Speaking of Fred:
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There should be a trial period for new cops before they can have a real gun. They start with a squirt gun, and if it is more than half full after a month they can get a real gun.
Honestly unless the legislative body does something we can’t realistically expect police reform. Cops aren’t likely to change just because we ask them to, have any of you had a cop react positively when you made demands of him/her ?
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Or it just means you think the fascist police state is inefficient, incompetent and/or does not care about your criticism.
Whether somewhere is a police state or not is a point on a sliding scale. There’s no agreed upon fixed point where a society stops being ‘free’ and becomes a ‘police state’.
Nacht und Nebel Aktionen against dissidents is definitely on the police state side of the line but I’d suggest it starts long before that and I wouldn’t say everything is fine so long as that isn’t happening.
I’d say the main argument against the US being a police state is that the government doesn’t seem to have much control over what the police does rather than that the secret police don’t disappear people.
As for fascist, again everyone has to make up their own mind where the US sits on that one.
Personally though, I’m with George Orwell in that “fascist” has come to have no useful meaning anymore.
It’s interesting rereading that to see how nothing has changed over the intervening 74 years.
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Sorry but where do you get that result from?
Taking the page you linked to gives us:
Gunfire deaths (including the one listed as accidental): 45
Automobile crash: 21
Struck by vehicle: 5
Vehicular pursuit: 4
So, 45 gun deaths, 30 caused by automobile accidents. And that’s not including the one motorbike related death and the six deaths caused by ‘vehicular assault’.
That is in fact unusual in that this year’s figures do have being shot as the leading cause of death (albeit not twice as frequent).
In most years the various forms of vehicle related accidents/incidents (not including being shot at a traffic stop) are about level.
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/causes.html
Strangely enough for all the talk about the risk of being shot at traffic stops, there appear to be no statistics kept of how often that happens. All shooting deaths just gets lumped in under “shot”.
I am glad to see though that since 2008 not one officer has been killed by a falling object which does beg the question “Why list it as a cause of death?”.
We can certainly agree on that. There do though seem to be a lot of police officers who are unreasonably concerned about the risk of being shot at a traffic stop.
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Reminder: humans have lived without cops for tens of thousands of years. By the most generous of definitions, police have existed for a few hundred years. Cops have shown you who they are and what they do. Believe them.
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as has been referenced below, there are no databases regarding police shootings or their outcomes on a national basis, nor do most states track that information. it is almost as if there were some force in american society that is determined not to know.
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If this threat of being shot during a traffic stop is so severe, why not make every trafic cop use one of these:
Might look a bit weird but we gotta be safe right? And besides it’s gotta be cheaper then all those lives lost on both sides!
Alternative idea’s:
- Decrease the amount of guns available everywhere
- Treat all people with the respect they deserve
- De-escalate instead of escalating
- Don’t punish but rehabilitate people that do crime
- Stop the unwinnable war on drugs together with the thriving illegal market for them (ie: legalise a large portion of it)
What most people don’t realise is that a society that is fair for everyone, makes all people in that society better off, including the richest members. Every country I went to that had a big gap between the rich and poor missed some things that most people take for granted. Ever been on a square like this? With multiple bars with outside terraces up to the street?
You don’t get that in the big cities of strongly divided countries, if you want to sit outside and have a drink or bite you will be sitting behind a fence to keep out the poor. The price for not having to live in a walled compound is a (certain level of) fair society.
Even if you are very rich in those countries, you cannot pay for the freedom to just leisurely stroll around your own city without having to think about the unsafe neighborhoods. You are never fully free in that sense.
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Reminder: people spent tens of thousands of years at low, environmentally sustainable population levels, wandering as hunter-gatherers. Packed into cities and nation states, all of a sudden militaries and eventually police forces developed.
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I suggest a whole range of emoji derived from Hyperbole and a half…
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So it has become an essential part of high-school curriculum to learn how to avoid to be killed by the state police? Only in the 
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Yes - don’t talk to them, but follow their instructions, more often than not.
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Philando Castile followed every single one of these instructions and the police killed him. https://t.co/pNqURNhOQQ
— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) October 17, 2018
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Because that is overkill. Pun intended.
Look - do bad stops happen where innocents get killed? Yes.
Do bad stop happen where cops get shot at and some times killed? Yes.
But the 99.99+% of stops don’t end in the worst case scenario.
Though then there is the grey area, and I have no idea what the percentage is, where a simple stop ends in harassment and over zealous policing. That’s a problem too.
But, anyway. Letting new drivers in on how an average traffic stop works I think is good life knowledge to have.
At the same time, that doesn’t excuse it when police fuck up, as the various high profile examples have shown. Training and accountability is certainly something that needs to be improved upon.
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Should that not be part of the driver training process then?
I confess I have no idea how that works in the US. Do you persist in the charmingly quaint belief popular in the UK that the average, utterly crap driver (which includes me, BTW) is able to adequately train their offspring/friends/relatives or do you have a sensible system with tested and approved driving instructors?
So what you’re saying is that the proper response to a police officer asking about your identity is “I am a meat popsicle.”
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Hold up a sec…you have a politician, in Texas who actually has integrity? That’s pretty amazing. Is there a good reason (other than the obvious Gerrymandered one) why this man isn’t running for a Federal office?
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I suppose whilst they’re at it, they should add on training for females for ‘how to avoid being raped’.
(and i wish i was joking, but this view also seems far too prevalent)
Both.
I and the majority of my peers took a drivers ed course. If you pass the course you can get a learners permit at 14, and a full license at 16. IIRC I still had to take a written exam for my license, but didn’t have to take a driving test due to passing the course. (This may have changed in the 25 years since.) The course I took was offered in the summer by the school, but there are private schools out there.
If you want to drive a motorcycle, that is a separate course and license.
If you don’t go through a drivers ed course you can take a written exam and take the practical driving test. I assume people who do this learn via youtube and uncles with beat up Camaroes.
Fun fact - my first time driving I ran over a dog.
We were on a residential street and a small dog was right in the middle of it, licking its butt or something. My instructor was like, “Just go slow, it will move.” So I did and it wasn’t, so I stopped. He said, “Honk your horn.” Did that, didn’t move. “Ok, just go real slow it will move when you get closer.”
It just stayed there as I drove over it. But it was small enough I just passed over it and it was fine.
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My view is something like this*, that every police holster should have a single-use plastic security tag.
Tag gets broken on duty = instant investigation and officer removed from duty. If it’s deemed a reasonable action, then fine, but really even drawing a gun should be your ABSOLUTE LAST RESORT, not your initial one. Teach de-escalation not immediate maximum escalation…
*To start with at least. Ideally move to a society where guns are very rare, see the UK as an example
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