How would you fix American policing? (UPDATED)

[robby]

@DrDeth

That would end up with too many dead cops.

Is there any evidence for this? Any at all? I’m sure that American police believe this to be true, which is why they are so quick to shoot. They get bullshit training on how fast a person can supposedly run over to them with a knife, and that’s why it’s so important to immediately shoot people if they appear to have any weapon on their person, or even anything that looks like it might possibly be a weapon.

The pendulum has swung far, far over to the point that police now tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Their top priority is not public safety, but their own personal safety. This overwhelming concern for their own safety, combined with the power trip most police seem to have and the overreaction they typically exhibit when their authority appears to be questioned,* leads to the situation we have now. I’m a white male, and I fear the police in our country today. If I were a minority, I would be terrified of them.

We train our soldiers in occupied areas of foreign countries that it is counter-productive to shoot the civilian population. You don’t win “hearts and minds” by shooting everyone who you think might be armed. It’s time to train our police the same way – then arrest, prosecute, and jail them for an unjustified use of deadly force, with none of this “qualified immunity” bullshit.

This isn’t the first time I’ve said this. As I wrote last year:

@robby

Police in the U.S. seem to extend this aggressive approach to virtually every interaction they have with the public.

We had a local case where a mentally ill person off of his meds had a knife in his hand while standing in the middle of a field. He refused to drop the knife. The cops had him surrounded, but nobody was within 20-30 feet of him. He posed absolutely no danger to anyone other than himself. After a few minutes of this, the police opened fire on the man and killed him.

I read about cases like this all the time. Police kill a person who poses little or no threat to them or anyone else. The police almost seem to be looking for a reason to use their guns to kill people, and the reason often simply boils down to their authority being questioned (even if it’s because the person is drunk, disturbed, mentally incapacitated, deaf, etc.).

In most interactions with the public, the police seem to have elevated their own personal safety above all other considerations. And for many police officers, if there is any threat, or even a potential threat, or even a theoretical threat, or maybe simply if they decide their instruction aren’t being followed, they deal with the threat the same way: with deadly force.

And they wonder why people fear and distrust them? :dubious:

*This even extends to mundane interactions with the police. In my job, we are forced to hire police for traffic control for construction projects. The police get to decide how many officers are needed for a given job (which is an obvious conflict of interest), and they personally get overtime pay for doing nothing (typically either shooting the bull with the other officer, or sitting in their squad car). In order to get them to do the job they are being paid for (i.e. actually directing traffic), we had to hire a retired police officer to serve as a liaison with the police, because it is all but impossible for a civilian to get a police officer to do something they don’t want to do. So if I get word that the police are sleeping in their car instead of directing traffic, I have to call our liaison, who calls the private duty police coordinator, who may or may not counsel the officer. We have been warned to never question a police officer ourselves – nothing good would come of that. :rolleyes:

Whether they do their job or not, we still have to pay, approximately $100/hour per officer, plus another $15/hour for a squad car, with a minimum charge of 4 hours. This is one reason why utility construction in roadways is so expensive.