Unfortunately, I am not sure that will be the case in a week. I think by the time the actual voting on the bill comes, it is likely that either the protests have died down removing the immediacy of this, or else there is so much destruction in the cities that this becomes not politically viable.
It's important that more people see officers and get the impression that they are there to enforce peace, not dole out violence -- while still ensuring they have the tools to maintain safety and order. Large, threatening military-style vehicles don't send a good message to people who are already scared for their safety.
Of course the police union lobbied for more.
They have armored trucks and undercover vehicles. They have mobile towers to survey. They have closed circuit cameras at every major intersection. They have Stingrays. They have purchased LRADs which can permanently deafen. They have helicopters, tear gas cannons for hundreds of officers, batons.
And they trot it out for peaceful protests. The police did not come equipped to protect, they came equipped to escalate and occupy.
Hell, they even manage to bust a lot of the equipment out at concerts and festivals. I stopped going to a local outdoor concert series when they decided to gate a park off and start pat downs and metal detecting everyone who entered.
I don't remember who said it, in relation to sports - "Look good, feel good, play good." I think how you look can absolutely affect how you behave.
Legislation almost always winds up being the softball nearby target that does something visible, not necessarily something useful.
As an armchair economist who believes that everything DOES happen at the margins, we can't completely ignore this, so I'm at least somewhat sympathetic to the argument.
But what really kills the argument is looking at how our medical professionals have stepped up and responded to COVID-19, putting their lives on the line every day, with utterly inadequate gear. And still they serve.
Yes, if the police are less militarized and have more personal liability/responsibility, it will reduce the level of interest in the profession somewhat, but I think we have to not kid ourselves about the degree of such an impact.
This is before we get into whether we really even want "those people" (who are attracted to the militaristic side of policing) 'serving' our communities at all.
Just as anti-pursuit policies have swept the nation to reduce officer-involved carnage, we can reduce escalation of violence.
People trained by the military to police occupied communities should not be allowed to act as civilian police in peacetime conditions.
The rule of engagement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are significantly stricter than they are for America's cops. No firing until fired upon, limits on use of things like tear gas and riot gear, etc. They're also trained significantly more.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/1...
> In contrast, soldiers continuously and over the course of their careers repeatedly train to employ techniques to deescalate stressful, unpredictable, and dangerous scenarios. They also know what steps they must take before resorting to lethal force. Most rules of engagement (ROEs) — the military’s term for rules that govern the circumstances when soldiers are justified using force — contain explicit instructions requiring soldiers to use verbal warnings, show their weapons, and exhaust all non-lethal physical options before resorting to deadly force.
Maybe on paper, but in practice they act with little if any respect for the communities they're in. For instance screaming at people and pointing rifles at their heads to "overcome" the language barrier. Or, as apologists phrase it, "use verbal warnings, show their weapons,"
Edit: Here is something else for the haters to consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology
After WWII, the American military conducted studies that determined a large portion of their soldiers were unwilling to kill people in combat. This was perceived as a problem and efforts were undertaken to make soldiers more willing to kill people. Among these measures was the use of human silhouette targets at gun ranges, a practice which is not coincidentally common for civilian police today: http://www.americantargetcompany.com/law_enforcement_targets...
It's not just a matter of whether an individual police officer was a combat veteran, but also a matter of whether he ever received training from a combat veteran (which is extremely common.) Look up Dave Grossman.
It was Big Truck Day at the library and a lot of government employees were showing their vehicles. Fire trucks, trash compactors, a huge bulldozer, and there was a police car and a handful of officers around.
A little girl came and pointed at a rifle and asked the officer, “what is this for?”
He said, “to protect myself”, paused and caught his breath and said “and to protect you”.
This happened a couple years ago. I still think about his pause, the afterthought on why he needs the truck, the rifle and the gear.
"What's the point of having all this cool shit if we never get to use it?!"
Now one fix that removing some of the equipment will do will reduce the amount of psychological impact it has on those wielding it, as in reduce the Rambo effect. The idea of attaching military style equipment to the current problems is only for political purposes, they needed to blame Trump for the violence.
However in the end, there are few alternatives to fixing the police and their application and misapplication of force
1) Restrict conditions that can be placed in union negotiated contracts regarding officer behavior, culpability, and indemnification.
2) If not 1) then make it illegal for the unions to exist with regards to any public servant who is armed
3) civilian oversight boards that are veto proof against the police they monitor. Not only would they review incidents which are questionable they would have to involved in any use of concentrated force to include no knock warrants; something which should be illegal except in the most incredible cases.
4) holding elected and appointed officials of the localities, city, county, or state, accountable for the harm caused by their police forces.
I'm not sure that it's relevant, as the pay scale for LPNs/CNs/CNAs are all over the place... and overtime and retirement benefits can make law enforcement extremely lucrative careers. But I just don't have the numbers for it either way.
I don't particularly care what the standard is for disposing of unwanted military hardware is so long as it's not a double one. A civilian police force should get no special treatment above any other civilian entity.
this is the key point. I have known many people that would like to have been a "police officer" in the sense that I believe many people think policing should be. After finding out it is more like the military than servicing the community they dropped the pursuit
More recently I have even seen many Former Military people shy away from going into the policing because the paramilitary tactics and procedures of modern militarized policing are in many ways MORE extreme than any rules of engagement that the military employed in their theaters of operation (i.e US Police treat citizens of this nation worse than the US Military does when we invade a nation)
Any Police Reform that does not involve MASSIVE demilitarization of the police force is a waste of time
https://www.vulture.com/2017/11/marvel-punisher-police-milit...
Seems disingenuous to compare say Doctors who go through medical school vs people who only need a high school degree and however long training takes.
Looks like NYC cops make more than NYC nurses, or it's close.
From the source, starting $42K, $85K after 5 years, plus benefits:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/careers/police-officers/po-be...
New York nursing, average pay (> 5 years) $83K, $89K in NYC.
When you factor in years of medical school for the degree, medical malpractice insurance, and lack of benefits versus police pension, police are generally netting more.
Training and educating medical professionals is not a cheap task.
[1] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/06/in-blue-but-no...
