Personally, I’m not convinced cops need to go for a 100% apprehension rate all the time no matter what with 100% control of every situation.
Mostly because of the rate at which crimes happen without a cop around and then go unresolved.
The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.
Even countries with less violent police corps often have episodes like this.
To keep it out of political rallies, just think of police vs hooligans in Europe.
For example the Rayshard brooks shooting. Why was a gun needed to wake a man sleeping in a car. Why are guns needed to hand out speeding tickets.
I get that guns are needed if a bank is being robbed. But this is glorified customer service work. Imagine your car breaks down and the AAA guy who came to fix it had a gun. Like y tho?
Perhaps it's because at least some of the people they stop, for speeding or other possible offences, won't take kindly to being stopped and in many parts of the USA, those in the vehicle may be permitted to carry guns of their own...
Glorified customer service work? Far from it
Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country"
To what extent do these, not uncommon - even here, sets of beliefs contribute to the problems of violence in policing? Not something that seems to me like a good idea to pretend does not exist or is minor or fringe.
Where are you going to get the humans who are able, wanting and willing to live up those higher standards is my question for you.
Last I checked, anyone can decide at any moment to be completely broke, a drug addict, a criminal, an alcoholic, a piece of shit, have an unlimited number of children and everyone else has to support them for some reason.
What kind of standard of conduct is that?
You won't ever get people to conduct themselves properly if ignore evolution and pretend you can magically educate people into not being animals. Americans don't even bother with trying to live up to the education myth, given how much they pay school teachers. They think they can just import people with higher standards of conduct when they have to and outsource the rest. It's more profitable this way you see, to ignore reality, fund bogus economics, manufacture consent and have this planet go to shit. It's more profitable this quarter you see.
Similar logic would apply to a position for a crane operator or a pilot. If an airline had a pattern of pilot errors, and their excuse was “if we required all our pilots to have adequate pilot training and meet stringent skill requirements, it would be very difficult to hire pilots,” would you accept that?
Isn't the issue with laws that those breaking them don't usually care about laws? I'm sure you have laws in place against murder, and murder still happens. "But there's a law against burglary, why would you want additional protection and have a strong door" isn't a good argument.
There are good arguments (and the whole issue is a good gun control argument in general), but that really isn't one.
> If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever.
Let's say we decide to pay police officers 1 million/year and really raise their standards. Great! We did it!
Why don't we just do that across the board? The answer is - we have a limited number of highly capable people.
I see the shortage of highly capable people as a problem. My previous post was a way of highlighting that. One would have to think big picture to understand the point I was making.
Regarding leaving positions unfilled - I'm not sure you've thought this through. Imagine we have a shortage of doctors and your appendix burst. Would you rather a medical student try and save your life at say, an estimated 50% success rate, or simply die?
Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Haiti, and Malaysia or Mexico, Madagascar, El Salvador, and Rwanda, depending on whether you take the CIA's numbers or the World Bank's. If you look at the list, you'll see that the European countries are closer together and in a different area of the list, the US isn't in their group.
Wouldn't that be a better indicator for "similar countries" than average internet speed or NATO membership status?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
But yeah, that's pretty radical what you're saying too. Maybe it's fair that you should only compare the richest nation on earth with much poorer developing nations with a short track record of democracy. Not sure I'd agree.
Why? Income inequality is correlated with crime rate, why wouldn't you use that to find comparable countries? Seems useful to me, similarly to comparing diabetes rates in countries with similar levels of obesity, not based on average hair color or amount of trees per square mile.
> the richest nation on earth
You'll need to define what "richest" means, I guess. The highest GDP? Largest military spending? Does that mean a lot to somebody that is poor in the US? Would that person possibly be better off in a European country with public health insurance, a vast social safety net, high welfare etc, even though it's not "the richest country on earth" by your standards?
Where I live, we drive cars, but we don’t fight the overseas oil wars. We’ve outsourced all that brutality to the US. That lets us smugly reap the benefits and point fingers at Americans for the violent, backwards, gun-toting culture.
I mean the richest nation on earth bar none. The amount of wealth in the nation. Literally that. The USA cannot plead poverty as an excuse for why anything is worse there than any other nation. Do you see it now?
So what though? Do European countries like the UK (that are usually with the US when it's time to bomb somebody in the Middle East) outsource their domestic violence?
Really, you need to provide some evidence for "we have less crime, less murders, less police violence because the US has more". "The US has more income inequality because it has to fight wars for the European countries" doesn't follow either, so please don't.
