The equipment issue isn't going to solve anything, this is just lip service to the real problem. Police Unions have effectively created a system by which officers are nearly immune from prosecution and even if successfully prosecuted their record cannot travel with them in many cases.
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.
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.)
Having gone through police training in another life, you are absolutely correct. I think it's deeper than just what you wear, it's the attitude of the higher ups and overall culture.
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.
Something I've noticed in a lot of police encounter videos: there is no attempt at de-escalating the situation. The shooting of Daniel Shaver is a prime example of that: a benign situation made deadly by high strung officers shouting and giving conflicting orders to a stressed, innebriated man. I get that they shot because it sorta looked like Shaver may have been reaching for a gun while he was stumbling, but that whole situation could have been avoided with some simple deescalation techniques.
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?
Mentality. I have family members in LE and they have plenty of teaching material on how to properly descalate. The FBI has volumes on how to do this and they provide it to all law enforcement agencies.
From the top down they simply dont care to follow. There is no punishment for them being violent against whomever they want.
This is important to introduce into the discussion. I have felt that in the vast majority of controversial police shootings, especially in the mistaken identity cases, they were likely the result of a hair-trigger reflex and being on high alert, with your conditioning telling you that if an adversary either gets the jump on you or even gets into a strategically advantageous position, today is the day that you are going home in a body bag.
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.
"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.
Cops are not soldiers. They are not fighting a war. Look to any other western nation. America may be a little more violent, a little less stable, but the cop-citizen relationship isn't fundamentally different than in any number of other nations. There is no need for US cops to take that attitude. There is no reason for them to be killing as many people as they do.
A thousand people a year are killed by US cops. Canada, with 10% of the population, sees maybe 25 in a bad year.
Your perspective is skewed, and the example is arguably irrelevant. It’s not difficult to find examples where the situation is far worse than the US.
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.
Homicide is the leading cause of death among non-Hispanic black males under 44 (taken in total, it’s not) [0]. In the same year as the CDC statistics above, 223 black men were killed by police [1].
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.
Thanks, I misread the source and didn't think about it.
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.
Apologies, I misread [1] and didn't apply the sniff test. It's the sixth leading cause of death, not the first. And it's 2.5x the rate of whites.
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.
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.
The knife vs gun scenario is not disputed. The police didn’t make that up. It’s broadly accepted by combat experts. Self defense classes, firearms classes, and knife combat classes will tell you the same thing, and it’s easy to demonstrate.
Being a cop is exceedingly safer than many professions where we don't bend the standard of protecting human life like we do for cops. About the same amount of lumberjacks die in the US during work as police. About the same number of toddlers kill themselves with guns every year as police die in the line of duty.
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.
> It is not acceptable to have a non-zero casualty rate
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.
If a false positive in threat identification means killing an innocent person, and a false negative means getting killed because you failed to identify and mitigate a threat, it sounds like you are saying that we must accept that an innocent person will be treated like a threat some percentage of the time in order for a police officer to have any hope of surviving the job. Is that accurate?
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 point is that the two are coupled. It is not clear why 0 false negatives is the aim. In almost all hard problems, you cannot have 0 false positives and 0 false negatives.
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.
I want to disengage from the false positives/negatives discussion, it’s too abstract to be relevant, and demonstrably false anyway. There exists a system with 0% false positives.
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.
> 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.
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.)
> When is the last time anyone rioted, protested, or even remembered when an innocent police officer was killed?
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.
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.
anecdotally, my family is full of vets and no one cares where they sit at any table, in any room. not sure that is very true, unless they were active combat and might have some PTSD.
I think this is touching on a key point about militarization of the police. I'm a non US veteran who went to Afghanistan.
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.
Because that’s action movie nonsense. The issue is that they pull out their guns too easily, not the place they aim them. Guns are not a tool for disarming or wounding. For one thing, a leg shot can easily kill. Second, it’s extremely difficult to make that shot with a pistol, even for trained police. Third, if someone has a weapon and they are about to kill someone (which is the only time police should be pulling out their guns), a leg shot might not stop them quickly enough. And disarming someone with a bullet is absurd except in very rare stand-off situations where the person is sitting still, and a sniper has had time to get set up.