[2] The effective nationwide minimum wage, (the wage that the average minimum wage worker earns), is $11.80 as of May 2019. So 40 hr/week * 52 weeks = $24,544 annually. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...)
In my city a 1st year officer makes about 15-20% more than the median HOUSEHOLD income for the city. (most Households are 2 income at least).
That is base income not factoring in Shift Premiums, Overtime, and various other income they earn
So I would love to know what city you are referring to where cops are being paid the minimum wage
1: https://files.kstatecollegian.com/2014/08/08.27.14.BikeCop.G...
2: https://d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net/img/c1200x675-w1200-q8...
Also, fewer surgeons and nurses get shot on the job, I assume.
The DHS funding being pumped into the forces have resulted in police being better battle-equipped than the average country's military and this has become a recruiting tool. Don't want to sign many years of your life away and probably get shipped out to a -stan where you have to deal with constant misery just to live out a military fantasy? Just go to a police academy for a couple months and you can cosplay all you want while with all the same toys in a "target rich environment".
The end result is we've created a recruiting pull that only finds the worst possible people for the job. It would be like HR only hiring people for a software company who picked computer science entirely because they heard it was high paying but somehow far far deadlier.
I don't see why it's not clear there's a difference here, in terms of community interest, but whatever
> A civilian police force should have no special rights above any other civilian entity.
What a weird way of looking at the world. I've genuinely never heard this take. Police have power over you, if you break the law; that's the point, no?
The military's RoE are also very strict with severe consequences for violating. Contrary to what some think, soldiers are not running around shooting every person they see.
There are also 54 people listed as working as "[XXX] police [XXX]", in a town of 41k.
For the record, there is an average of one violent crime a day in my town, and stats like 7 projected rapes in 2020 (0 murders).
Whether or not that's all justified, I leave as an exercise to the reader.
Ex-military cops were almost 3x more likely to be involved in a shooting.
[0]https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1180655701271732224.html
I'm surprised to even see the argument offered, I'm very interested in hearing from someone with inside experience on this enlighten us as to how much these kinds of 'opportunities' actually affect morale.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...
From what I understand, assaults on health care workers is a large issue, but they are also much more numerous than law enforcement. It's hard to find exact numbers, as I really don't know the US government industry names very well, so I have no idea whether "Police protection" in IIF contains all LE and "Health care and social assistance" is the appropriate other category, but HE has slightly more deaths (138 vs 111) while employing a lot more people (16m vs <1m).
Study suggests ex-military cops are 2.9x more likely to be involved in a shooting if they had been deployed, and still 1.9x if they were ex-military but not deployed.
It's worth considering that people who leave the military to join another high risk of violence job may simply be violence seeking individuals, and that a randomly selected solider who was required to be a policeman would not show this effect. But given we can't really control that, we'd likely be better hiring fewer ex-military vets.
Another search suggests vets are over-represented in police jobs by about 3.5x their baseline rate
What always confuses me (I live in a country where the police don't generally get guns, even) is what they're preparing for with this sort of thing? A full-on war? Like, if they need hundreds of assault rifles for police work, then arguably society has already collapsed and the police are probably surplus to requirements anyway.
Police cars that can be destroyed by unarmed civilians are a feature not a bug.
Would love to see this happen. Being policed by literal pigs would be better than...well, you know.
You can really only beat one person at a time with a club. You can spray rubber bullets and water pumps into a crowd.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
However, I think any meaningful change or even competent governance is of the table in the US until something is done about the broken and polarized two party system. Right now the two factions are about evenly matched and can hardly agree on anything. Until that changes the US will continue to have their most unproductive governments in their history.
The Insurrection Act requires a State governor or legislature to request military assistance during an insurrection. The act also allows the president to act without that, if the State is not acting in a way that is protecting people's rights. This is why Bush could not deploy the National Guard during Katrina - the governor of the state refused to request the help, and it was not deemed to have come to a point where the president would impose the military anyway. The last time this act was used was during the Rodney King riots, where the governor of CA requested assistance.
This is a long way to say that we have made it difficult to deploy the military or use military force within the US. And for good reason.
So, why do we allow police departments to arm up and look/act like the military? If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck - is it not a duck?
I get that there are circumstances where SWAT may be required, but why does every PD have a SWAT team? Why isn't it required that the governor authorize the use of SWAT in every case?
SWAT is now routinely used to perform dawn raids (no knock raids) on people who have no criminal record, and where no violence has been reported.
Controlling the equipment may be part of the solution, but it won't do any good unless the deployment of SWAT and other military style options are more carefully, judiciously, and transparently controlled.
Having police on the roads is having a huge positive impact on drinking and driving. Let’s be careful not to over-correct when demilitarizing our police force.
Have fun with this one, folks:
But we had police shooting at reporters on live TV already. It's not that documented misconduct didn't exist. What's missing is savage consequences for misconduct.
[1] https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/make-cops-carry...
The bellicose see war everywhere...
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ferguson-michael-brown-...
https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1180655717038067712?s=21
(pasted the tweet which contains the link to the data because his entire tweet thread is interesting!)
Bike squads on regular duty almost always look like [1] anyway. [2] might be a SWAT picture.
Dress for the job you want. If they all dress like storm troopers some of them will act like storm troopers.
NY state patrol uniform: Grey with purple ties. https://northcountrynow.com/sites/default/files/images/Zone2...
NYPD (new york city) police: Black on black with black ties. https://media.timeout.com/images/103899055/image.jpg
It seems meaningless, but having interacted with a few police agencies I have noticed a trend. They cops that show up for meetings in head-to-toe black tend to be more aggressive. They try to assert themselves in every meeting, which is entertaining as we are the military. They cannot win the "who has the bigger gun" thing. The cops that come in oldschool blue shirts and ties are much easier to work with.
(Fyi, if those two NYPD officers in the pic were in the military they would get a talking to about attitude. Hands in pockets. Chewing. Crossed arms. In public? Have some respect for your uniform.)
The other side is they didn't know it was only old women in the home.
I don't even have to say anything further. It speaks for itself.
You can't compare spontaneous heroism with mundane risk.
