indeed, the fulsome celebration of The Thin Blue Line can get even louder than Support Our Troops, since the latter has the politically unhelpful tendency of periodically producing a bunch of flag-draped reminders that foreign policy adventures aren’t without their price); and developing it without a war zone denies you a certain perspective:
The presence of actual professionals(or reasonably dedicated amateurs) interested in killing you certainly doesn’t mean that your presence will be good for bystanders(especially when calling in fire support is an option much more attractive than trying to clear that building room by room); but it makes it a lot harder to take hysterical imaginings of everyone who possesses both hands and a waistband being about to slaughter you harder to take seriously, in your own mind or in the assessments of your colleagues.
An actual threat can also induce you to moderate certain impulses because you know that they might carry real costs: playing ‘stop and frisk’ against every passing kid whose attitude you don’t like is probably less popular in cases where some of them might actually be hoping for a cluster of hostile soldiers dense enough to make the bomb belt worth it.
WIthout that perspective, the mythology of being an occupation force (once it takes root, which seems to be solidly past tense at this point) is free to go on a sort of autoimmune cascade: with few actual threats available your belief in the existence of threats gloms on to whatever limited scraps of threat-like material are available, upgrading hostile demeanor, vague proximity of hands and waistbands, and visible symptoms of mental illness into clear signals of being on the opposing force; and with little to actually fear from the enemy you construct(it’s certainly not false that cops are feloniously killed periodically; but the cost/benefit for all but the most desperate or impulsive criminals is very, very, poor; and it’s vastly less common than would be the norm in a real war zone where guns are in abundance and you can summon enemy troops into ambush just by calling 911) your sense of discretion and/or animal fear doesn’t dissuade you from even needlessly provocative interactions.
In an ideal world you’d avoid the mindset entirely; but if you can’t do that the guy calibrated by actual war zones is at least more likely to find it hard to take alarmist fantasies of ‘urban’ super-predators just waiting to kill them if not put in their place seriously; and more likely to (largely correctly) judge the inhabitants of the zone being occupied as overwhelmingly hapless bystanders with some malefactors interested in internecine violence or criminality, but without much to gain by clashing with heavily equipped and supported occupation troops, mixed in.
Actual enemies of the ‘either ideologically motivated to deal as much damage as they can without regard for personal risk’ or the ‘agents of a competing organization that both thinks it has a decent chance of matching you in force of arms and that doing so is a better option than avoiding you, or trying to corrupt or co-opt you’ flavor are an actual thing if you are really occupying; something of a rarity in policing.
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The real question is, can US soldiers avoid shooting civilians.
Those aren’t normalized over population size. Given that the size of the black population is roughly 1/10 the white population, those numbers more or less back my position up. But let’s check in with some actual epidemiology (the fact that none of the risk ratios are less than or equal to one is my point):
Fig 6. Posterior Random Effects Estimates: Risk Ratio Black-and-Unarmed to White-and-Unarmed.
(a) County-by-county posterior estimates of the risk ratio of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} to being {white, unarmed, and shot by police}. Grey bars are county-specific 95% PCI estimates. The blue bar is the nation-wide pooled 95% PCI estimate. The points on the error bars are posterior medians. Data are plotted on the log scale, but are labeled on the natural scale. (b) Map of county-specific posterior median estimates of the risk ratio of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} to being {white, unarmed, and shot by police}.
Ross, C. T. (2015) “A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014” PLoS ONE. 10(11):e0141854
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Nah, our systems are functioning as intended by those in power.
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And then there are the military contractors…
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Because many police officers are undisciplined sociopaths and psychopath. When police kill like they do today it’s a pathology. We can not continue with police committing state crimes.
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Wait. What? Something sensible coming out of the National Review? The National “Fucking Dinesh D’Souza” Review?
Well, I’ll be. Have things gotten so out of whack in the world that the Review is now the voice of reason among conservative propaganda? Huh.
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The US soldiers aren’t allowed to use tear gas, either.
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Police are told by their union - it is emphasized - that their own lives are paramount, that if they have any doubt, any fear at all, they should shoot. That’s in addition to the natural human tendency to do that anyway. But even when police brass try to get rid of bad apples, the unions take them to court and get the guys reinstated. To make a dent in the problem, you’ve got to whittle down the power of the police unions. But to do that, you need to pay cops more, weed out abusive and incompetent commanders, and set higher entrance standards. But especially pay them more. Because the job sucks, and if not enough people who would be good cops are willing to do it, you end up with the ones who aren’t so good.
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The public relations division of the military made the assessment.
Not trusting them is Treason, Friend Citizen.
Anyone killed by a drone strike is welcome to submit evidence that he was not a combatant.
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Rules of engagement by the military are not uniform. The rules for engagement for US forces in Afghanistan, for example, were substantially stricter than those for cops in the US (in fact, the pentagon was literally pushing to have the rules of engagement be the same as for US police to loosen things up for them). There’s been a huge amount of commentary by recent vets from Iraq and Afghanistan looking at recent police actions (e.g. in Ferguson, Mo.) and saying, “We weren’t allowed to do that” and “we were trained not to do that.” So the acceptable behavior by cops and (recent, occupying) military are different. On top of which, police have enormous latitude in declaring someone “threatening,” which can then justify just about anything, regardless of whether that was objectively true. Then there’s the systems that actively prevent police being held accountable - the police unions and agreements made with local governments, DAs who rely on good relationships with the police to do their jobs being the ones to potentially prosecute cops, etc.
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Maybe its relevant that the people you piss off in Iraq will come at you with weapons more powerful than small arms, so you try to keep them on your side.
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Avoid? No, they don’t avoid – you just never hear about their actions most of the time. Ever heard of Mi Lai? Does Kent State ring any bells? Lots of press there but no change worth mentioning.
You may have noticed that there was a court martial for The Mỹ Lai Massacre. Police rarely have to defend themselves in court.
If you want to start comparing the number of times police are not even taken to court with the number of times military crimes are not taken to court, I’d be happy to play that game.
When we speak in general terms with regards to the most common outcome we already understand there will be outliers which do not fit known and established trends. This is not surprising or unexpected. Outliers are common. They do not however falsify the general trend. They are simply outliers. So, when I say the police are not held accountable but military personnel are, most of us understand that this would be a generalization as outliers can still be found. Just as most of us understand that those outliers in no way represent the majority of cases.
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Most cops aren’t cowards. But sufficient cops protect the racist cowards.
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Hundreds raped and murdered, one minor scapegoat “punished” with a brief period of house arrest. And the trial only happened after sustained media pressure.
Or we have the Haditha massacre:
Twenty-four people dead. Pay cut and demotion.
As with the police, there is an occasional show trial. Even when a scapegoat is given a slap on the wrist, the people truly responsible are very rarely held to account.
And I’m saying that unpunished war crimes are not an outlier. They’re routine.
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