1) A firearm with live ammunition is explicitly a lethal weapon. You must not fire one at something you don't intend to kill, even if you "only" end up maiming the target. There's also a reasonable chance you'll kill someone if you shoot a limb, e.g. if you hit an artery. Guns are not to be trifled with.
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.
I agree from a public relations standpoint too. All the new cruisers in my city are black Chargers/Challengers with battering ram front bumpers and they look way too intense for the job.
I'm also scared irreparable damage had been done to the police brand such that way fewer "good" people will want to sign up.
The battering ram is useful even for peaceful purposes. It’s great for pushing crashed cars to the side of the road and is a good place to hook a tow strap. I’m from a rural part of the country and they have come in handy multiple times.
Paint the rams pink. There’s no need to make them look like Tie Fighters.
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.
>> The police need to push cars to the side of the road on, I'd venture, a daily basis.
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.
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.
This is going to be very dependent on location. I've commuted on various 20-40 mile stretches of highway for the past decade and it's rare to see debris for more than a day or two before someone cleans it up. And I've seen a car "engulfed in flames" exactly one time in my entire adult life.
I've seen cars engulfed in flames I'd say a dozen or more times (alas, the first time I drove into Houston) and it would be more, except I've only lived in large cities 15 out of my 43 years.
Weirdly, growing up in Texas and living in Austin for 20 years, I never saw a burning car until I moved to Alabama. I've seen several as well as many of the resulting pavement scorches.
AL does not have an annual vehicle inspection, by the way.
They don't ignore them. They are mashing that skinny pedal to get that truck somewhere they can get a new tire on the double before DOT sees it and puts them in an expensive and time consuming hole it may take weeks to dig out of depending on who they work for and the details of their operation. The incentive structure truckers work under isn't ideal to say the least.
If a truck driver stops to deal with a blown-out tire, they lose money. Delivery windows are incredibly short - there are bonuses for on-time deliver, and penalties for failure.
So at least some truck drivers will ignore a blowout, particularly if it's in the last couple of hours of a trip.
Literally any accident where stopped traffic can be more dangerous than slow-moving traffic (such as any highway).
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 googled it; sure enough, can't find UK police vehicles with one. Perhaps it's a policy decision where clearing a road is left to tow trucks, which would take longer to arrive. Obviously there's separate liability there in allowing the police to do the "pushing". And perhaps, in a country of more compact dimensions, the added 1+ft in vehicle length is considered to be not worth the benefit.
Generally yeah, tow trucks or specialist wreckage recovery vehicles do this here (UK), however, in an emergency, it's not uncommon for fire trucks to ram things out of the way too.
When a car breaks down or gets into an accident, gently pushing it to the side lets traffic flow without causing damage to the motorist's car or police cruiser.
Car chases? If, when they stop the car, it’s in the middle of the road, you can’t just leave it there until a tow truck comes; that’d block traffic for longer. So, push it to the side.
I had a tire blowout in the fast lane of 101. The CHP ran a break and the policeman pushed my car to the slow where there was room for me to change my tire.
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.
> 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.
That's an interesting article but buried near the end it looks like an actual study found that it wasn't all that effective in the end:
> 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...
And those aren't even the NYPD's Hercules unit.[1] Steel helmets and an assault rifle. Hercules is purely for intimidation. They mostly stand around and look impressive. They're not SWAT; that's a different unit.
It's be great if the police in the US had a more consistent uniform. If I go from one town to another in the US the police could look completely different. How are you supposed to be able to tell a police officer from a private security guard there?
Private security guards can't use the word police on their uniforms. I looked it up a while ago (I asked the exact same question you did) - IIRC the rule is that you are only allowed to use it if you aren't issuing any orders and there isn't an unrelated reason for people to think you are an official officer. If you see the word police they are either someone pretending to be an officer (and must follow the rule I just wrote) or a real police officer.
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 question whether I’m being sarcastic is unfortunate. Please assume good faith.
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.
I agree, and especially the lack of consistency in vehicle dressing is annoying as hell. I was driving down the high way and this so-and-so behind me was right up my tail, and I didn’t even realize it was a cop before they turned on the party lights to signal me to move out of the way.