A doctor on the other hand starts out making 70k in their residency after 4 years of undergrad and 4 years of med school. Once their residency is over they can expect to make well into the six figures. Probably in the 300-400k range. COVID is a few months of increased danger that happens perhaps once in a career for which some medical professionals are even getting paid extra for.
I don't necessarily think police are under paid but to say you can attract people because of the public service aspect of the job and ignore the vast pay difference seems to ignore the obvious difference.
I've brought this up before: US law enforcement has a long-established training relationship with Israel. Is it any surprise that American police have a "siege mentality" when they are being trained by a country that is basically dealing with a multi-decade insurgency/hybrid war?
https://progressive.org/dispatches/us-police-trained-by-isra...
It's also entirely possible the warrant was unjustifiably a high risk warrant. In that case, SWAT could serve the warrant, and you get this situation. But that's not SWAT's fault.
The point isn't whether they get paid the wrong amount for the qualifications required the point is about the calculus about how much you are willing to put up with when you are getting paid $70k vs $300k.
If I'm getting paid $300k and once or twice in my 40 year career I have to deal with a pandemic my thought process about how I feel about that is different than if I'm making 70k. All I'm saying is comparing doctors to cops doesn't seem particularly useful.
The whole thing feels like a deeper problem than just training cops to be nicer.
Why wouldn't the taxpayers be expected to pick up the cost in the form of increased pay?
Better: police unions indemnifying their employers against convictions.
What seems less defensible is police coming in with things like tanks. Personally, I would prefer to see police de-escalate rather than escalate.
20 years ago most of this wouldn't have been caught on camera, so it seems like a net win.
A week? I think it's already not the case. Maybe not across the entire nation but certainly in some places. I can see an argument that Twitter isn't a source of "quality" journalism. But these things are so widespread that I think it's hard to not only discredit it but even ignore it. In the first link [0] you've got National Guard walking in a neighborhood shooting paint at people legally standing on their own property. In the second link [1] you've got protestors taking refuge inside of someone's personal property.
No, it's not a war zone insomuch as there aren't live rounds being used. Except for, you know, when they are being used {[2],[3]} [4]. Okay so the latter three videos videos aren't in neighborhoods. I don't think it matters. It shouldn't matter whether these events are happening to a neighborhood or not. The fact is, they're happening and people are getting permanent injuries and some even dying.
[0] https://twitter.com/tkerssen/status/1266921821653385225
[1] https://twitter.com/allieblablah/status/1267636221406261248
[2] https://twitter.com/BrandiKruse/status/1266889752466227200
[3] https://twitter.com/BrandiKruse/status/1266924674107109377
Are criminal penalties too harsh? If you're looking at 25-life for a conviction, aren't you going to resist being apprehended with as much force as possible?
Unfortunately for us, democracy ensures idiots elect idiot politicians who employ idiot, evil police.
What would it take to align police incentives (compensation, etc) with the outcomes we want? Reforming the unions? Better local politicians?
De-militarizing the police seems like a great step, but it seems like trying to cut off a mindset that is already entrenched.
This sounds like perfect being the enemy of the good.
Militarising police lets them to project force like, well, militaries. It attracts people who want to play with military toys without military training.
Removing military equipment doesn't solve the problem. But it makes it less deadly. And it removes one, among many, incentives for bad behavior.
> civilian oversight boards that are veto proof against the police they monitor
Simplier: let them initiate investigations, and give them the funding required to do so.
> holding elected and appointed officials of the localities, city, county, or state, accountable for the harm caused by their police forces
This is lip service. They're already elected. They continue to be re-elected. Police violence is, in large part, a majoritarian failure.
Consolidation of power to the federal level is a very blunt tool. Our nation is not built on such centralization of power. In fact the foundation is the opposite.
Yes, deaths and injuries should be reviewed but this should happen at as local a level as possible.
There’s need for reform but more federal power is not the solution.
That's interesting, and betrays the fact that modern policing has somewhat drifted away from its historic tradition. (https://www.techuk.org/insights/opinions/item/15744-behind-p...)
I'm also scared irreparable damage had been done to the police brand such that way fewer "good" people will want to sign up.
I'm pretty sure you're talking about Buffalo, NY.[1] They purchased 115 semi-automatic rifles that use the same .40S&W ammunition as their pistols. That's the opposite of "high powered". And they're not fully automatic. They can in no way be construed as assault rifles.
The 450 vests they bought are resistant to rifle rounds. Their old vests could only stop pistol rounds.
I agree that many departments go overboard, but this doesn't seem like an instance of that.
1. https://buffalonews.com/2017/03/07/buffalo-police-to-get-new...
I'm seeing a lot of good, evidence-based reform ideas dismissed as not being enough to "solve" the problem. But reform isn't all or nothing! Where we can make marginal improvements, we should. This is a large, complex, and heavily-entrenched issue. There is no silver bullet. Attack it from every angle available.
Obviously it's no one's fault. We should just accept things the way they are and change nothing.
One objection is that police are already doing a difficult and dangerous job for relatively low pay, and it would be unfair to saddle them with the additional cost of insuring themselves.
No problem. We can take that pot of taxpayer money currently being used to pay damage awards for misbehaving cops — $308 million in payouts last year divided by 34,000 uniformed NYPD officers equals nearly $10,000 per cop — and use it to give them an insurance allowance.
When very‐ high‐ risk officers see premiums go up, they would have to pay the difference out of their own pockets. That’s fair
In terms of consequences that is why I believe there should be review at the state or federal level. The only way you can do that review at scale is with body cam footage. Most cases will be open and shut, but just the idea of being recorded AND being scrutinized by a higher authority would make a huge difference in behavior.
Per part 4 in the thread above, more military-style equipment appears to lead to a significant increase in police violence.
It's also worth reading for the rest of what does (and doesn't) work.
Link to full study on militarization and police violence: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...
Is it? I hear ads on the radio for Portland Police in my state (which is not Oregon) and it says pay starts at $74,000/year plus a long list of benefits.
Is $35/hour the minimum page in Portland now?
I'm not saying that, you'd want to find out why the warrant was high risk or deserved a SWAT response. Someone made that call, and it may not have been SWAT themselves. And you should take actions to ensure it doesn't happen again and hold them accountable. If you find abuse of power, you need to get rid of that person.