I don't think US-citizens by and large want that change bad enough to accept restrictions upon their freedoms and an end to low taxes, European-level wealth redistribution does not seem to be popular in the US. I suppose they'd like the result without doing it. Unfortunately that's like wanting to be great at tennis without wanting to put in the training: understandable, but not happening.
I have no doubt that American can-do and talent will get it done.
None.
Just decide what it is, what the scoreboard looks like and get it done as Americans the American way.
Your belief is (?) that the US aggregate violence/whatever is in no meaningful way confounded with the levels you measure in (say) EU nations: any confounding is small enough to make no difference?
We have a population of 200 (nations) of very diverse size and age, all related by historic and present competition and cooperation. Is there any fair shot at comparing apples to apples?
What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
But that only works for super powers? Why is there no trend visible for countries like Switzerland who are traditionally neutral and never fight wars with neighboring countries like France who or Germany who have a larger active military, do engage in NATO wars etc? Why aren't the Chinese shooting each other on a similar scale? Why weren't the Germans during the early 20th century when they were very militaristic? Why were the US already at similar levels in the first half of the 20th century, before becoming a global super power that others may have "outsourced" their wars to?
> What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
Minimum requirements: has some sort of rule that allows predictions that can be falsified other than "it's only true in this super specific narrow case of the USA in last 5 decades of human history, but not in any other place or during any other time".
It feels like looking for super complicated reasons that require American Exceptionalism (as in "does not apply to any other country") to explain something that is explained by well-studied phenomena that do not require US citizens to function fundamentally different than other humans in other places or other times.
In fact, you cant really call someone a criminal until they've been convicted of a crime - cue the video of the cops being called by the black store owner, punching him in the face and breaking his jaw while the white thief leaves.
However, it is worth pointing out that there are around 750,000 police officers in the US. It is hard to deny that finding and or training 750,000 highly capable people is a very difficult problem.
A theory where every nation is a data point can’t get you anywhere. All the nations interact meaning we should reason about the system as a whole.
I say something about a nation, you expect me to back it up with other nations. But there are very few data points, and they are interconnected, and the problem has a huge number of dimensions.
It’s like I claim opposable thumbs are good for tool making and you ask me to show five other body parts where that applies.
Sure, but there's little/nothing that suggests the effect you speculate about, it seems to have no parallel in history although empires have existed before, there are counter examples ... so it seems not too likely that that is the cause. Of course, no two days are the same, no two countries are the same and no two countries are even the same with regard to their not-same-ness on two different days, but countries and cultures move slow enough, and countries and humans are similar enough that we'd see such obvious and large patterns, I believe.
On the other hand, we have other explanations that have supporting evidence, apply to multiple situations etc, so they seem more likely. When you present a new theory, claim that it cannot be falsified because no two countries are exactly the same (and therefore no relationships between countries can be the same), I think you should offer some evidence to support that theory instead of asking others to just accept it.
Sure, there are also some people who violate gun laws. But those people could be a threat to everyone, not just cops, yet surely we wouldn’t justify everyone to preemptively have their guns drawn in all human interactions.
Not necessarily drawn, but isn't that pretty much the reason you have public carry laws in the first place? Surely even the worst of cars does provide sufficient protection against roaming coyotes and mountain lions. The only predator left to fear is another human.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/outrage-vide...
It is extremely hard to react with anything but EXTREME vitriol to comments like yours - police are using excessive force deliberately, and then arresting people with no cause who post videos of their crimes.
I’m not asking you to accept anything: I don’t evangelize. In particular I have no theory that generalizes over nations. It seems very limiting. Like ignoring a mechanism I see work in my apartment because it doesn’t hold true for buildings writ large.
Edit: Probably shouldn’t have written “the superpower” posts ago because that makes it sound like a general claim.
This is a technical nicety not available to a policeman in a real situation. If someone points a gun at them, that someone is a criminal, even if they are "technically" not.
Without more context, I'm guessing their parents took them to a protest and acted illegally. If so, I think that's rather poor parenting.
There doesn't seem to be a link to the full video (or any video), so take that with a grain of salt.
There has to be a limit to 'higher standards' humans can live up to, I hope we can agree on that. If you agree, you can't deny that we can't have higher standards indefinitely.
We can have higher standards a little bit and we can fake achieving higher standards a lot by moving highly capable people from one set of jobs to another (from jobs X, Y, Z to police officer by paying them 1 million/year) and doing a marketing campaign that convinces the ignorant masses that real progress has been made.
My previous posts were pointing out that wanting higher standards and not having any standards for the people who create and raise new humans, are incompatible and have to be reconciled if you want to actually have higher standards, not fake higher standards via re-distribution of highly capable people.