This is a good point. The cars are a signal too. My town upgraded from the usual crown vics to souped up Ford SUVs that look ready to plow down a house. It seems to have brought with it some extra police swagger and aggression.
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.
Changing the inventory will reduce the appeal of police work for psycho assholes who fantasize about shooting protesters. Special weapons and vehicles should be reserved for centralized, specialized police forces who are called out when needed, if ever. Most cops should be issued a radio and a bicycle, so you attract people who want to look like [1] instead of [2].
How do you engender an idea of a UK/Canada-type cop in a country where there are more guns than people? I assume cops here are trained to see all citizens as armed threats, which systematically produces cops who are always on edge and ready to kill.
The whole thing feels like a deeper problem than just training cops to be nicer.
The incident that has sparked the current stretch of American decline involved police using force other than firearms against an unarmed man. It's clear that sending police to respond with violence to an incidence of passing counterfeit currency was perhaps not the appropriate response. Violence in American society has various structural root causes. It's not as simple as saying there are a lot of guns. Inequality, lack of opportunity, poor education, bleak built environment, and of course racism and the echoes of slavery are all aspects of the problem. Police violence can't solve any of them.
Hear, hear. It's particularly ridiculous since some large portion of the people who end up with a counterfeit bill have no idea that it's fake...
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.)
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.
Not enough people acknowledge this. The U.S. is a heavily armed country. It is very easy to (legally) buy military grade weapons in most states. Knowing that you could potentially get your head blown off anytime you pull someone over is going to lead to a very different psychology than you might see in a country like South Korea or Germany where very few people, if any, are armed. You can't just say, "Oh look how nice the police are in <Insert random western European country here>. Let's just do what they do".
This a much more complex issue than the media or either political party is willing to acknowledge.
The number of actual cops shot in the US is extremely low. Logging is five times as dangerous as police work and the most dangerous part of being a cop is the amount of driving they do.
Even miscellaneous agricultural work is more dangerous and they make 24k/year.
I'd say that any number over 0 is not Ok. That would be like saying only a very small percentage of the population gets killed by cops. Again, anything over 0 == Not Ok. And just because you can cherry pick a dangerous job that happens to be more dangerous than being a cop doesn't make being a cop any less dangerous.
If you want to save lives, then armed cops are killing far more people than cops are being killed every year. So, removing guns from a cops normal uniform would very much save lives.
> It is very easy to (legally) buy military grade weapons in most states.
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.
I feel like this response is made in bad faith, since the meaning of "military grade" is fairly self-evident and straightforward, if somewhat imprecise. But in case this comment was made in good faith, perhaps by a non-native English speaker, here goes.
"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.
Are you just assuming this, or are there numbers on how "nice like EU country" police actually get their heads blown off in larger numbers than the "racist murderer" police?
Perhaps it is you who need to look up the statistics of those cities. Only two police officers have been killed in Minneapolis in the last 20 years, out of more than 600 homicides in that city.
That really depends on where you're a cop. Most towns in the U.S. are very safe, so yes, in aggregate being a cop in the U.S. is very safe. But no one experiences the aggregate, and there are some incredibly dangerous places in the U.S. that you don't see anything similar to in other developed countries. Sure, being a cop in Scarsdale, NY is a pretty safe bet. Being a beat cop in Camden, NJ, not so much.
Really? The site that tracks police killed in the line of duty lists 1975 as the last time a Camden police officer died.
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.
Just because you don't die, doesn't mean your job is safe. Most of the time, getting shot, stabbed, punched in the face, or hit by a car is not lethal. That doesn't make it ok or mean that you're safe. I'm pretty sure that if every time you went into the office, there was a good chance that someone would try to strike you, you'd quickly conclude that your workplace wasn't very safe.
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.
The No True Scotsman of police getting shot. If you don’t provide statistics of these supposedly common incidents you have no argument, just some vague hand waving that it ‘doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen’.
I don't see that your argument is any more fair than the one you are replying to.
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.
I have no strong position in this argument, but, robberies and other armed crimes are regularly paired with a murder in order to get rid of the witness.
How do you think citizens feel? I consider anyone and everyone potentially armed and potentially a threat, yet I'm not blowing people away in the streets. Sounds like police need to change their tactics. Seems like society needs to change their expectations on what police are doing on a day to day basis.
