Chicago police, despite all the attention given to their horrific practices over the past few years, are apparently still acting like an incompetent but brutal street gang.
My emphasis.
It’s OK - according to SlackerInc, since she didn’t do anything that made the poor innocent cops decide to shoot her, she can just do it properly through the justice system now and I’m sure they’ll pay to replace all of her damaged property and for the therapy to get over PTSD from the outrageous and unjustified assault. They certainly won’t stonewall and claim some kind of immunity or justification for not paying for all of her damages, right? Because if you do it properly and comply with police instructions, they won’t hurt you! Really!
Which is why, when people look at stats of people killed by the police, that’s an important thing to keep note of, but the humiliation, denigration and outright dehumanization should also be included in understanding why the public is terrorized, rather than protected and served, by the police and justice system.
I have no words:
The standards we have for that high schooler are that they should withdraw from the person acting violent and disruptive, and call the police. Who should the police call after they withdraw, in your paradigm?
Two different shootings in one town in a couple of days. Further, it seems both were more complex than might first appear. These are going to take a while to sort out.
No, the standards that we have for that highschooler is that they will try to deescelate the situation
With police, the standard is to escalate, until they are “justified” in the use of force.
If they called the police for every belligerent customer, you’d have to have a precinct assigned to every fast food restaurant.
Of course, the difference is that the kid at McDonalds is supposed to take your money and give you something for it, as opposed to Officer Blue whose job is to take your money and make you prove that you should get it back.
Hell, even as a poorly trained security guard I knew to use tactics to deescalate situations with belligerent or drunk people, it should just be common sense. It seems like a lot of people going into law enforcement are far too aggressive to be in law enforcement in the first place.
Nope, wasn’t talking only about ‘violent’. If a customer is disrespectful, then the high schooler’s job is to try to deescalate the situation, and he’ll get fired if he starts to escalate it. But if someone is disrespectful to a cop, it’s very common for a cop to keep escalating the situation until an arrest and/or violence ensues. We’ve seen that in multiple cases here, where someone speaking rudely to a cop or questioning anything causes the cop to escalate the situation, or where cops come in hot to a situation swearing and threatening when there’s no violence other than theirs (like George Floyd, where they are swearing and shoving a gun in the face of someone who allegedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20). I’m sure it’s also right in the ‘people should learn how to be arrested’ class you think people should go to, with all of the ‘obey all commands and never question anything’.
If someone can’t approach a situation that doesn’t even have a violent element without a professional demeanor, or handle people being rude without resorting to violence, then they shouldn’t be a cop. This isn’t some absurdly high standard, this is just ‘be a basic functional adult, or act like one, like we expect some high school kid in an afterschool job to manage’.
Also, I am still waiting to hear about these six figure jobs where beating and killing people who you consider disrespectful is fine.
I’ve ignored that, because it’s a nonsensical non sequitur, and to the degree it’s even semi-coherent, a strawman (since I never said there were such jobs).
It’s not a non sequitor at all. You made that claim that people would have to bump police salaries to $200,000 a year if they were expected to operate at a universal level of competence where they deescalate situations instead of killing and beat people for no good reason and actually know basic things like constitutional rights. I’m trying to figure out what six figure jobs you’re thinking the police will flock to if they’re not allowed to beat disrespectful people, and why people in retail don’t flock to those jobs.
And that’s a non sequitur. It doesn’t follow.
First of all, you’re mischaracterizing what I said. I mean, there’s honestly paraphrasing what someone says. There’s spinning it a bit. And then there’s the deeply dishonest distortion you just engaged in. So let’s look at what I actually said.
The context is that I was responding to Quicksilver, to wit:
My response:
You either didn’t read this carefully, do not have the cognitive ability to comprehend it, or are being disingenuous (which is to say dishonest). I don’t know which it is–you tell me. [ETA: I did notice just now a typo in what I wrote. It should be “graduate degrees or the equivalent”, not “of the equivalent”. But I don’t think that really obscured my meaning so badly.]
But in case it was genuinely a lack of comprehension, I’ll spell it out for you: I was not talking about paying the people who are currently police patrolmen $200K. They do not, in the vast majority of cases, have the intellect to “have graduate degrees [or] the equivalent in terms of understanding the law, constitutional rights, etc., not to mention abnormal psychology, sociology, and so on and so forth”. So what would be needed is to get rid of all those cops currently walking the beat, riding around on bikes or horses, or driving around in patrol cars and replace them with people who have these intellectual/educational credentials.
With me so far? Okay, so just to compete in general for people with these qualifications, you’re going to need to pay at least $80-100K. But that’s if you’re offering them a job they want to do. Most people with those kinds of intellectual qualifications are just not going to be interested in doing front-line police work. Even if they don’t see it as too dangerous, it is–as I also said in that post–“a real grind most of the time”.
