Most police academies subject trainees to hours of video footage of cops getting ambushed by people with guns, and drill into them that any situation can turn deadly in an instant. They are hard-wired to think that they can lose their life in any second in any interaction with any citizen no matter what the circumstances.
Right, and that is why the "more training" argument I've heard some use as an alternative to the "de-fund the police" doesn't hold water.
My own experience working near a lot of police early in my career led me to believe that the majority of the training instills a "us vs them" attitude in the police, and it carries through to everything they do. Combined with the constant bombardment of stories about the tiny percentage of cases where someone is actually violent and the results are predictable.
Frankly, i'm of the opinion that the vast majority of cops shouldn't be carrying lethal weapons into the average traffic stop or whatever other activity is basically 100% safe outside of infinitesimal number of cases which go violent. After all, by pulling over, the person has basically already yielded to their authority.
You need the proper training. You can review some of that training through right-to-know requests. You can also read The Tactical Edge. Many of the issues you see happen are because of incorrect or insufficient training. There can be an us-vs-them if it's not done right.
Also, the threat on a traffic stop is not to be dismissed - there are officers attacked during those stops. Those stops are not just for traffic violations, but can also happen if the vehicle matches one used in a crime or reported stolen. Do you really want to be unarmed when making traffic stops or other calls? Sometimes they may stop, not to yield to authority, but to ambush the officer so they can get away without being identified.
Which is of course why they are suppose to report the traffic stop as they make it. Plus, in the case of warrants and the like, the second they get a hit on their terminal it sets off flags in dispatch/etc which will immediately start sending backup.
Those were the systems I was working on 20+ years ago.
I think that's an argument for better training or a complete rethinking of training. More of the wrong training will just result in bad behavior getting more entrenched.
Related to that point, defunding may actually have the opposite of the intended effect. You may actually have to spend more money to increase accountability, change culture, and improve the quality of policing.
Yes, you can probably rework it, but as another comment noted its entrenched culture at this point. So, even if a cadet gets out of training with good habits/attitudes those can change very quickly when they start working with the more experienced officers. I'm sure it can be done, but it will likely take a zero tolerance level of push-back like has happened with sexual harassment in the corporate world to solve the problem.
And I don't for a moment consider most police forces to be underfunded. The lions share of most city budgets are the police force, and it goes to buying armored cars and helicopters, and "benchmark city" ratios of police/citizens. And where I live the armored car gets used once or twice a decade, and in all cases so far could have probably just called the larger city an hour away and borrowed theirs as was done 15 years ago before the purchase.
Some how we survived for a century with far less police, and outside of the crime wave of the 1970/80's which were likely caused in large part by other things, were generally safer too. That "crime wave" seems like it would have solved itself without the huge ramp up of police funding we now have today, although the tough on crime people like to attribute it to that. A large part goes to fighting the failed drug wars. Which in turn feeds into the massive prison populations we have now, the largest part of which are there for non violent crimes.
Well, more training and proper training (and probably getting rid of a lot of the leadership). It’s not like this is new ground; plenty of places have reformed their police (in particular, after the fall of the iron curtain), and there are playbooks that have been moderately successful.
This is a very naive understanding of police work. Pulling over does not mean a thing. If a small number of cases go violent, and you don’t know which ones, you cannot just ignore them. If 99.9% of contacts are non-violent, a cop who makes 1000 contacts is dead.
Violence has never gone down from defunding. Although this should be obvious, an alarming number of people don’t seem to be thinking rationally on that topic. It has certainly gone up after defunding, however.
You shouldn't make up numbers about the ratio of violent vs non-violent stops. The vast majority of police go for their entire careers without having to ever discharge their weapon. Police work is actually quite safe, they never appear in any of the top most dangerous professions lists. And compared with some of those lists https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-i... they are paid much better due to being about the only job that is still unionized throughout the entire country. I've been pulled over by cops making $100+k a year, and its not all all uncommon for them to break $200k with overtime. (and this is in TX, not exactly known for CA salary levels).
That’s not how data works unfortunately. You can’t average the experience of a Chicago beat cop with a desk duty cop from Nome Alaska. Besides that, number of discharges doesn’t tell much of the story.
They’re not paid better due to the fact that they are in unions at all. Otherwise teachers would be rich, and police departments in major cities wouldn’t be struggling to hire even with relatively high wages. They pay that because nobody wants the job and the public is inexplicably antagonistic towards cops who join out of a desire to help people.
Saying that it’s quite safe is absurd and obviously untrue. It didn’t make your top 10 list of professions with the most deaths, but it’s barely below the cut, so still in the top 20 easily. And again, that data doesn’t tell the whole story.
American police training routinely promotes an us-versus-them mentality. It instills the idea that every situation is a threat that must conquered and dominated. You can see this in their comments that the streets are "a war zone" and talk about being "warriors", and a routine glorification of violence and stereotypes. This is why American police routinely escalate situations. Note on the video, the police don't just pull guns, but then start agressively barking orders.
Of course, in reality, COVID has killed five times as many cops as criminals have. In normal years, traffic accidents are higher risks for them, and many other professions are more dangerous.
Traffic accidents are the highest risk in normal years, followed by heart attacks. Those two reasons account for almost all of the on the job deaths for cops.
This is very true(personal experience). It’s not just in the academy it’s in every training course. All it takes is a jittery Rookie and things go wrong quick.