The key theme here is that you usually don't get all of the details about why things happened. Sometimes it's honest mistakes. Sometimes it's abuse of power. Sometimes there's miscommunication.
Totally agreed on the paint schemes.
This a much more complex issue than the media or either political party is willing to acknowledge.
These policies would almost certainly be bought and negotiated on the union level, as a union benefit. As such, rates would rise for everyone and be passed on to the taxpayer.
Indemnification requirements are simpler, and cut out the middle man. If the union then chooses to pass than risk to an insurer, that can be negotiated separately.
How does any military hardware reduce drunk driving?
Yes, police need cars. That’s not controversial.
Right now, this reads very much like a deflection of the core issues at hand. This will not alleviate the core issue at all in the long term, but gives the appearance that lawmakers are "doing their best" to solve the problem. That they've "taken first steps" and that protests should stop.
No.
This is an extremely common tactic and will lead to no long term changes.
While it is hard to argue against what you're saying, your comment is actually doing the same thing as what the lawmakers are doing - detracting the conversation from the core issue.
Another surprising fact is the last two NYPD officers to be killed on duty, the total of all NYPD officers killed on duty in the last three years, were both shot by other NYPD officers.
More cameras is not always good, even in public and even if legal.
[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/files/2011/09/mdf489180.jpg
I further believe that this lack of justification is routine. Even if there was a good reason, that do this routinely without being either compelled or persuaded to supply it is by itself evidence our police are militarized.
American police collectively lost a lot of trust and authority. Obviously the most significant aspect is actually murdering people like George Floyd in plain sight while wearing a badge. But dangerous stunts like this are a contributor as well. Do they want to regain our trust?
It's a pet peeve of mine when people on social media mischaracterize Canada.
We have shootouts in broad daylight in downtown Toronto on a fairly regular basis. All of our cops have guns and are trained to use them. We have 35 legal guns per 100 population and that doesn't account for the illegal handguns from the US which account for almost all of the gun crime.
Canada and the UK are nothing alike in gun crime.
The police need to push cars to the side of the road on, I'd venture, a daily basis.
In what kind of weird and twisted world do police officers need to push cars to the side on a daily basis?
It reminds of me of all the people still referring to Covid as a "bad cold" or "not a big deal" because the fatality rate is only 0.5%, completely ignoring any and all concern around morbidity, as if being stuck on ventilator or having permanent lung damage was just fine because it wasn't fatal.
When the matter of police training is raised, much consideration is given to the training police aren't receiving but should receive. I think too few consider the matter of training the police are receiving but shouldn't be.
As a condition that police behavior is better prosecuted, and a lot is done to change their culture, unions have an important role to play IMO.
Regardless of how I feel about police members in general, they also are in a job where they’ll have a hard time negotiating terms. For instance during shelter in place they are on the streets patrolling and cannot refuse to work in time of crisis, don’t have effective striking rights. Getting fair conditions for the sacrifices requested should be granted, otherwise there’s no way to get reasonable people in these jobs.
Excessive power given to unions is of course bad, but no unions could be equally damaging.
An officer that chokes a nonviolent person to death for 9 minutes straight, or an officer that kicks an unthreatening protester in the face, or that fires rounds at people peacefully standing in their own home's doorway, or one that knowingly attacks journalists, should be first and foremost be prosecuted and put in jail, and also be subject to civil suits for their actions.
Unfortunately there is a significant structural disincentive for DAs, prosecutors, and Attorneys General to pursue such cases except in the most egregious high-profile incidents so justice is rarely served. Eliminating qualified immunity allows individuals some recourse to sue the perpetrators in these incidents, but it is no replacement for prosecuting and putting them in jail.
The leadership team for police that wants you dressing all paramilitary and in all black is going to have a focus on you acting a different way during training and in what your day to day is like than the other group.
There's also the brittle fact that I still remember the day long fire arms training where i was required to watch officers get shot for an hour and got it drilled into my head that it was better to shoot someone if I felt any risk or danger (and what to say if i had to do it), and that I needed to make sure i got to go home. It was all done in a very deniable way, but police officers are 100 percent indoctrinated during training to shoot if they feel like they are in any danger. I can speak more to what kind of training took place and the attitude of the instructors if people are curious.
You consider the Posse Comitatus act as being passed for a good reason? Perhaps the effects are good, but the Act itself was mainly passed so that the white former slaveholding states of the south could enforce racially charged laws without the Union military preventing them.
Facetious commentary aside – and I do apologize for the tongue in cheekness – as a European I’ve always been struck by just how many wrecks and other debris are littered by the side of the roads in the US. Mileage varies I’m sure (no pun intended) but I covered 6660 miles on a road trip through in the US last year and it seemed almost universal to me that you’d see at least one car wreck (often partially or fully burned out) and loads of other debris like blown tires etc.
I think I’ve even got video from when I was leaving Kennedy Space Center and just a few miles from the bridges there was a car by the side of the road engulfed in flames.
On my latest road trip someone explained to me that the remnants of blown tires are from 18-wheelers that just keep on truckin’ once that happens, basically ignoring it till the next stop or even later. Given how many trucks you see on the road I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true.
Even miscellaneous agricultural work is more dangerous and they make 24k/year.
Agreed, the NFA needs to go and every citizen should be able to purchase military surplus.
This is exactly an American hero obsession that is causing police problem. Everyone here : police, fire department, medical staff and so on have to be heroes.
From where I come, all doctors, lawyers, police or any other service provides are identified at best working for a pay or more commonly out there to rip off common people at first chance they get.
My US experience of doctors is not much better considering how much private, non-insurance covered treatment they "recommended" for my kid. It feels highly unlikely that they had my best interest at their heart.
It's really not a strange concept and it's weird to me that you can't comprehend a first responder having a need to move a large, heavy, immobilized object.
I would love to know what you mean by "military grade" because by every definition I can think of this is so wrong it's either a statement with no bearing in reality, or an intentional lie.
Relevent: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-blazer-experiment...
