Honestly, I think the biggest thing is a combination of changing the personality profile for hiring and shifting emphasis in training.
For hiring profile, that should be kind of obvious. Pubescent manboys who get easily worked up have no business having power over other people’s lives. Period. Instead they should hire the sort of people who are non-confrontational and instinctively defuse rather than escalate. So none of the sort of personality that got involved in the Minnesota shooting, and all of the sort of person that thinks ‘Let’s break up this fight with a dance-off’
And it’s not an unusual profile, we have tons of them in the nursing, teaching, and caretaking professions.
As for training, that’s just a combination of …
- You serve the public, your job is to help raise everyone up.
- Humanize aggressively.
- There is no ‘blue code’. Your tribe is who you serve.
- Do NOT quickly leap to shoot to kill. (we are SO FUCKING BACKWARDS there!) If you’re wielding a firearm then learn to treat it as a last resort and seek any other option. Be somebody who’s decision making we can trust.
And so on. There are tons of people who can handle this sort of thing, and who will happily put their lives on the line, especially if it means preventing the mess we’re dealing with now.
