Police prioritizing their own personal safety over that of the public

Great Debates
101

Give me a break. That article is ludicrously biased starting with the title alone:

Police shootings: how statistics can be dangerously misleading when excluding context factors

It’s written not by someone who has any experience in rigorous academic research, but by a “licensed psychologist” who works for a for-profit consulting company.

And the publisher (MedCrave) is a for-profit open-access publisher whose journals have faced academic scrutiny regarding the rigor of their peer-review processes, aggressive email solicitation of manuscripts, and the pay-to-publish model.

Finally, the journal in question (Forensic Research & Criminology International Journal) should not be confused with mainstream, high-impact legacy journals in the discipline, such as Forensic Science International (published by Elsevier). Based on data from Data from Exaly, it has a low citation impact, with the majority its published articles receiving exactly zero citations.

So do you have a real cite?

102

Could I have a cite that shows 97 percent of people shot by police were felons? Were armed? Were dangerous? You are asserting that all of them were all 3 things.

You asserting that 97% of these people shot by police are “quite willing and capable of killing police.”

That’s quite a statement.

103

The discussion here about police equipping with more and more powerful weapons over time reminded me of this incident from the late 90s:

It was a robbery which led to a big shootout. The robbers had some sort of body armor protecting them from the typical police sidearm. The article says it was a motivating factor for police to get more firepower. Indeed, I remember when I was a kid the typical police firearm was a revolver, which seems very old fashioned nowadays.

104

And police are notorious for shooting dogs during home entry. I’ve remarked that a “dog kill index” might be a useful metric for how abusive different police departments are.

105

I think the difference comes down to soldiers having centuries, if not millennia long traditions and expectations of putting one’s mission first, and everything else recognizes and reinforces that.

Police as an organized institution only date back to the mid 19th century at most, and in most places are just people hired who have a specific sort of license allowing them to be a cop and wield deadly force in the name of their city/state/nation.

I mean, if you enlist in the Marine Corps, you’re getting 250-ish years of tradition and expectation and you’re living and working in an environment that’s also steeped in that particular ethos. It’s powerful stuff; think about how former military people are shaped by that for the rest of their lives, even when they only served actively for 2-4 years.

Meanwhile, when you’re a cop, you’ve got what? A different set of traditions and expectations. Your job isn’t primarily to put yourselves in harm’s way; most cops never shoot their guns in the line of duty, and actual violence is unusual, if not exactly rare. And the internal ethos of cops is such that they view everyone as a threat if they’re not a fellow cop or cop’s family. You see this attitude when they pull you over for a burned out taillight and they approach you with their hand on their gun, as if this is a dangerous situation.

Military people are conditioned differently- there’s no expectation in combat that it’s NOT dangerous, and it’s all about keeping going despite that. Cops have this weird dichotomy where 98% of their job is mundane, nonviolent, and frankly dull, and 2% requires violence and possibly heroic efforts. It probably takes a more intense sort of selection, training and ethos to properly prepare people for that and to engineer institutions to foster that sort of thing.

As it stands, we’ve either got militarized police who presumably might be better for that 2% of the time it’s actually violent, or we’ve got normal police who are fine the 98% of the time, and who sometimes drop the ball hard the other 2% of the time.

They don’t always drop the ball; this guy did it right.

Allen Outlets Shooting: Police body camera video shows officer confronting gunman | FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth

106

Interesting POV. Here’s mine, if anyone cares…

I’m a professional pilot and have talked on the boards before about how Crew Resource Management informs everythng we do. Some decades ago, airline captains were unquestioned lords and masters of the flight deck. They weren’t to be second guessed by first officers or anyone else. And guess what? That dynamic led to many senseless disasters.

Commercial aviation, perhaps against all expectations, successfully turned that ship completely around. Today, we still have captains and first officers. But we are trained to listen to each other and to ATC, flight attendants, maintenance personnel etc. Captains are still captains, but they can’t unilaterally decide on a rash or risky action. A grizzled, veteran captain is expected to consider the opinion of the newest first officer and often that leads to conservative decisions. Sometimes more conservative than necessary - and that’s a good thing.

All this to say, I’m continually incredulous that other industries haven’t learned the same lessons. Medicine has tried a little and mostly failed. Law enforcement, from what I understand, has no interest at all. Example: George Floyd.

There were several officers there when it happened. I’ve asked multiple police friends why it apparently didn’t occur to any of them to say, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t be kneeling on that guy’s neck.”

The answer, to a man: They were probably junior and afraid to speak up.

Good lord. We pretty much solved that problem in aviation years and years ago. We also addressed reporting cockpit errors and crucially incentivized confessing when mistakes occur (see the ASAP system / NASA reports). From what I understand, law enforcement doesn’t have anything like this. Also recall, the police are not federal like the FBI, ATF, et al. Which means the training standards and reporting requirements vary widely state to state.

I won’t pretend to know a police officer’s business. But from the outside, it seems like they have one hell of a dysfunctional system and a lot of people are being harmed by it.

107

I never thought of it that way, but I wonder how that sort of Crew Resource Management type stuff would have translated in Uvalde. Was it a question of unwillingness to act without direct orders from a superior, was it sheer cowardice, or was it some combination of both?

I do agree that the incentivization of confessing mistakes is something a lot of professions ought to do. Hell, in IT it would be a godsend.

I think the biggest problem with the police is twofold.

One, it’s a job that doesn’t have a very high bar to entry. Some places like Amarillo, TX essentially require a GED/high school graduate and 21 years old with decent vision and some administrative stuff like Texas driver’s license and US citizen. Dallas requires a bit more- depending on the applicant’s age, either work experience or college credit from accredited schools, but even then, not a crazy amount- basically two years of college or three years of gainful employment somewhere, including the military.