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.
Of course your penalties are too harsh. Not just the lengths either. Your prisons are simply awful places. Prison rape is so common it has its own trope. (and people joke about it, disgustingly)
And there's so much more wrong than just the rape thing. Just google "amnesty us prison" if you need more examples.
If you show up for riot duty wearing [1], you're likely to walk away with injuries. If this goes through, make sure to track police injuries during riots if you want to be forthcoming. Violent protesters and instigators will throw things no matter whether you're in [1] or [2].
Bike squads on regular duty almost always look like [1] anyway. [2] might be a SWAT picture.
This is legitimately the argument I hear from my friends who are fans of open carry. Now, it's with AR's and AK's, instead of grenades, but that exact line is what they use. I find the fear simply fascinating and confusing.
Grocery stores are public places, homes are not. Homes can be located in gang territory. Police ambushes do happen. I'm not saying they get it right 100% of the time, but serving warrants and bike patrol have way different risks.
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.
>Obviously it's no one's fault. We should just accept things the way they are and change nothing.
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.
That would be (partially) SWAT's fault. I don't expect police officers (SWAT or not) to be automatons who blindly follow orders. They need to stand behind their actions. They shouldn't serve a warrant like that unless they believe it to be a high-risk situation.
Quoting your source: "Dressed in riot gear, deputies from the Alameda County Sheriff's Office arrived at the house on Magnolia Street around 5:30 a.m." That confirms what jeffbee said. (Except the "old" part. If 34 is old, I'm in trouble.)
Sure they can. jeffbee was still correct. And no matter what other hats they might wear, it's inappropriate to show up like this when there's no reason to anticipate any violence.
We can't end this debate without the warrant. You can acknowledge that you don't have that information and there's a chance it was justified before they rolled up if any of the people were known to be affiliated with dangerous people. If you know of a way to figure out if every situation is going to be dangerous before it happens, definitely put that forward. I'll acknowledge that it could have been some bored SWAT guys just looking to show off and it was completely unnecessary show of force and waste of taxpayer money.
Justified? No. I agree there's a chance—a very very slim one—that they had information that would make me think their show of force was reasonable. But AFAIK, they didn't supply it. They didn't justify their actions to the general public or to any oversight agency, either ahead of time (understandable) or after the fact (less so), and nothing compels them to do so. They can execute the warrants as they see fit, using basically whatever ex-military hardware they like, without explaining themselves to anyone.
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?
I'm trying to figure out what kind of warrant you're imagining that would justify bringing a full SWAT team to evict squatters who were known protesters in an ongoing legal dispute with the property owner, not some gang kids.
You'll get things thrown at you regardless of your intent or response. The anonymous violent protestors among the crowd don't likely know the cops personally, they're just there to inflict damage when they decide to throw something. You can choose to wear appropriate gear for what you're doing and prevent some damage, or eat a glass bottle to the face, arms, or legs (cops can do bike patrol AND riot control and use different gear -- there's no change in gear issuance needed). Wearing bike squad gear to a riot won't stop those assholes from doing harm. They might even prioritize you for a chance to see blood.
> Most cops should be issued a radio and a bicycle, so you attract people who want to look like [1] instead of [2].
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.
That just strikes me as a disingenuous argument. No one can argue that drinking and driving is bad. But I would argue that drinking and driving is not correlated to SWAT teams being kitted out like they're on the ground in Afghanistan in 2004, and regular street police having access to military weaponry.
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.
"X isn't going to solve anything." "X will help with..."
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.
This is a somewhat small distinction, but I think an extremely important one: prosecutors - not police unions - are responsible for the lack of charges and indictments against police[0]. And even if an indictment is returned, qualified immunity[1] reduces the chances of conviction.
Qualified immunity only applies in civil cases. The reason criminal charges are rarely brought in police abuse cases is because of the massive conflict of interest in having the police investigate themselves and be prosecuted by an AG who is essentially a close work colleague.
Police unions contribute to political campaigns, make endorsements and turn out the vote for "anti-crime" candidates across the board, from President down to local DA. They certainly influence the likelihood of aggressive, or even competent, prosecution of cops who break the law.
Yes, you're right that this won't achieve real change. I truly like the idea of civilian oversight boards.
