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.
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.