> For many years, the Menlo Park police had worn some variation of the traditional, pseudo-military, dark blue uniform. But Cizanckas thought that look was too intimidating and aggressive, so he traded it for slacks, dress shirts with ties, and a blazer. Guns and handcuffs remained hidden under the coat. Instead of a metal badge, the blazer sported an embroidered patch that looked a little like a coat of arms....
> That’s because uniforms not only shape how people see the police, but also how police see themselves. In challenging an image so entrenched in the style and psyche of police officers, Chief Cizanckas was bucking a tradition that would prove hard to change: a uniform whose history was interwoven with the profession it represented and that went back more than a hundred years.
I assume you are implying an Israeli cannot be a good police trainer because they occupy Palestine, but I disagree.
On the other hand, people who want to harm others, have a higher chance of joining the police force. (Not all police officers, but some.)
As others have already said here, more is needed.
I think another proper move would be to abolish police unions - nationally. This coming from a pro-union individual; however, these organizations have failed the public in my opinion.
And it's not really their fault. Unions are tasked with strictly defined goals around protection/advancement of wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. To fail to advocate for these on the behalf of their paying members - opens them up to lawsuits themselves.
Ideally there would be an organization that would stand up for the protection of the individual in police organizations, the current structure(s) we have in place simply are not congruent with respect to protection of both the working individual in an organization and the public at large.
Cops are also generally brutal on their vehicles. The biggest problem is probably a cop in a hurry getting out of a running vehicle without putting it into park. They get into lots of low-speed/rolling car collisions. These things happen if you are getting in/out of your car 50 times a day.
The solutions you are talking about are real, but this thing you said about equipment isn't true. It's definitely one of the points of emphasis for organizations that are working on this, see: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/demilitarization
And that's based on research like this that receiving military equipment made it more likely for that police department to kill its citizens. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...
NYPD annual Budget: 6 billion dollars Mexican military budget: 7 billion
It's no surprise that the police at these protests look like they're ready to take on a well-armed drug cartel. They are.
If not do a Google image search for 'american police officer' - almost every image has a different uniform colour, cut, insignia in it.
Dark blue, light blue, white, brown, black, grey, purple, yellow, green. It's every colour under the sun!
Two police officers:
https://static.trendscatchers.io/uploads/2019/01/bear34-uk.j...
https://writersforensicsblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/chi...
I think there's almost literally nothing consistent between these two uniforms (badge?)
> with a badge and utility belt
That's also what mall security guards wear in the US though.
It seems obvious to me that as we work toward decarceration and decriminalization there will be a need for fewer police officers.
Practically everyone agrees that racial profiling should go away. Well, that's less "work" and should lead to fewer staff. Pretty similar public sentiment toward drug possession.
Not quite cops, but related. If we got rid of cash bail we'd need smaller prisons and fewer corrections officers. People who are released without bail overwhelmingly return for their court dates. So the only reason they are in jail is because they couldn't afford bail--they haven't been convicted of a crime. And that bail is then used to coerce confessions out of people.
On a given night, about 470k people are in jail because they couldn't make bail. That's about 25% of incarcerated people.
At 83 million, Germany's population is 25% that of the USA, so all things being equal the Police in the USA would only use 184 bullets per year, and there would only be 28 deaths as a result of police shootings.
In reality, The police in the USA shot shot and killed nearly 1,000 people in 2015 [2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/52r4zr/sho...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/12/26/a...
There is a car accident every 3 seconds in America. Cops are almost always the first on the scene and clearing the highway of wrecked cars before a tow arrives is essential.
I guess it’s time for us to acknowledge that unions are not always a net benefit.
This happens every single traffic stop.
Clearly getting their head blown off is on their mind.
> An early study even suggested that altercations between citizens and police had declined because of the new uniform. The study’s findings were eventually challenged...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....
> Effects of such an alteration were examined in the laboratory and in the field. No positive effects of the uniform change were found.
That said I'm all for police not looking like an occupying military force armed to the teeth.
"This is an extremely common tactic... "
So what? Trolls don't get to win just because they are clever. Required changes are required whether or not this or that group wants to use a given change as a talking point or to manipulate the greater goals.
I’ll give you the green. That is unusual. It might be fair to add green to the list for some state trooper uniforms and park police uniforms.
I apologize if you’ve spent significant time in the US. I’m assuming you haven’t if significant variation in police uniform seems like it would commonly come up. The colors I mentioned are typical for city, county and state police. There are some variations, e.g., I said dark which could be black or a dark blue. To most people, the difference does not cause them to read the situation differently. When I review the uniforms of the 40-50 policing bodies with which I’m most familiar, I don’t see much deviation.
Security guards do try to mimic police uniforms as much as they can get away with, and I think that is dangerous. At minimum they should be forbidden from wearing a badge that looks like a police badge, and they should not be allowed to wear a hat that looks like a police hat. A security guard with a baseball hat, no badge, and their firm printed on their uniform is not easily mistaken for police.
Cashiers do not have to approach dangerous people who do not want to be approached. If they get held up they give the cash and they're good.
In cities cops are often targeted to be killed since it could be the difference between life in jail and going free.
Of course police deaths are low across all police everywhere. The aggregate death statistics are meaningless.
Pull up a stat comparing deaths of cops only in downtown Chicago or Detroit or how about Minneapolis and then it will be more meaningful
In many cities (including mine, which has a lot of private security) the word POLICE is written in all caps and large letters on the back and front of their shirts. It's hard to make the distinction until you see them once, then it's pretty clear
(The US civilian administrator fired a HUGE chunk of armed men who could no longer provide for their families. Their services were eventually rendered elsewhere. I’m sure ex-police will find rackets, new and old.)
The amount of gun training these officers receive is insane, and it's no wonder why so many resort to using their weapon first.
As someone that has spent 55 years in the Bay Area this is false.
Part of the training also drills in the fact that an untrained opponent with a sharp object like a knife is at a strategic advantage versus someone with a holstered firearm if they are closer than 21 feet away. Failure to maintain strategic dominance is a potentially fatal mistake.
Nobody is interested in empathizing with the mental state of the cop in these situations, and if you try to do so, you’ll be shouted down for not empathizing with the family and friends of the deceased. This is not only a false dichotomy, but it precludes you from arriving at possible solutions. The goal of this exercise is not to feel sorrow for the officer, but to discover the root cause of this pattern. Only after doing so can you expect to find solutions, and ultimately, save lives.