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.
We agree on violent policing! Seriously, just look at where these cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas work. Almost all working for mayors with D besides their names. The level of police aggression isn’t palpably different whether you’re in Orlando or Minneapolis, and those two cities have vastly different politics.
> I think everyone agrees they don't like violent policing
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.
True, everybody agrees is an oxymoron. What I mean to say is most people agree they don't like violent policing. I think that's probably true for some value of most.
Multiple choice voting. (I.e. you give 1 point to all candidates you like, the ones with most amount of points wins. Very simple to understand system with no spoiler effect.) It will fix the issue within one set of elections and I don't even think it would require any changes to the constitution.
The constitution is completely silent on voting methodology. States are free to choose whatever they wish so long as it is representative, with the exception of federal Senators (and maybe representatives), I believe.
> The equipment issue isn't going to solve anything
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
> 2) If not 1) then make it illegal for the unions to exist with regards to any public servant who is armed
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.
The first sentence of your post is simply not true. Demilitarization does help to reduce police violence [0]. Your points about union contracts and civilian oversight are valid and important to point out though.
> 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.
...
>
Unions have effectively created a system by which officers are nearly immune from prosecution and even if successfully prosecuted their record cannot travel with them in many cases.
I guess it’s time for us to acknowledge that unions are not always a net benefit.
This is true. Japanese policeman look like street crossing guards. I've had a few run-ins with police that were pleasant and helpful, that would have otherwise been minor infractions.
I agree with what you said except for this
"The equipment issue isn't going to solve anything".
Removing equipment will greatly help the situation as will the other points you made.
A common response to the idea of "police reform" is that it will make it harder/more expensive/etc to hire police, which we all agree we need.
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.
It's interesting trolling that side of the youtube algorithm. It's abundantly clear that we've shifted from cops just being a mix of individuals who want to help and a substantial number of not-so-ex-high-school-bullies to full on military LARPers.
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.
Is there any evidence this is true? The vast majority of cops will never aim their weapons at another person or use military gear beyond training. Is the slim chance of getting to use a humvee once in your career really compelling?
A lot of people end up in law school because of courtroom dramas, even though the vast majority of attorneys don't spend much time at all in a courtroom...
I went to a well-regarded law school and happen to have witnessed first hand both how many students were surprised that they wouldn't end up seeing the inside of a courtroom in their careers, and how many students shifted their goals from wanting to be a prosecutor or a civil litigator to wanting to do one of the hundreds of other things attorneys do on a daily basis.
Traditionally that was the case, however there's been an increase in incidents where they have been responding with far more gear and weapons than could possibly be reasonable. In short, they're actively looking for excuses to play dress-up and it's getting worse.
There was a big push for more community policing and less "tacticool" policing the last time these protests happened. That seemed to have petered out after a few years.
I don't think that's what causes doctors to be ethical (most of the time). Pros of being a doctor: high pay, you get to help people. People who don't want to help other people will not become doctors.
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.)
I had a friend in college who dropped out and attended a police academy program. After finishing the program and going on a lot of ride-alongs with local police, he decided not to become a cop because the culture he encountered was so toxic it turned him off to the entire idea. He was a good guy, smart, not an angry bone in his body. Maybe if we make policing a desirable career instead on extension program for high school bullies, we could attract better people to the job.
Increasing the cost of a single cop isn't the same as increasing the cost of a police force.
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.
>>This is before we get into whether we really even want "those people"
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
>>Israelis excel in the defense industry and their mandatory military service
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
I agree that both professions have the same sort of "service in a time of crisis" mythology surrounding them but how does the fact that the norm for the medical profession is high pay where as the norm for police is slightly above minimum wage starting out with a shot as average pay after several years of service affect those myths?
I believe there was a thread here previously on this topic. It varies across jurisdictions but most police officers are paid better than other salaried workers[1], which is significantly above the minimum wage[2].
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.
In Baltimore, the minimum wage is $15 an hour (31k / yr) and the starting salary for a police trainee is advertised to be around 35k.
