You’d think that would be part of their training, wouldn’t you? To me it would put to bed most of the “I was afraid for my life” arguments. “You’ve got 3 non- lethal weapons, 1 lethal weapon, body armour, and hand to hand combat training. The suspect was unarmed. Why were you afraid?”
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Other than every single day in ERs all over the country, you mean?
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I’d rather have a broken arm than a bullet in the chest.
Agreed, I’d rather see a headline stating “Welfare check goes wrong, victim treated for broken bone, officer treated for minor scrapes/bruising”.
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Any martial art is neither passive nor aggressive - it is the user/practitioner.
Many people learn martial arts for defense - some learn it for offense. You can’t really brand knowledge of a martial art as “bad”.
I dunno if UFC wash outs would make the best cops.But certainly the ability to subdue vs kill would be preferable.
It is ridiculous we don’t have a better system for people having mental episodes to have somewhere to go for help. Thought it looked to me maybe there were some fire or EMT people. Though they didn’t seem to rush to render aid once shot. And when armed with a melee weapon with that many officers, it is ridiculous a taser wasn’t implemented first.
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I had my apartment robbed once when I was in college. Stole everything I had that was valuable. I called the cops so I could file a report, and the cop just told me to go fuck myself, he wasn’t going to waste his time filling out paperwork for a hippie loser like me.
That was the best, and most productive interaction with a police officer I ever had. I did at one point have a friend who joined the police force. I thought he was not the sort of person I felt comfortable about having a gun. It seems that “authority complex”, “anger issues” and “short temper” are absolute requirements in order to be accepted into law enforcement.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, there have been instances where I had good interactions with cops. When I was at some event and there was a cop directing traffic, that usually was a fairly good interaction.
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Fixed that for you.
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“Because the union lawyer said mostly white elderly juries eat that shit up with a spoon.”
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I think you might be employing some negative stereotypes here. Certainly some police have a warrior mindset, but most don’t. We don’t here stories like this every day, even if we hear them too often. There are literally hundreds of millions of police interactions with civilians every year - use of force is rare, albeit poorly controlled.
Diverting the resources meant for responding to mental health crises to crisis intervention makes a lot of sense, but I would expect that to run through the police budget anyway. While having a trained responder on hand might have helped here, I can’t imagine a team of social workers responding to someone armed and violent without police there to help.
Having a 311 option is great - but how wide-spread is it? 911 is universal in the US.
The training (or lack of it) is a big part of the problem. I recall seeing a video of a man with a knife in a European city. About 6 cops with riot shields closed in on him and subdued him without risk to themselves or their target.
BUT - you would have to have 6 cops ready to respond with riot shields, which you can’t carry around all day on patrol.
I think you might be confusing individual attitudes with institutional and professional culture. I’ll be glad to explain the distinction if needed, but the metaphor of “a few bad apples” (the police apologist’s favourite line) vs. “a rotten barrel that spoils everything it contacts” referenced above is a useful one.
Since “too often” frequently involves people dying needlessly when use of force is involved, “poorly controlled” is an understatement. One means of control is limiting resources available for main force solutions.
I would expect that, too, given that American police departments are very experienced at spending every last penny of their budgets no matter what the mandate. The solution in those situations is to reduce the money in the police budget, or at least mandate that less be spent on lethal weapons and warrior training. There’s a shorter term for that, I believe.
It probably wouldn’t be 311, which is generally used for quality-of-life complaints. Whatever the number, nothing is preventing it from being a national standard like 911. Perhaps some funds could be found to make that happen, but where oh where would they come from?
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What’s a few dead Black people when cops gotta cop… /s
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Please back that up with some kind of evidence. There are literally a dozen or so “warrior mentality “ training camps for law enforcement and almost every major PD in the country has sent their officers through one or more of them. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that has a national conference and an industry lobbying group.
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No, dude. Defund the police IS fund them less.
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You’ve never heard most of the stories because we’re not stupid: we know what could happen to us and our families if we expose the violence and other bad behavior.
I alone could keep you busy with my own personal stories for the entire rest of the day, many of them involving nearly being killed by the police. Not a single one of those stories are ‘on record’. I’m sure there are many others here who could say the same.
Meanwhile, we consider it a ‘win’ if we are in the vicinity of police and are not harmed. That’s as good as we can expect.
What is your motivation in defending police brutality and unprofessional behavior? What do you stand to gain from it?
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Absolutely; that’s the unfortunate reality I live in as well, whether other people of privilege choose to acknowledge it or not.
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So now you want to divert funds from the police to set up a call center? Sure, relieving the police of the responsibility of crisis intervention makes sense and diverting those funds to specially trained crisis intervention teams it perfectly reasonable. But now you want to take cops off the beat to fund a call center?
Not sure putting more people in cubicles will fix the problem.
More money for police is probably part of the answer. More funds for body cameras and much more money for training. And yes - money for crisis intervention teams. Then the beat cops who are first to respond could be trained to contain the problem until the crisis team arrives rather than dealing with it themselves.
No, since the call centres (911, 311, etc.) already exist. The funding from police budgets would go toward dispatcher training, line capacity and routing, phone-based and first-reponder social workers, etc. I’m sure that police budgets can spare themselves sound cannons and tanks and heavy weaponry to fund that.
Since you continue to avoid addressing the violent and racist and ableist institutional cultures that make giving more funds to American police a bad idea, and since you’re not acknowledging the lived experiences of others who’ve responded to you, there’s no point in continuing this discussion with you.
Since you’re new here, you should be aware that (unlike on the big social media platforms) the community here is very familiar with the history of policing in this country, police-union talking points, and fallacious arguments.
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