It is not acceptable to have a non-zero casualty rate, and what most people fail to understand is that the average human, even with training and experience (and often, experience is actually a liability, not an asset - people with PTSD are further compromised) cannot accurately assess and process a potential threat 100% of the time. This is the simple explanation for why these incidents seem to happen so frequently. Yet the general public thinks that police are somehow different from the average human, and that their brains do not work like their own. Or perhaps more accurately, they don’t understand how their own brain works, so in their mental re-enactment of the scenario, they make the correct decisions, and conclude that the only remaining explanation is hate, racism, or some other evil that only police seem to have.
If anyone wants to get a glimpse into what this environment does to a person, next time you go for dinner with a veteran, take note of where they sit at the table. More often than not, they will prefer to select a position that does not leave their back exposed to an entrance. Even in a harmless restaurant, their brain is instinctively on high alert for potential threats. That’s also why many of them cannot sleep.
IMHO, the way to prevent these errors is to prevent the number of opportunities to make a fatal mistake.
None of this is to suggest a complete lack of malice in all cases - but most of the time, people are people, and they will continue to do what people do, uniform or not.
De-criminalize recreational drug-use. Community arrests of recreational users with no victims causes a bad image and puts young people on a path to being full time criminals.
Increase training. If you fall back to instinct too quickly and you're equipped with guns, you're likely to commit large mistakes like murder.
No immunity. Police offers already defend each other. Immunity makes just gives them a license to kill. Over time, they'll learn they can get away with pushing people around and hurting them under umbrella immunity + team protection. Legal immunity must stop.
Full medical insurance, no co-pay (Do all officers have this already?). If an officer has to fear he'll get ruined from an injury then it creates unnecessary pressure for him to shoot first.
A thousand people a year are killed by US cops. Canada, with 10% of the population, sees maybe 25 in a bad year.
They get paid a reasonable salary to be trained in a job that will provide them a nice income for the rest of their life. Having a lower salary while in training is not unheard of in any field, I am not sure why you believe those numbers are unacceptable.
Further Baltimore shows why a national $15 min wage is untenable, as all that does is make more jobs "minimum wage jobs" because taking the min wage from $8 to $15 does not magically mean all the jobs that paid $15 now pay $22, that is not how economics work
I mean, if it is, then so would calling out someone's comment as an ad-hominem, right.
"Fittingly, the most chilling scene in the movie doesn’t take place on a city street, or at a protest, or during a drug raid. It takes place in a conference room. It’s from a police training conference with Dave Grossman, one of the most prolific police trainers in the country. Grossman’s classes teach officers to be less hesitant to use lethal force, urge them to be willing to do it more quickly and teach them how to adopt the mentality of a warrior. ... In the class recorded for “Do Not Resist,” Grossman at one point tells his students that the sex they have after they kill another human being will be the best sex of their lives. The room chuckles. But he’s clearly serious. “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.”"
1. You do what you train to do.
2. What you look for in the world is what you will find.
3. Police work is risky, but not excessively so. https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf
Systems have both false positives and false negatives. A system with no false positives but many false negatives can be worse than a system with few false negatives and few false positives.
AL does not have an annual vehicle inspection, by the way.
There is no reason for them to be killing as many people as they do.
Yes, there is absolutely a reason. There is a reason for everything. If you want to fix it, you need to set your emotions aside and get to the root cause of that reason. If you continue to deny that there is a reason, you can expect the same tragic result.
Edit: I am not criticizing the statement or trying to put words in your mouth, I am just making sure I understood correctly. Because you may very well be suggesting a reality that most are unable to accept. I suspect if you say yes, you’ll be downvoted. But if I have that wrong, please do correct me.
The police in the U.S. seem to think like they are in the military , in their training and tactics. One big problem is the U.S. military is not exactly well regarded for is nuanced handling of conflict.
I once spoke to a marine who was involved in the invasion of Bagdad who describe their rules of engagement as "shoot any man woman or child holding a spade, a mobile phone, any kind of parcel or anything that might be a wire". These ROE are almost certainly a war crime, but the US is special so it gets away with it.
Now in the military you have a bunch of guys who actually have to deal with very dangerous, fluid situations that have a high likelihood of death. They mostly operate in areas where you have little room for anything other than binary control (obey or get shot). Whatever the details of the culture that was set down by the high ups before the Iraq invasion, I can somewhat get onboard. Casualties in a war zone are logistically hard, getting effective treatment often means at least some part of running them on a stretcher, potentially strapping them to the back of a vehicle and driving for an hour. If you aren't conservative in how you instruct people to respond, the effect can be highly non linear. One casualty take a 3 others out the fight, meaning casualties become more likely etc.
How police respond simply should not be modelled on the military. I entirely disagree with the idea that they are constantly primed to consider themselves one stop away from a body bag.
They almost certainly interact with more innocent members of the public than criminals. They are in largely stable situations. They may deal with bad people, but they do so in places that have good access to support, they will get timely care if something happens to them, and they almost certainly are well backed up if the situation gets out of hand.
My opinion is that the police basically suffer from a kind of dunning Kruger effect. Most would be woefully unprepared to handle an actual combat situation. You just have to compare the countless videos of about a dozen cops all unloading at the same car like the first to finish gets a prize.
Being a good solider is about maintaining discipline and composure under pressure. Most unit tactics involve some variant of your unit shooting over your head or off to your side whilst some of you push some kind of flanking manoeuvre. Our military even dropped the shoot from the hip on contact SOP because of the risk of friendly fire.
The police do not have anywhere near the same level of conditioning to operating under pressure from their training as any competent army gives it's soldiers. If they want to act like the military that's fine, but they should go through similar training before they do.
Here’s an Italian police car [0]. Here’s a Cobra HISS tank [1]. Here’s a local police department’s default cruiser [2].
When the police car looks more like a GI Joe tank than other nations, that’s an easy fix. Just like making kids were corny uniforms affects behavior, I think having police drive non-threatening cars will reduce violence.
