It’s actually exactly the same here in both NYC and DC for auto speeding tickets.
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I’d say double the de-escalation training, so they get the idea that it matters more.
You’re right… we should never do anything hard, because why bother… It’s not like important lives are on the line… /s
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I’m not saying the UK has perfected descalation, but we tried to bake it in with the formation of the Met and the Peelian principles. I mean, the Met have enough scandals going on right now to show that this is an ideal we haven’t achieved.
But one of the ways it survives is that almost every cop is unarmed. See points (4) and (6), both flowing from the idea that police legitimacy requires the consent of everyone else.
Even if USA-ian cops had to do half as much paperwork as a UK cop for firing their gun it might act as an incentive to try descalating occasionally.
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Oh…this was in the tiny town of Mt OLIVE, not Oliver (no such place). Home of Mt. Olive Pickles.
How do I know this? My maternal grandmother lived across the street from the packing building.
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Why are unbalanced people like this allowed to work around firearms?
Or own them for that matter?
Oh yeah we live in a fucking hellhole that’s why!
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Do the pickles cause police violence?
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I’m not even sure this guy has spent enough time at the firing range. Who holds a gun like that, other than gang members in movies, tv shows, and music videos? I don’t know a lot about guns, but I know that’s not how you hold a gun because you can’t aim it like that.
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I absolutely agree with you that learning deescalation is critical. I simply mean that right now we don’t have a good way to measure in a practice situation whether someone is doing it well. I definitely did not mean I thought it was impossible, or that we shouldn’t try.
I definitely did mean to imply that there were a significant number of lunkheads involved who would use the “can’t measure it like you can marksmanship” argument to dismiss it.
More data about the lack of proper firearms training. (link to AP study) So much about the current setup needs to change. Guns aren’t particularly effective and police aren’t very skilled in their use. Shifting all firearms training resources, and more, into de-escalation would probably be a sound investment.
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Only in America would it even cross the mind of a police officer that a teen girl in the car with her younger sister and her mom would be armed with a deadly weapon. And even there it’s unlikely to be true.
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It is almost inconceivable from the outside to understand just how universally irredeemable the U.S. policing and justice system is. As bad as our police have been given current investigations in Britain and here in Oz with regard to ‘black deaths in custody’ there is still some community respect for police.
I’ve been told that good practice in Oz when being pulled over is to get out of your car so that you allow the cop to see that you are co-operating and that they feel in control. Try that in the States and see how that works out for you!
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If we don’t, we easily could, though, and I imagine someone has already done it.
It’s the difference between scoring a multiple choice test (marksmanship on a target), scoring one of those “scenario” exercises where different images pop up and they have to shoot the baddies but not the civilians, and scoring a, perhaps, more creative exercise with more nuanced scenarios. Educators have figured out how to do all of this. It’s a little bit harder, but not as hard as people not in the field of education or training might imagine.
I mean, look at everything they’re already doing with project based learning in our underfunded schools. Figuring out how to measure competency at de-escalation is easy compared to that, and with those police budgets!
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Yeah. I think that to get the UK level of Peelian principles in USA cops would be a vast improvement, would require starting again from scratch, but still not enough
On text media is difficult to communicate that this is a better system while.admitting it’s far from perfect here and coming across as a smug foreign
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I’m guessing there might be places that have worked on deescalation and have figured out how to measure it. We know what we’re actually doing is not working here, because of the out of control violent encounters started by police.
Jinx!
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And to add to that, just this morning there was a story on NPR about a certain jurisdiction adding training for police about being respectful and attentive during traffic stops in certain hot-spots, and they found that not only did arrests go down in those areas, overall crime went down.
So not only have they figured out a way to train it, they’ve figured out a way to determine whether that training is having the desired effect IRL, which is (as you know) a level beyond and much more difficult than determining if it’s working in practice/training.
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Not only. I’m not in America.
Huh, am I to understand that you are a police officer afraid of teenagers then?
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The British “Policing by Consent” model does seem far away from the US model.
I did that the few times I got pulled over in NZ, and it felt respectful and good. When I moved to Oz I was advised strongly not to do that in NSW by the locals, but I haven’t been pulled over yet so I can’t really confirm.
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I think the difference is, in Oz if the police don’t want you to get out of the car, they’ll tell you. They won’t shoot you.
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