I've been told that my only job is to go home at night.
And yet simply withdrawing from a benign situation rather than escalating it to the point of violence seems to be beyond their grasp.
Or maybe deescalate, like police forces in other countries do.
Apparently, when women first started as police officers, in the UK, they were paired up with male officers. The logic being that the man can provide muscle, if needed.
It's now been found that 2 women officers are far more effective, particularly with drunk men. A male officer can restrain them. A female officer can talk them into coming quietly.
Oh, and the UK police were the first to "raise concerns" when the government suggested arming beat officers with guns. They did NOT want to be armed.
Basically, it's perfectly possible to police primarily by consent, and get the job done.
Oh that’s exactly what they do, it’s just that their training is to de-escalate by shooting first and sorting it all out later.
Going home at night is paramount to being a peace officer after all.
Remember that's police sued to be able to discriminate against people with high iqs
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
And sued to not be required protect people.
ACAB.
I'm not an anarchist looking for the abolition of police as a concept.
But the institution of policing in America needs a Truth and Reconciliation commission. Complete top to bottom scrapping and rework. And a lot of pigs need to go to prison for a long time.
Start by removing Qualified Immunity.
While this is definitely needed, I don't think it's a starting point.
IMO, a good place to start is instituting policies requiring LEOs/PDs carry liability insurance. Similar to doctors and other medical practices (in the US). An officer is found guilty or misconduct or violating a citizen's right? Penalties are taken out of their insurance and their premium increases. Can't afford the premium? Guess who's looking for a new job?
The way I see, the pigs can keep their criminal immunity, but civil matters will have a more direct financial incentive for them to behave like they have morals.
That's another "market economy" solution.
Maybe start with the training. It's ridiculously short in the US compared to European countries where the training takes usually multiple years, before you're allowed to go on your own
Longer training isn't going to help, they need better training
Of course is longer training going to help. Police school is like 3 Months in the US. Obviously that's insufficient, when it's 3 years in most European countries.
In a longer time you can watch them more closely how they behave under pressure, and you have more time to sufficiently train de-escalation tactics, basic psychology etc...
Fight police with capitalism!
I mean, if it works, it works. We've addressed a lot of societal problems via liability-based approaches. ADA ramps and disability access come to mind. It's not a perfect solution, but it's often a lot more tractable than trying to change the culture of an entire industry or profession. Activists spent decades trying to persuade architects and building owners to make their spaces accessible. But they simply didn't want to change. Designing public buildings with ramps and elevators can have real drawbacks, both practically and aesthetically, and the building industry didn't want to change. Congress could have made it illegal to not have ramps, a misdemeanor or felony, but who is legally responsible for a non compliant school? And does this sound like a law police would spend a lot of time enforcing? Are they going to devote resources to cracking down on inaccessible buildings?
In the end, it was simply easier to empower disabled people to be their own advocates. Let them sue building owners who won't make their structures accessible. No need to convince a prosecutor or bureaucrat that disability access is worth their time. The people most affected can lead the charge instead.
Overall, the approach has worked quite well. While not perfect, it has radically changed the degree of accessibility for disabled people to public buildings and spaces.
Makes sense. Make them a liability that not even the most corrupt officials wouldn't want to help because it'd be too costly.
Police have unions (They function as professional organizations, but legally they are labor unions) largely to block legal changes like this. To defeat them, you'd need to somehow pass legislation on the state and federal level that mortally undermines the power of all labor unions in the USA. This would have knock-on effects for all US workers, as unions fight for and uphold labor protections that benefit those outside their ranks. For instance, two day weekends and 40 hour work weeks.
It seems clear to me that ending QE - Which is merely a judicial policy, it's not even law - Is by far the more potent, simple, and safe avenue of attack. But I'm interested in your thoughts on the above proverbial gun that police unions hold to the head of every US laborer.
No, you can have selective limits, tied to how much risk the job imposes on the surroundings (like universal regulation on any job requiring being armed). Unions are supposed to be about worker power against the employer, not against society.
Well unfortunately in the case of US police unions, it's an anti-labor force using a labor organization as a disingenuous hedge against accountability. And also at the end of the day a police union resisting insurance requirements for it's members actually is a case of workers (Class traitors, but workers all the same) organizing against their employer.
