So, it’s safer to be a cop, and there’s more cops, and they’re killing more people.
That sounds to me like the cops aren’t working to be less lethal at all. It seems to me the cops are doing less and less work on their end in the realms of training and getting good results in favor of killing their problems away.
One area where I saw an improvment in relations was way up in NorCal.
The local environmental activists were holding non-violent resistance trainings, and the police took them up on it.
And suddenly there wasn’t any more applying of pepper spray to the eyes, using cotton swabs, by the police.
Yeah, they did that (1997) and got away with it too.
The problem isn’t that one sadist. It’s the hundred enablers in blue that have his back UNQUESTIONINGLY.
"Ma’am don’t put yourself through this" (laugher)
Will stick with me for a lifetime. As far as I know, it is ANY of them. ALL of them.
One bad case outweighs millions because it got more press?
I’ve never been in a situation that couldn’t have been made far worse by the presence of a police officer.
I’ve never been more afraid in my life than the time my young son was in a house alone with a police officer.
Criminals are far less dangerous than cops, full stop, has been my lifelong experience.
Criminals can and will walk away from situations they don’t control.
Cops walk towards them, armed and trained.
Problem is, cops should not be in control of most situations, but good luck telling them that.
I disagree; people like you (aka fellow white people with “ideas”) scare me a lot more than cops.
Nothing personal, I just don’t trust other human beings at all.
If you ask a six year old and a cop, you’ll get the same answer. They should!!!
Do ideas scare you to death?
Well, those “ideas” are usually about guns and carrying guns and the right to bear arms.
Doesn’t make the equivalence true
Every word ever spoken and idea ever held by man across all of time… is less lethal than one pull of a trigger.
I find that systems are generally more trustworthy than individuals, in the broadest sense of the words. Not that systems can’t be corrupt. But individuals are fucked up, and generally out for their own selfish goals.
Religious genocide would like to have a word with you about that.
In my view one of the key problems that make American police uniquely problematic among the rest of the developed world is their lack of proper training.
In the United States the required training to become a gun-totin’ cop is 19 weeks, about the same as one semester of college. That might be enough time to learn how to hit a target at a shooting range but it’s nowhere near long enough to learn enough about U.S. criminal and civil codes, traffic safety, community engagement, deescalation, mental health counseling and a thousand other skill sets that are essential for a good police officer.
So I’d definitely approach the problem by saying we need to raise the standards for those who we appoint to serve and protect the citizenry, not lower them.
How does this compare to police training time in other first world countries?
In Germany, it’s 2.5 years in the academy.
Scottland’s is 11 weeks, but that’s just initial boot camp.
Australia is 18 months in basic training to become a police officer
Japan generally is 1 year of training with a high school diploma, 6 months with a relevant degree.
These are all just skimmed off of wikipedia so, take that for what it’s worth.
That’s some good solid data to indicate the US standard of “19 weeks to become a cop” is pretty weak, yes?
Oh, and even in Mexico, they’re required to take a year-long course.
I’d say so.
There’s pretty strong correlation that extensive good training of cops for longer periods, along with national standards reduces both crime and police violence.
Really the US is the only country not following the science at all.
Well, OK, I won’t take it personally that you just called me a criminal for some reason. But consider these truths:
Cops have been found to systematically under-report cop criminality in every single US study I’ve ever seen. They’ve been shown to literally turn away rape and beating victims without filing reports if the perpetrator was a cop.
Cops are statistically more likely to beat their spouses, sexually abuse children, or murder a stranger than the general population. This holds true despite the reporting problem mentioned previously!
I don’t carry a firearm. Cops do, pretty much 24x7, and many of them habitually carry an undocumented one “just in case”. Who’s more likely to harm someone? An unarmed citizen or an armed man immune to penalty of law?
So if you really don’t trust other people, that should include cops, it seems to me…
I don’t want police protection, and that is not what police do in any functional state. They enforce laws by catching people who have broken them, and not by pre-emptively acting to nominally “protect”. That serve and protect on the side of a police car refers to the possessions of the rich, and not the lives of the citizenry.
Remember, I was harassed by cops for over two years because I helped break up an illegal dumping ring run by a cop who is still on active duty today (in Murdertown, ten miles away), the cops did nothing when I had swastikas and death threats spray-painted behind my house after I adopted a child of color, and I was one of several unarmed citizens who went after the kid with the gun at the High School field hockey shooting incident. All that is independently verifiable, there were lots of witnesses. I have reasons for my beliefs based in real events.
In my half a decade of experience cops are the least likely people to act ethically and humanely in any given situation. They are provably and significantly morally challenged (as a group, I am sure there are individual outliers) as compared to the rest of the populace.
All that being said, I think reforming the police is more likely to happen than getting rid of them, and I would certainly support any such halfway measure.
Really, did they have mind control powers a la Mua’d dib and his killing words… or are you conflating thought and speech with action for a reason?
I’m not interested in playing semantics with you, this shit matters.
I dunno, I’d say racism / sexism / bigotry are pretty dangerous thoughts that should be actively combated, for moral reasons, and also because they tend to lead to actions that harm others. See also: religion.
Cops work under a system of law, but you, sir, are completely unknown to me and therefore a much greater risk. I agree the system the police work under can absolutely be improved, but you personally could be working under any ideology at all for any reason, or for no reason whatsoever. I just don’t know.
Random crazy-ass white people who probably carry a gun are much more of a threat to me than any cop will ever be.
(If I know you don’t carry, then that is at least reassuring though. But your avatar sure carries a gun.)
Are there any functional states with no formal police force at all?