So when I asked “How much would you have to pay to compete with other sectors for this level of talent? $200K a year maybe?” I mean that you have to find a bunch of smart and highly educated people, and convince them to work an unpleasant job that is generally a huge pain in the ass, often emotionally stressful, sometimes dangerous. Occasionally it will feel rewarding, but mostly you’re dealing with people who are pissed off at each other, maybe at the world in general, and definitely at you once you insert yourself in the situation. But you’re well-trained, and are going to deal with everyone with grace under pressure, applying all those intellectual tools at your disposal.
How long are you going to maintain that before you burn out? I submit that you’d have to pay such qualified people so much that they are tempted to do the job to begin with despite their reservations, due to the huge jump in pay they get compared to working elsewhere–and then once they’ve been doing it awhile, even if you start to feel burnout you are going to be reluctant to quit because you have grown accustomed to a new lifestyle, have a high mortgage payment, etc., and just feel you can’t afford to take a 50% pay cut by working somewhere else.
Got it now? 
Now, thinking about it a little more, it might work to have two-person teams go out on patrol, as is sometimes done now, but they would not be “partners”. One would be the well-educated, highly-paid one, and that person would have a significantly higher rank and call the shots. The other could make $50K, have just the high school education or whatever, and do the grunt work. But they’d have to be supervised by the other person at all times, or you’re back to square one.
To be fair, if, as a high schooler, I had a gun and qualified immunity, I probably would have killed quite a number of customers.
But I would expect those charged with the safety and security of our communities to have higher standards.
Your wrote a lot of stuff, but I still don’t see any six figure jobs where you get to kill people who fail to obey your orders that these alleged supercops would flock to. So I think your whole 'we’d have to pay them $200k thing is some weird fantasy on your part, that you came up with by slapping requirements that no one was asking for (did anyone but you mention graduate degrees?) onto a hypothetical job and doing some unsound math. At this point, it appears that the whole thing was made up by you.
Police work generally pays about as well as nursing, but being a nurse requires a degree (sometimes associate, usually bachelor), regular licensing, and continuing education, and if a nurse engages in serious misconduct their license will be revoked. Your idea that holding police to the kind of standard we hold other, similarly paid professionals would require stratospheric salaries doesn’t seem to be based on anything but raw bootlicking.
And yet again, if you’re getting paid $50k for a job that doesn’t require any school past high school or regular certification and where killing someone means paid vacation and not losing your license, you’re getting paid really damn well. And it’s certainly not unreasonable to expect someone who gets paid insanely well for a job that has almost no qualifications to act with the level of professionalism we expect from High Schoolers working minimum wage retail jobs.
Why do you think so little of police that you believe they’re too incompetent to handle the level of behavior required to keep a typical minimum wage job?
There is no such thing as white privilege. It simply does not exist
(that, btw, is a Washington State Patrol officer – they used to be known “affectionately” as WASPs)
He even reached into his vehicle. And then got in.
Then got back out again, and ignored the lawful orders of the officer to get on the ground.
Then he got back in the vehicle.
I am assured that a cop has to assume that he has a gun in there.
I notice the part where he screams at the officer that he is going to “kill your fucking ass”
You know, in front of his fucking kids.
This is still a total non sequitur. It’s not even coherent enough for me to respond to. Like, seriously: what the fuck are you on about?
No, no one else mentioned graduate degrees but me, and yes: the whole thing was made up by me. Who ever said any different??
That’s what I believe it would take to have police who acted in the way people are asking for. The blue collar Joes (and Janes) doing it now are just not up to it, and training them better or whatever isn’t going to change that. It’s not a high paying enough or generally attractive enough job to get that level of competence. (Your attempt to link it with nursing is ridiculous: people–largely women–who gravitate to the “caring professions” like teaching, nursing, and social work, and definitely get paid too little for doing them, don’t have the inclination to be a beat cop. They don’t want to be trained how to use guns, they don’t want even the option to use a gun as a last resort. My wife, who got a master’s in sociology and is now a special education teacher, is a great example. When there was talk in the state legislature about having optional training for teachers to use guns to be able to confront a mass shooter, she was adamant: no fucking way.)
It’s a leading question, and I don’t buy the premise. I can’t think of any minimum wage job where the job is literally to go around all day inserting oneself into trouble. And I would not want most minimum wage workers to be given weapons, no matter how much training they get.
As for why I think so little of police, it’s what I have seen and experienced over the years, just like the person I was originally responding to (they said the cops seem incompetent and I agreed).
It also strikes me as being… well, too easy to become a cop. If you’re getting a lot of the wrong people applying, you could solve that problem through screening and making the qualification requirements rigorous, thereby just filtering out the yahoos. But in many places it’s shockingly easy to become a police officer, involving academy training of 2, 3 months. I always assumed you needed at least an associates degree in a related field of study, but that is usually not the case.
Los Angeles:
Indeed.