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 San Jose cop that caught controversy was found by public records to be getting paid over 200k a year: "According to Transparent California, a salary database of public employees, Yuen has worked for SJPD since at least 2014 and made about $153,000 in regular pay and overtime in 2019 as part of a total $226,000 compensation package." You can also look at Seattle police salaries (https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/databases/article2586102... it is normal for police to be getting paid 150k+.
I was between jobs this time last year, and started rooting around in my local town's salary publications. In the top 50 salaries for my mid-size MA town, about 50% were police (starting at places 2, 3, 4 and then like 8?), with the average salary (including overtime) at about 175k$.
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.
I think it's worth discussing as I also had slight misgivings about the perceived disparity you mention.
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.
the norm for police is slightly above minimum wage starting out
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.
As a comparison, the Portland, Oregon police bureau starts officers at 66,934 as an entry wage, and it starts at 80K if you are moving over from some other law enforcement agency.
No where, I said 'slightly above starting out'. For example in Baltimore where they have a $15 minimum wage (~31k /yr) the advertised starting salary for a police officer is something like $35-38k while they are in training which as far as I can tell lasts for 6-12 months that gets bumped up to ~$53k and after several years you can take some kind of test to become a supervisor where you make up to low six figures. A college degree is helpful but not strictly required.
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.
So are you advocating we charge police officers $100-300K for their training as well?
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
You make good point. From what I read here apart from medical professional or software developers, forget increment, no one really deserves the pay they are getting now.
> 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.
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.
I'm pretty sure that the medical professionals will not be happy if you made this the new normal, so I'm not sure it's wise to bring this out as an argument for "so it should be okay for the police to do this normally".
Also, fewer surgeons and nurses get shot on the job, I assume.
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).
"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."
You can't compare spontaneous heroism with mundane risk.
Wouldn't it be better to pay police/firefighters/teachers more? If it means a little bit more in taxes for getting well trained (in dealing with the public), empathetic police officers, I am all for it.
> if the police are less militarized and have more personal liability/responsibility, it will reduce the level of interest in the profession somewhat
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.
For once I am not nearly as cynical and I believe that far from 'massive impact' - it will be negligible. It's only been a decade or so since a lot of this surplus has come in, moreover, I really don't believe most cops want this, or are naive enough to believe it will be a material part of their jobs.
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.
All the more reason to not give the police even more powerful tools with which to brutalize people. If the equipment is not the problem, take it away. That's one less thing to worry about.
This isn't true. Modern tools are significantly less lethal, and give police more options on the spectrum of escalation before having to draw their service pistol. This is why protests were much more deadly in the 1970s.
We're not talking about the same thing here. Of course it's better if the police can manage crowds and protests without anyone dying. Ideally no police person ever has to draw their service weapon and fire.
What seems less defensible is police coming in with things like tanks. Personally, I would prefer to see police de-escalate rather than escalate.
I would argue that "less lethal" tools are used more often, and in cases in which the lethal option would be completely unnecessary. This has the effect of increasing the lethality of these engagements. For example, using a taser during a traffic stop. Using tools like tasers lowers the bar to using the tool in the first place, rather than reducing risk to the receiving party. False logic at the end of the day.
If it's easy to solve, then it should be a footnote in a much more difficult to tackle solution.
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.
To not have demilitarization of the police as a prominent item on any list of required changes would be insane. But obviously it is only one of many changes needed.
"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.
They would need to restrict capabilities, not just cut off access to "military-style" gear. They make the same mistake with gun laws where they ban "military-style" weapons because they look scary, but allow weapons that are just as deadly because they have a wooden stock and don't look as scary as "military-style" weapons.
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.
I think this is spot on, and not just because of creating the impression to people looking at police. I also think that if police see their tools as the tools of a soldier, they are more likely to act like soldiers.
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.
I think we should also make it legal for police departments to discriminate against combat veterans when hiring, and encourage them to do so. Perhaps as a token of fairness, this could be paired with a separate initiative to provide other sort of jobs to combat veterans.
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.
> 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.
> The rule of engagement in places like Iraq and Afghanistan are significantly stricter than they are for America's cops.
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:
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.
This is completely backwards. If anything the veterans are the one not shooting first and asking questions later because that kind of conduct is/was not allowed overseas. They also tend to have a little more perspective as to what does and doesn't constitute a threat.
