Why should de-escalation rather than arrest “always be the goal” when it comes to someone who is menacing an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend? I feel like if I were in that position, I’d be kind of pissed if calling the cops resulted only in them coming over and telling him to leave. Then if he leaves and comes back a half hour later, she just has to go through it all again? Fuck that, there should be a penalty for violating the order.
They lost control of the situation and he paid the nearly ultimate price for their incompetence. If they are always working on the assumption that the person they are trying to arrest may have access to a fire arm - this is America after all - then the kind of fuckery they exhibited could only have gone from bad to worse.
I’m sorry but more and more I’m seeing that cops are fucking incompetent, unfit for the job and dangerous because of it.
I think that’s often true–but think of how much money we’d have to pay them to get a universal level of competence as we might wish. We’d want them to have graduate degrees of the equivalent in terms of understanding the law, constitutional rights, etc., not to mention abnormal psychology, sociology, and so on and so forth. I’m not being snarky: that would genuinely be great if cops had these tools in their mental kit!
But then we also want them to be willing to go deal with a lot of really annoying shit, and do a job that’s not only dangerous but a real grind most of the time. How much would you have to pay to compete with other sectors for this level of talent? $200K a year maybe?
Do we really need to link to all the videos where melanin challenged, belligerent, armed people are arrested without being shot seven times IN THE BACK???
Police in other countries seem to achieve better outcomes without significantly higher levels of formal education. Perhaps their salaries are slightly better but probably not equivalent of 200K.
After tasering,tackling, and threatening this man, what on earth could have given him the idea that he was in a dangerous situation that he would be safest trying to flee?
As a white guy, I suppose that you have difficulties in seeing George Floyd’s fate as your own, but Blake didn’t have that luxury. Being in the custody of police, being at their mercy, is terrifying. Knowing that they can just kill you at any time, any reason, and get away with it.
Better to be killed on the street with witnesses to what that killed you than in the back of the cruiser or in some back alley.
[T]he perception that the police regularly kill black people under circumstances in which white people would be merely disciplined is in fact a misperception .[…]
Contrary to his expectations, Harvard economist Roland Fryer has found that while white men are actually more likely to be killed by cops, black people are more likely to be handcuffed, pushed against the wall, and treated with weapons drawn.
This was, FWIW, written by an Ivy League professor who is himself Black.
Yeah, we should definitely change the way that the police is funded, from the ground up. Less focus on the brawling and beating, and more on the understanding and compassion.
Maybe replace some of that police budget with social workers who are trained in these sorts of situations, rather than just sending in thugs with guns to sort it out.
Police budgets are already the plurality if not the majority of most municipalities’ budgets. We could well have a much smaller, but better trained law enforcement system that would much better respond to the needs of the citizens, rather than just attempt to terrorize them into compliance.
Would you be on board with that sort of funding reallocation?
Police in other countries don’t have to deal with the guns and the general level of violence and disorder we have here. Nor do they have the same level of competition from the private sector in terms of salary for people with elite qualifications. You want highly intelligent, well-educated people to go driving around in patrol cars (I’m not talking about detectives here), you are going to have to pay them serious amounts of money.
No, I’d be in favor of increasing funding for those things, but not “reallocating”. We’ve already seen in Minneapolis, Portland, and Seattle what a mistake it is for police to pull back or have their footprint reduced.
ETA: This BTW is in line with what Joe Biden said earlier this summer: that he wants more funding for other ways of dealing with social problems, not “defunding” police.
Good for him, I just watched a guy get arrested in a ‘shoot out’ where over 200 round were fired. He was not shot, in fact the police never fired a single round. Guess what race he was.
Anecdote is not the singular of data.
That kind of thing must also be happening fairly frequently in Black communities, judging by the way so many of these videos show people who don’t seem afraid of being shot. Or do you think they are just really clueless?
Yes. Train them better. Screen them better. Pay them better.
I’m all for that, but it’s going to be expensive and will be the opposite of “defund the police”.
I never argued for defunding or abolishing police.
Good!
Skimmed over this. A couple notes.
Starts with
That alone should be enough to agree that there is a very problematic racial bias going on.
Then we get to the data, which for shootings, they only used 12 cities, Boston,Camden, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, six Florida counties.
Having read the analysis which is too extensive to quote for effect here, is that it is not that a white person just as likely to be shot as a black person, but that a white person is just as likely to be shot as a black person per police encounter and it does admit that black people and other minorities have a greatly disproportionate number of police encounters than whites.
Just looking at this very basic data set should show you that the conclusions that you drew from this paper are wrong.
Yes, there were 370 white people shot, vs, “only” 235 black. Sounds bad for white people, until you realize that there are more than just 50% more white people than black, by quite a bit. (And there’s quite a bit of “other” in there too, not sure what to make of that.)
So, the plain data says that, if you are black, you are more likely to be killed by a cop than if you are white.
If we increase social programs, then crime will go down.
If we decrease provocative policing, then crime will go down.
If we have less crime, and have less for the officers to do, then what exactly are we paying them for?
If you want to pay taxpayer funds to have a force ready to protect and serve, then I’m in agreement with you. But, we do not need nearly as much funding towards the bust heads and incarcerate as we currently use.
Fewer cops, better screened, trained, and paid.
More social programs and people to aid those who need it.
Or, we could just keep doing what we are doing, and try to use enough police brutality to make them stop complaining about it. That sometimes works.
Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, any other minorities already know they’ll go to jail faster than a white person. They know excessive force will be used.
I Hoped. Now I hope to see Change.
And equipped. I do see things like drones as being a very useful addition to their capabilities.
Unarmed, always. But, too many shootings come from an officer being scared, or not knowing what is around a corner. A drone can alleviate these fears, and not worry about being “killed” itself.