That’s trivial, when you think of the responsibility a cop’s given. It’s a hair more than is required to enlist in the military, but not as much as being commissioned an officer (4 year degree and OCS/academy/ROTC). And not as much as nearly any entry-level white collar job like IT, accounting, engineering, etc…

Two, somewhere along the line the cops got sold (or sold themselves) the dual lies that being a cop is “special” and that they’re the “thin blue line” between order and chaos, and that being a cop is uniquely dangerous. That engenders an “us-vs-them” attitude versus everyone, and leads to them perceiving everyone who’s not a fellow cop as basically a potential threat. This attitude both causes them to be more apt to use force and deadly force in response to perceived threats, and it also means they’re that much more likely to close ranks and pull together when something does happen. It’s “us-vs-them” and uniquely dangerous, so they’re going to protect their own.

I don’t know how to solve the problem. In my city (Dallas), police and fire already consume more than half the general fund (i.e. tax dollars) spent each year, with a bit more than half that being police, about a third being fire, and the rest being stuff like 911, dispatching, etc… that crosses both. And they still manage to be under manned and suffer from the same problems as police elsewhere. So paying more isn’t really much of an option, and raising standards would just make things worse.

108

Three anecdotes used to support an opinion.

Can anecdotes be used to support an opinion? If not- why did you not speak up earlier?

That statement could be read either way.

Read the stats given, If a mere 3% of police shooting could be considered “unjustified” (and i took the higher figure), then the remaining 97% are justified, And that is what qualifies a shooting as justified- that the felon was an immediate danger to the public or the officer.

Have you documented the sleeping and reported it?

109

By what standards do you judge “justified”? By the standard you quoted, the killing of Philando Castille was justified, but you yourself said that that one was unjustified. So you don’t agree with the standard you quoted, but you somehow still agree with the number from that standard.

110

This is not true. But that incident is hard to define, I will admit- after all he did have a gun.

I gave several cites. So far, how many have you given?

111

I gave several cites upthread to support the figures I provided regarding the number of police officers killed and the number of civilians killed by police in a typical year. I’ve not seen anything from you or anyone else to debunk these cites (one of which was from the FBI).

Your main cite that you have used over and over to support your contention that 97% of police shooting are justified (and that you subsequently extended to an unsupported statement that “97% of the time, the police are shooting a dangerous armed felon who is quite willing and capable of killing the police”) is problematic at best. Something you have not seen fit to rebut.

Of course we have. But typically, nothing changes. (And incidentally, it’s crazy that we have to babysit the police to ensure they are doing their job that we are paying for.)

I had an issue a few years ago in which the contractor had departed the site on time (by 4:00 pm), and the cop was sitting alone on the street at 4:15 pm all by himself so that he could claim another 4-hour block of overtime at our expense. I took a time-stamped photo and the bill to the police chief, and they still refused to change it. Because it was “only” a few hundred dollars, we ultimately gave up fighting the overcharge.

But that was yet another reason we hired the retired police lieutenant to be our liaison with the police.

More recently, the issue has been blatant falsification of police slips (documenting their time on site). :roll_eyes: So our inspectors are now required to take a picture of every police slip at the end of the day.

I have never encountered supposed professionals in any other context at work who lie and cheat as much as [some] police do. It certainly doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in their integrity for law enforcement, either.

112

No, three individual anecdotes absolutely cannot be used to support the use of a specific percentage, especially when the specific percentage isn’t mentioned in those three anecdotes.

Uh…no? If 3% are considered by the police to be “unjustified”, then 97% remaining might be considered by the police to be “justified”.

113

Perhaps more important than adopting any specific CRM technique is the lesson that aviation successfully changed its culture. I think that’s harder than changing how you train or report incidents. Seems to me the culture of policing needs fixing.

114

I think the more important thing is that police shootings are a lot like capital punishment. The saying goes that "“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”; I’d rather see cops getting killed because they hesitate to use deadly force, than have them killing innocent people.

115

You mean the gun he told the officer he had and was legally allowed to carry ?

Castile, who was licensed to carry a firearm, told Yanez that he had a firearm.
Killing of Philando Castile - Wikipedia

That gun?

116

I agree, so when another poster came up with four anecdotes over 12 years, where were you?

I gave several cites, then gave a few examples. The cites proved my points. The examples were just for illustration.

And independent agencies, and the courts, etc .

You are also depending heavily on four anecdotes over 12 years to prove your point. None are recent.

PoliceData.org gives numbers, which as i pointed out are not verified and other independent sources give numbers as low as 800.

117

The only data point I have for you is, I have a friend in the biz; he personally does modelling and planning rather than the actual road work, but, anyway, they have their own flaggers and flashers; nobody is snoozing in a cop car.

So your example does seem like a (pretty) clear-cut case of police prioritizing, not their own personal safety in this case, but corruptedly lining their pockets at the expense of the public.

118

Agree.

I’ve watched many police-encounter videos. In addition to their questionable ethics, it never ceases to amaze me just how incredibly ignorant they are about basic rights that are covered under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. If I was as bad at my job (as they are at their job), I’d be fired in a heartbeat.

119

This would be like reading the regulations of Financial Advisors, observing the actions of Financial Advisors and concluding that most financial advisors are terrible at their jobs.

120

That is especially outrageous. I’m a retired federal employee, and the most certain way to get fired was to lie about your hours. It was swift and certain.