[0] https://images.app.goo.gl/3uEds6hdzPwoiF6D7 [1] https://images.app.goo.gl/eJAaVdK5qNXEKah39 [2] https://www.ajc.com/rf/image_large/Pub/p8/AJC/2017/03/20/Ima...
Normally, getting to 0 false negatives requires a large number of false positives. E.g. if I wanted a 0 false negative pregnancy test, the only feasible way would be to tell some very large proportion (maybe all) test takers they are pregnant.
If it requires 20 innocent people to be killed in order to achieve say a goal of 1 police officer failing to identify a threat, who says that is the right balance?
You want to take emotions out of it, I say the life officer of a police officer is no more important than an innocent person, and given a police officer has a) control of which situations they enter and b) presumably accepts some level of risk from the job the choose and c) Killings by police are an externality that the police system is not incentivised to fix in a meaningful way , they should bear the burden of systemic risk from those interactions. Accepting no less than 1 innocent death for 1 police death seems like the rational baseline, and I think there are compelling points to suggest it should be less than one innocent death to police death.
People are right not to empathize.
Is the lack of interest in deescalating situations due to training or mentality or the wish to maintain authoritative appearances or some other factor I'm not thinking of?
I find point (a) interesting. You posit that they have control over which situations they enter. But one of the major criticisms I hear, after abuse of force, is that “the police didn’t do anything”. It would seem that these are incompatible. They can choose, but we expect them not to. We expect them to put themselves in harms way for us. As a society, we do value civilian lives the same as police lives. In fact, we value civilian lives far more. By and large, so do they. If they did not, they would not ever put themselves in a position where they might be killed. But, we expect them to do just that. If there is a heavily armed lunatic inside his house threatening to kill his wife and kids, we get out of dodge and tell the police to deal with it. I sure as hell am not going near that.
Just look at the outrage and protests every time an innocent man is killed. When is the last time anyone rioted, protested, or even remembered when an innocent police officer was killed? Never going to happen. By and large, we don’t give much of a shit about their lives. Most of us don’t even seem to consider them human. They know that, yet they do the job anyway.
Do you know how many police have been killed so far during the riots? One of them was just gunned down in cold blood in Oakland while guarding a federal building. He wasn’t doing any crowd control or engaged with protesters. A white van drove past, stopped, opened the sliding door, gunned him and his partner down, and drove off.
Another police chief was found dead outside of a looted pawn shop last night.
Nobody is ever going to protest this.
Store clerks are also targeted because they are often alone and in poorly secure places. They have no choice weather or not to approach dangerous people because those people are approaching them. They have little or no training for handling these situations. They have no back up. They likely receive no pension or disability when injured. If they do something unwise in a dangerous situation, they will almost certainly be fired with no union to protect them.
That is not completely true. For example, the narrative on thedonald.win wrt recent rioting is that most protesters are looters and that looters deserve being shot. They seem to be ok with militarized, strong-men police.
Also, "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" is used as a justification for violent policing. "Of course you're gonna get tazed/hit/shot at if you don't comply with orders/resist arrest/insult the officers."
Now, we can argue about how representative thedonald.win is to the entire population (I think a non-negligent part of the population subscribes to those views), but the point is, party affiliation does affect one's position wrt violent policing.
From the top down they simply dont care to follow. There is no punishment for them being violent against whomever they want.
I'm suggesting that optimizing for officer safety at all other costs may result in more overall death (/injury) than if more emphasis were put on civilian safety as well. I very much don't have any particular data to back that assertion up in this case, but often such things are true.
Hopefully that clarifies.
I can't parse what you're trying to say here, which prevented me from responding to the main body of your post, unfortunately.
> Nobody is ever going to protest this.
What would you suggest we protest? There are many dangerous professions. Law enforcement isn't even the most dangerous. They're not even in the top 10. Should we protest car accidents that lead to the death of professional truck drivers?
"Police" is an institution. It has norms and is governed by rules. Police officers are meant to protect and serve society. When they fail to do that, that should be protested. I don't see the value in protesting the fact that law enforcement careers carry risks. Yes, it's true that there are bad people in the world. That doesn't give law enforcement carte blanche to abuse their power, nor absolve individuals or institutions from protest of abuse of that power.
(There's also a relatively snarky response here: Yes, it's regrettable that these officers died in the line of duty. We should dismantle the US police institution in its entirety, which would solve both the concerns of BLM protestors and largely address your concern. While I don't share that view, I do know many people who do.)
These kinds.
I'm going to reiterate that it could have been overkill or poor judgment and that we don't have all of the information.
2) Per [1] the surface area of your torso is about double that of one leg (that is, anterior torso is 18%, an individual leg anterior is 9%), so it's far more likely to hit if you aim for the torso. Even if you aim for a torso and miss, you might hit a limb or head - it's a lot less likely to miss a limb and hit something else.
3) The research behind the Tueller anti-knife self defence drill found an attacker with a knife could cover 21 ft / 6.4 metres in about 1.5 seconds. To stop the attack, you have to be able to shoot them before they can close to melee range - you must aim for the largest possible target to have any hope of success.
I am not commenting on US police practices generally, but specifically that the idea you can shoot to wound is neither responsible nor practical.
What is your proposed solution?
The rifles used by everyday police are the same as those owned by tens of millions of civilians. These weapons are cosmetically similar to those used by the military, but they have the same functionality and fire the same cartridge as the Ruger Mini-14.[1] They are semi-automatic. Every "bang!" requires a pull of the trigger. The reasons police have these weapons are because pistols are less accurate, have shorter range, and are unable to penetrate body armor. These rifles are usually locked in the back of the vehicle and only brought out for standoff situations, or if the cop has retreated due to being outgunned. Such occasions are rare, but when they happen, those rifles are worth their weight in gold (as are the fire extinguishers and medical kits in practically all police cars).
Moreover, police have always used the latest weaponry. A century ago, they were equipped with the Thompson submachine gun[2] and the Browning Automatic Rifle[3] (both of which are fully automatic weapons).
I agree that police have gotten more militarized over time, and I would love to roll that back, but it's also true that many of those arguing in this thread are either misled or disingenuous. We're much more likely to convince others if we make sure our arguments and our facts are unimpeachable.