>>>People trained by the military to police occupied communities should not be allowed to act as civilian police in peacetime conditions.
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?
You're quite right; this is another aspect of the same sort of problem: Police being trained by the military or by military veterans (be they American or foreign.)
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.
I would love to see some statistics before discriminating against veterans. My intuition says combat vets would make better police officers because they would likely be better trained, and are used to dealing with high pressure, dangerous situations.
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.
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
Is there evidence to suggest that violent police are disproportionately ex-military? Is there anything less extreme we could do to reduce violence from both veteran and non-veteran police?
I get that they're trying to address the current issues this nation is facing. But if the issue is related to police officers not facing punishment for their crimes, wouldn't revising qualified immunity[0] be a pretty good solution? It seems to be clear that qualified immunity has been taken advantage of and is potentially the main reason why officers are able to get away with the crimes they commit. This might get burried in the comments, and maybe I'm wrong, but what are others' thoughts on this?
It's entirely insufficient. Qualified immunity is a concept that protects officers from civil liability. It's part of the puzzle for sure, but the much bigger issue is that officers that violate the law or others' rights almost never face criminal liability.
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.
Slightly tangential question, but I have seen at least one proposal [1] for "malpractice insurance" for cops. The claim is that this would shift expenses for bad policing settlements from taxpayers to bad actors -- a bad cop attracts suits, creates settlements, pays higher premiums, and perhaps eventually stops being a cop. It has some kind of economic logic, but to the best of my knowledge this has never been implemented anywhere. Has it?
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
> When very‐ high‐ risk officers see premiums go up, they would have to pay the difference out of their own pockets
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.
There is evidence that demilitarizing the police works (along with other things) and that some training doesn't.[0] I'm all for accountability, which the link also says helps.
Gear and training dovetail. Like at many companies, LEO training has been "game-ified", and much of it consists of playing with toys procured at taxpayer expense.
I completely agree, though I assume it's because the federal government only pulls federal levers without new legislation. I bet they have more federal programs for military gear redistribution than they do to subsidize training.
In the year 2015, in all of Germany, the Police only fired a total of 46 bullets [1], killing only 7 people in the entire country.
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].
I have friends who are police that post videos of their gun training to social media. One exercise involves speeding up to an area in their cruiser and quickly coming to a stop. Then they exit the vehicle and use their door as cover while shooting a target as fast as they can. Afterwards they proudly smile and hold their target up to the camera.
The amount of gun training these officers receive is insane, and it's no wonder why so many resort to using their weapon first.
> Mr. Gallego said. “Our neighborhoods aren’t war zones.”
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.
> Unfortunately, I am not sure that will be the case in a week.
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.
That makes sense. The NG goes by in their vehicle and the people firing the paint guns are wearing what looks like police armor.
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.
Our neighborhoods (especially poor/black neighborhoods) are war zones, ever since Nixon declared them so in 1971. The war on drugs is the primary cause of police militarization and mass incarceration. It's like that Orwell quote "We've always been at war with Eastasia"; it's gone on for so long, we've forgotten its actually happening.
The Posse Comitatus act prohibits the military from operating within the US, except at the borders, and as provided by the Insurrection Act.
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.
The Posse Comitatus and Insurrection acts are primarily concerned with protecting states from the federal government. That's why it's legal for states to use their National Guard units, which are definitely military, as law enforcement.
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.
Or so the captains of industry could strike break without fearing the same?
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.
I would like them to provide and require body cams for all officers at the federal level and require all deaths and injuries occurring in police custody to be reviewed by the FBI/justice dept.
I would like them to provide and require body cams for all officers
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.
I only take minor exception to them shooting at the press with pepper balls and things like that. Should it happen? Generally no, but you have look at it from the other side. These are large and violent riots and it’s very easy for people to pretend to be the press. It’s not practical to stop and validate press credentials under the circumstances. It sucks, but I don’t have a huge problem with it.
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.
Police body cams have significant privacy challenges. There are no easy answers there.
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.
I am not seeing the privacy issue. In most cases the police are interacting with people out in the public rather than in their homes and businesses. In most jurisdictions it is already one party consent to record.
Because being recorded can have a chilling effect on speech. Officers recording a peaceful, legal protest could exert undue influence on constitutional rights. It’s a reasonable concern.
