I was travelling a few years ago, and hanging out in the hotel bar in Portland, Maine, and I listened in on a heated conversation between some guy and a lady whose husband is a cop. They were discussing police brutality and the protests at the time (Baltimore maybe?), and the lady's point was basically "do whatever you want with regulating police behaviour, but I will take my husband coming home at the end of the night over anything else"
It's possible with the falling rates of crime, this may just solve itself (though increasing police training and standards is a good thing regardless).
You observe an outlier but fail to put it into context. The police in the US aren't comparable to police in other western countries. As a result, comparing crime rates is disingenuous.
The lady in your anecdote is also painfully disingenuous. Being a police officer isn't really dangerous. The death rate is much higher for landscapers, bartenders, taxi drivers, etc.. Roofers have a mortality rate of 4x the police. Even then, most police officers die in traffic accidents, not homicide [0].
[0]: https://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-...
One issue is that there is no single entity pushing a single policy. You have a lot of people saying a lot of things.
>The argument is not that the police doesn't solve crime, it's that they cause it.
Yeah. That's insanity. Is that backed up by any study? What does that even mean? There is no country on earth without a police department.
>The police in the US aren't comparable to police in other western countries.
I agree with that, and one big reason is that the American crime-rate is an outlier compared to other western countries.
>he death rate is much higher for landscapers, bartenders, taxi drivers, etc.. Roofers have a mortality rate of 4x the police.
Sure - but there is a different level of stress that comes around when your death can be caused by another human versus accidents and negligence. The death-rate of soldiers in Iraq wasn't very high by percentage either and yet it resulted in a lot of PTSD in soldiers that weren't even casualties. The stresses that cops experience are closer to active military servicemen rather than landscapers - wouldn't you say?
I remember watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi3Ndh3n-g which shows you how quickly things can escalate especially when you're dealing with tense situations. That's what cops have in the back of their mind, for good or bad. And if you're working in a high-crime area, it's going to affect you.
Unlike roofers and landscapers, the police are also dealing with the ugliest sides of humanity. They are called in to deal with murder and rape and abuse all the time.
Having said that, this is a good argument for INCREASED investment in police departments, namely the increasing and continual training for police officers in dealing with high-stress situations and de-escalation tactics. For example, each month, each police officer should take 2 or 3 days just for this kind of training. You can also raise standards for admissions. Those are all good policies, and though expensive still, cheaper than social strife.
Sure it is. In general this kind of data is hard to acquire because the police rarely stop working. When they do though, the results are fairly clear [0]. This study was made after a "strike" by the police. The study attempts to account for under-reporting due to this fact.
Please note that just because _some_ crime is caused by police doesn't mean _all_ is.
> There is no country on earth without a police department.
Something about appeal to tradition. Anyway, as you might know police departments are a very new thing. Policing, in its current form, has existed for <200 years, founded under what is known as the Peelian principles [1]. Principles my previous paragraph demonstrates to have been violated by the police departments.
> PTSD in soldiers that weren't even casualties
The two of us are obviously coming from two very different perspectives. I have a hard time having sympathy for the soldiers who fought in Iraq and I think I'll have a hard time convincing you to feel otherwise.
[0]: Sullivan, C.M., O’Keeffe, Z.P. _Evidence that curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime_. Nat Hum Behav 1, 730–737 (2017).
It's not clear at all. This was a singular event and it wasn't even a police 'strike'. It was a work-to-rule action. Police were still there. To counter your conclusions, we've seen evidence of crime spikes in Baltimore, and even Chicago in areas that are ostensibly police free. Hell, we've seen two shooting and three casualties (and one death) in the Marxist utopia of CHOP, just in the last 48 hours without police presence - so much so that the idiot mayor of Seattle is now having the police coming back to restore order. So no, a single study isn't indicative of anything, and certainly not of what society looks like without a police department. It certainly isn't indicative that destroying a system that works well in every free nation in the world, and replacing it with something else, will lead to better outcomes.
Urgh, the entire thing is so juvenile and idiotic that is boggles the mind. Are you just a disaffected teenager or early-20 something that has you literally believing that dismantling police is the right way to go.
>Something about appeal to tradition
Similarity you don't get a free pass in just claiming that after you destroy the current system, which statistically works very well (the number of people killed by cops is minuscule at the population level), you'll be able to rebuild in an improved way - without even citing one example of where your methodology actually worked.
>Please note that just because _some_ crime is caused by police doesn't mean _all_ is.
Noted.
>Policing, in its current form, has existed for <200 years,
Just around the time Democracy was becoming a thing. Maybe we should give up on this Democratic thing too. Just because policing is new is not an argument for whatever it is you're proposing. It's just a statement of fact not supporting evidence for whatever it is you're proposing. But even with that, policing has, in fact, changed. Let's take your 200 years at face value, that means we have 200 years of incremental improvements based on societal needs that you would be throwing those away.
>I have a hard time having sympathy for the soldiers who fought in Iraq
I never asked for you to show sympathy towards another human being. Thank you for sharing you have none to give.
The point wasn't sympathy, it was that these military servicemen came back with PTSD even though statistically, the death rate was low (and probably similar to working on an oil rig). So the overall death rate is not necessarily correlated with the stresses of the job. But let me try again because you clearly cannot show empathize with a entire group of people you hate ... suicide was (is) prevalent among Japanese office workers. I'm going to go on a limb and assume that working at an office in Japan doesn't run you a high risk of death, but the stress incurred by those workers manifests in depression and suicide.
Do you understand now? And look, you didn't even have to show empathy towards an entire group of young people (and military service is, by and large, a young person's profession).