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ruger_Mini-14.jpg
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thompsonad1sm.jpg
3. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Firearms_practice,_1...
Do you have a link to cite though? I haven't yet read a statement from the National Guard about it and some brief searching on Google brings up a lot of useless noise.
Your point is valid, but reading "there is no reason" literally misses the intended meaning, which is "this is unacceptable and cannot stand".
Just because you don't like the particular use case doesn't detract from the fact it is generally not desirable to be throwing around your military at your own people at the drop of a hat.
Part of the duty of a police officer is to put themselves in higher-danger situations than other citizens in order to protect and serve the public, up to and including taking physical harm or death (in fact half of police fatalities every year are in car accidents on duty).
If you train to be a hair trigger, protect-yourself-at-all-costs cop, that's how you will behave.
For what it’s worth, black men kill more cops than cops kill unarmed black men.
It’s tragic, but many orders of magnitude away from your claim.
It’s not the quantity that makes it horrible, tragic, and infuriating. It is all those things because it’s evidence of a larger systemic issue which includes lots of other awful things that fall short of homocide; and it’s largely unnecessary.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2017/nonhispanic-b...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
Regarding your second claim, I can't find those numbers. The closest thing I can find is this newsweek piece [2] with data from 2013 and 2014. That suggests most people who kill police are white. But it also includes prison guards as police.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019-08-15/police-shoo...
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/who-kills-police-officers-315701
You're right the quantity isn't specifically important but it does illustrate that there is a problem. Even if it is not the #1 cause of death it is disproportionately higher.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...
> The US Department of Defense 1033 program makes excess military equipment, including weapons and vehicles, available to local LEAs. The variation in the amount of transferred equipment allows us to probe the relationship between military transfers and police violence. ... >
I moved to Europe three years ago. Here, police outfits are designed to be seen in the dark, so they're day glo and neutral. In the US, police officers are terrifying creatures.
So why is the United States police unique amongst all other developed countries for its kill rate then?
> Part of the training also drills in the fact that an untrained opponent with a sharp object like a knife is at a strategic advantage versus someone with a holstered firearm if they are closer than 21 feet away.
And yet I've seen police officers here in Europe deal with people with knives without ever pulling a gun. Why can we do this and you can't?
The idea that a man with a knife 20 feet away from a man with a gun has the advantage! - it just seems like a justification for the incompetent policing that the US is notorious for all over the world.
Exactly, this means they are training police in MILITARY tactics, the entire point of this conversation was that the police need to be DEMILITARIZED, having them trained by the IDF is exact what we SHOULD NOT be doing
When I lived in the United States, on the very rare occasion that a police officer was killed, our community would memorialize him.
But the fact is that police officers kill others at at least _twenty times_ the rate that police officers get killed by non-police officers.
More, if someone kills a police officer, they are almost always caught, and then gets decades in jail. When a police officer kills someone else, nothing happens to them, even when the police officer.
I lived for thirty years in the United States, and I saw the most terrible behavior from police officers - not just brutality, but gross incompetence and corruption (as in "bundles of cash being handed to cops").
Now I live in Europe, and police here are competent and friendly (and also very effective at dealing with violent drunks, I actually laughed to see someone just lifted up from behind by two cops struggling away in midair, hurting no one, not even himself). It's like night and day.
> Another police chief was found dead outside of a looted pawn shop last night.
I wasn't able to find even _one_ police chief who was found dead.
I did find a story about a retired police captain who was found dead, but no one else.
So at least some truck drivers will ignore a blowout, particularly if it's in the last couple of hours of a trip.
Once I pulled out a bunch of cash in a bar and exactly one bill, a $5, glowed brightly under the black light in the bar. I'd already handed it to the bar owner and I said, "Oh, that one must be a fake, I'll take it back" and he said, "No, it's fine." I was surprised!
(Under my fingers too, it was an obvious fake, but I didn't react in time.)
You might ask yourself why you feel the need to make things up?
It's mostly not the $300K year MDs just like it's mostly not the $300K police captains. That's "the 1%" (figuratively).
The front lines for riots are the $35K - $85K cops and the front lines for COVID are the $35K - $85K year nurses.
I would think it would change the TYPE of person interested in such a job. I wouldn't be interested in a job where I'm just beating people up but I would be interested in a job helping people.
This is what it looks like even when the officer knows it is coming: https://youtu.be/2h0-q_IJbxE
"Military grade weapons", in this context means light arms (rifles, pistols, etc.) similar in quality, function and performance to those commonly used by soldiers in the military.
In most states in the U.S. you can buy rifles similar to those used in the military. You can also buy kits to upgrade weapons from semi automatic to fully automatic and make all sorts of other enhancements to build up a nice little arsenal if that's your thing. I'm not a gun guy, but I have a number of friends who are, and frankly it's surprising what types of armaments are available to private citizens in the United States, even in states with supposedly restrictive gun laws.
> And yet I've seen police officers here in Europe deal with people with knives without ever pulling a gun. Why can we do this and you can't?
"Combat experts" must hate these European police, not abiding by their theories.
Yes. What is and what is not a war crime is determined by the ICC in the Hague. The US does not recognize the authority of the ICC.
Per definition, no US soldier can literally ever commit a war crime.
So in that respect, they are not a whole lot different from US police. They can commit atrocities and get away with it.
It's like as if Germany decided to just not show up at Nuremberg.
And there's so much more wrong than just the rape thing. Just google "amnesty us prison" if you need more examples.
We're talking about them paying for military surplus like vehicles, machineguns and other items that 95% of departments don't need.
If the DoD weren't spreading surplus Army gear out like candy to babies who don't know how to use it, there would be a lot fewer opportunities for the not so stable elements of police departments to escalate otherwise normal situations just so they can play with big boy toys/get that "underfire" adrenaline hit again/get that power trip high that they craved from high school/soothe that sociopathic itch to dominate others.
We can put our voices together and force the DoD to stop this bullshit surplus program and acjnowledge that they built and bought too much and get egg on their faces as they destroy old gear and vehicles.
Starts at home.
When local departments get their acquisitions tightened down, then we start pressuring governors to turn the state police back into officers instead of National Guard reserve.
Starts at home.