More cameras is not always good, even in public and even if legal.
It could just be that police testimony is not admissible without extra video evidence. In this day and age it may make sense. Especially given how the George Floyd and Amy Cooper incidents wouldn't have been known without video evidence since both involved people lying.
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.
It's definitely evidence that unions work at a minimum. It's just as you said, unions advocate for their members above all else. Just like a union of coal miners might be against environmental regulation if it protects the jobs.
This is going after symptoms rather than going after problems. The primary problem is there are a subset of police that are bad actors, there is a thin blue line culture, and there is an unwillingness on the part of jurors, prosecutors, and politicians to hold police accountable. This legislative action does nothing to address that. A second problem is that police seem to be viewing their job as one of pacification as opposed to community based policing. This legislative action solves a symptom of that but doesn't go after the root cause which is again cultural.
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.
Unions are tied to pensions. Pensions are tied to politics. You’d have to create a greater economic force then tens or hundreds of billions of dollar pension funds.
Some thoughts:
1) Fire all current police officers
2) Hire back maybe 25% in numbers, but different profile people
3) Stop enforcing drug laws
4) Convert all property crime handling to online recording
5) Take away police guns, tear gas, etc, except in very rare circumstances
6) Have police focus on the very few dangerous situations where they are actually needed.
Getting rid of 75% of the Police force in one go seems like the recipe that the US used in Iraq and which resulted in the creation of ISIS.
(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.)
I don’t think the police need MRAPs. That’s a bit over the top. However, it does seem they need some sort of up-armored police cars given how many of them have been destroyed in the rioting. SWAT maybe has some use for military equipment, but only for bona-fide SWAT situations (hostages/bombs/active shooter.) But rolling out MRAPs for general policing is a bad policy. It’s one step removed from deploying tanks and it’s a bad look and probably counterproductive.
Sure, maybe there is limited use in some of this equipment. But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had. There are only 700 officers including things like traffic enforcement.
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 live close to a small town in the Bay Area, called Los Gatos. Quaint, expensive, beautiful place.
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.
Wow, anecdotal but very telling. I tend to think that most cops are "good people", but that doesn't mean that the majority also doesn't go around envisioning their job primarily as a combat deployment to a war zone, and only secondarily as an exercise in protecting and strengthening their communities.
The (presumably white) little girl probably needs someone to explain to that the police have a duty to the public to protect order, not any given individual
> But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had.
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.
I think the term "assault rifle" is very misleading here. People are imagining fully automatic weapons like the ones the military uses. But outside of SWAT, such weaponry is very rare. (And in most countries, their equivalent of SWAT has fully automatic weapons.)
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.
> But my small city police department recently got a grant for 450 high powered assault rifles and armored vests, on top of the hundreds they already had. There are only 700 officers including things like traffic enforcement.
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.
This sounds like an excellent case for equipment limitations. At the very least making departments pay 'retail' for gear instead of getting effectively donated surplus.
Why should the police get a discount? They should have to buy their MRAPs through the auction systems the same way that someone running a logging company has to buy surplus LMTVs. I'm sympathetic to the cause of saving money but if the military won't auction something to a random US citizen I don't see why they should be auctioning that thing to a random US civilian police force. They can sell that stuff to other nations if they can't sell it domestically.
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.
> 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.
Agreed, the NFA needs to go and every citizen should be able to purchase military surplus.
> I'm sympathetic to the cause of saving money but if the military won't auction something to a random US citizen I don't see why they should be auctioning that thing to a random US civilian police force.
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?
Police power is not intrinsic. It is granted by the people through their elected government. In my state, every local authority has the power to designate entities to exercise their various powers. By tradition these are police or sheriff departments but there's nothing preventing the local government from vesting police powers in the 4-H club or Wal-mart.
That’s absolutely not the point of the police. Any power granted to the police is granted by the people they are changed with protecting. The police are not our overlords, they are our servants.
Power is local citizens banding together, grilling city council members about what equipment they will authorize the municipal police to use, and voting them out until the next councilor is one who will follow through on their election deal.
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.
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.
The equipment they request betrays their perspective. They see themselves as having more in common with soldiers in occupied Baghdad than police officers.
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.