To defeat them, you’d need to somehow pass legislation on the state and federal level that mortally undermines the power of all labor unions in the USA.
I think you could narrow it from "all labor unions" to "all public-sector unions." Unfortunately this still end up affecting teachers, firefighters, and various city workers.
Imagine a world where the top priority of the police team (not “force”) was to help and support the people. “Help” includes stopping confirmed bad guys but also includes finding the homeless a safe place to sleep.
Send all police trainees to social work school.
What a world that would be.
IMO finding the homeless a safe place to sleep shouldn't be the job of the police. You don't call the police when there's a fire, you call firefighters. You don't call the police when someone's injured, you call an ambulance. Why would law enforcers be involved in helping a homeless person find shelter?
Maybe in this case you could expand the scope a bit. Police are responsible for public safety, and it's unsafe to sleep on the streets. OTOH, policing is law enforcement, deterring and investigating crime, etc. Homeless people are often committing crimes, either trespassing, loitering, using drugs, etc. It would almost certainly be better for them to be helped by someone who doesn't care about that part, and just wants them to get a safe place to sleep and a warm, healthy meal.
Instead of giving more jobs to police, shrink the police budget and hire new people to do those non-policing jobs.
IMO finding the homeless a safe place to sleep shouldn’t be the job of the police.
Completely fair. Their job should be to call a social worker whose job it would be to find the homeless a safe place to sleep. This is in contrast to what police presently do.
Yeah, I want as little contact between the police and homeless people as possible.
Part of what I would call the PSA - Public Service Agency, so named due to the consistency with Public Service Announcements - would be patrol vehicles (Ford Transit Connect, RIP) that are marked with attention grabbing (not camouflaged) vehicles that help citizens with daily public issues.
• Need some assistance / instructions on how to get unemployment or other public assistance? We got you covered.
• Need some basic first aid and / or a call for an EMT? We got you covered.
• Need some information about how to get jobs, update a resume, or understand your skill set? We got you covered.
We need to remove most of the police from the streets, and inject the streets with helpful people who want to improve the cities, and help to mitigate the issues that cause a rise in crime.
We need to build a system of citizen empowerment.
We had that in our European country and it was pretty amazing. Police corruption dropped a shit ton as they were not above the law anymore.
I can’t recall if it was in the Behind the Police miniseries or a more regular Behind the Bastards episode, but there was a breakdown of how even once you’ve completed the police academy, you have to train for a year (IIRC) under a training officer, and if the TO thinks you’re not cut out for the force, you are not permanently hired, and other forces will probably not give you a chance. TOs, by the bye, are typically drawn from officers who have been taken off normal duty due to numerous complaints, like the ones made by people who have been harassed or assaulted by cops.
It’s not just the academy, the whole system selects for bastards.
Another example of why there are no good cops.
because good ones never get the chance to be good.
And the bad ones do a uh oh on the good ones who don't play along.
pretty sure i read somewhere that if you excel in the academic portion of the academy youre disqualified for being too smart under the guise of some other excuse. critical thinking isnt something they want in the force.
I had a friend who went through a whole arc of wanting to be a cop. She had pretty much an identical experience I had to squint at the name and photo to be sure this wasn't a post she had made.
Being a woman was a huge setback from the get-go anyway, casual police brutality training notwithstanding.
She never quite got my criticism of wanting to be a cop (She wanted to fix policing by example) nor my lack of surprise when she spent a year wasting her time being tested and strung along by cops who were never going to hire her. (You have a master's degree FFS! You're not what they're looking for!)
I went to a technical college that had a police training program. Technical colleges sometimes have the reputation of being glorified high schools. That's mostly unfair, but there were three guys in some of my classes who were determined to make it that way. Give you one guess as to what program they were in.
I wouldn't trust those three to be security guards at a shopping mall.
Bad tree with a few good apples
Nothing surprising here. Violent enforcers of capital descended from slave patrols.
This is why, in addition to ACAB, I also like to use "Cops Enforce Evil".
Meanwhile they also teach them next to nothing about, nor verify their understanding of the laws they will be tasked with enforcing, and many absolutely do not understand the law at all.
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