Agree. And that’s a result of LEO culture, not training.
I’ve known quite a few LEOs over the years, and it’s pretty obvious they’re a gang of sorts, with certain codes and beliefs. They cover for each other. Thin blue line, and all that stuff. They rationalize it by believing that, without them, society would collapse into chaos. That’s B.S., of course. But it’s what they believe.
The problem with LEOs in the U.S. is all about the culture that permeates throughout the agencies.
They say one bad apple can spoil the barrel but somehow that phrase has been taken to mean, at least with regards the police, the one bad apple is a lone exception and the others are fine (and probably let the bad one back in anyway).
What it really means is the entire barrel is now bad and the other apples in the same barrel should be regarded with suspicion and probably thrown out.
If you file a complaint, you will be looked at as a troublemaker, and now your career is at risk. This happens in lots of places, not just law enforcement. Heck, it happened to me. I tried to to get rid of a bad employee who reported to me, and I almost lost my job over it. I am still licking my wounds over it. I will never do that again. But unlike law enforcement, the people in my industry don’t have the power to ruin lives and murder people. Because of the power they yield over citizens, law enforcement must be held to a different standard.
Huh? Pretty sure the various bar associations are composed of lawyers and judges, the medical boards are largely composed of physicians, and the accountant licensing boards are all CPAs.
What we’d need is a sort of state-level peace officer licensing bureau that can be composed of cops from all over, but that isn’t beholden to anyone but the state government. As it stands, it’s like expecting a hospital or law firm to take action against their own doctors/attorneys. They have incentives (public relations, etc…) not to take firm action.
An independent body wouldn’t have that same pressure.
I don’t think we are disagreeing with each other. I am suggesting an independent, state wide oversight board. It would, of necessity, be made up of mostly or entirely of police officers. Much like the Board of Bar Overseers are made up of lawyers, but lawyers whose sole job it is to investigate complaints.
In addition to the fine information upthread - culture, militarization, minimal accountability, I wanted to circle back to a point implicit in the quoted segment.
In a culture of local political influence, and insanely strong unions which control each local jurisdiction, the collective bargaining over COST of local enforcement is a huge factor as well. Since policework is almost always low paid (like military, but w/out the benefits and subsidized living costs), it attracts people who find the perks of the position worth the low wages.
And the unions then tell their ‘civilian’ superiors, that if they want to keep that portion of the budget low, then they have to give the unions what they want: effectively oversight of the investigations, veto power over discipline, and the other myriad ills discussed upthread. So the local authorities, who won’t get elected if they raise taxes, continue to economize on the cops, in exchange for letting them do what they want - unless said cops do something SO excessive (and on film) that it can’t be avoided.
Again, the cancer is well past the point of metastasis. I think the various defund the police initiatives suffer from terrible branding as well as intense partisanship, but in the long run, we do need to make a clean break getting rid of the entire existing culture and training a new one from scratch.
Considering the cost, the underlying American Culture, and the politics - I don’t think it will ever happen though.
One thing that is different is how we advertise for the job.
I was listening to Sean Carroll’s podcast, and he had on a person talking about the various things, mostly about corruption and such.
He pointed out that the way we advertise for police is a bit different.
From the very beginning, we are attracting the wrong people to join law enforcement, then it goes downhill from there.
If you look solely at police salaries, this may be true. For many officers, the overtime, details, pensions, etc., can turn policing into a very lucrative career. In my state, police unions have pressured the state to require a police officer detail at every road construction site, in most instances for a minimum of 4 hours, regardless of how long the work will take. Often the overtime and detail pay can double an officer’s annual salary.
This is also worth piggybacking on.
Police officers don’t defund schools and social services to children, which creates the school-to-prison pipeline. They didn’t craft the war on drugs, which incarcerated countless nonviolent offenders and turned them into career criminals. They aren’t the reason we have more guns per capita than any other country on earth.
But they do have to deal with all of that, and they absolutely aren’t equipped to do so. No single organization is. That’s why @madmonk28 is ultimately correct when he says the only solution is a complete restructuring of American culture.
If I pressed a magic button that suddenly turned every single cop into a combination of Captain America and Mr. Rogers, it still wouldn’t fix things. Those cops would still exist in a self-reinforcing system which is built on injustice.
But importantly, not made up of their colleagues.
Exactly, we expect cops to clean up the mess made from the failures of our health care, education and social safety net systems and we give the a gun and taser to do it.
A few years ago, I saw this thinly dressed homeless man hanging out and ranting and there was a big snow storm coming, I called around to different county numbers because I thought he’d probably need to get inside somewhere and they all told me to just call the cops, they’ll deal with it. That’s a lot to ask of one agency.
We’re real good in this country at union busting. Maybe it’s time to go Reagan on police unions: These terms of the contract under negotiation are unacceptable (self oversight, above the law, etc.) and are rejected. Anybody who doesn’t show up for work on Monday is fired.
Air traffic controllers were a skilled and vital part of the transportation infrastructure, and yet somehow planes kept moving, and it only setback the labor movement and workers rights by 50 years or so. A small price.
We expect them to be our guard dogs, to put themselves in the way of the danger we create. Then in that environment they are trained to be afraid, that the next traffic stop, encounter on the street, visit to a home or business, the next call of any kind may be their last and they must be prepared to react with violence to prevent that. Add in a healthy dose of racism and classism and you have cynical police in a position that attracts corruption.
And then we act surprised at the result.
A guard dog that treated grandma and a robber the same way would be put down. Policing isn’t in the top 20 most dangerous jobs in America. (https://www.facilities.udel.edu/safety/4689/) This oft repeated fiction that an officer doesn’t know whether the next traffic stop will be their last needs to end. There are structural problems in America that the police have to deal with that they didn’t create. So does every single profession that deals with the public. Teachers don’t get to say “I am too afraid to teach those kids because their parents are drug addicts.”
I’m seeing a process of change over time, but it is going to take a considerable amount of time because it involves changing a culture that has been ingrained over many decades.
In this particular instance, however, I believe the correct decision made. First of all, Lyoya should have never gotten out of his car. He made the situation worse by walking around and then disobeying a police command. He should have provided the ID required, waited for the ticket, accepted the ticket, let the officer drive away, and then fought the ticket in court if he so desired.
His registration was expired. There is nothing to discuss, nothing to argue, and no point to be made. Aggressive hostility is never going to get law enforcement to change its mind. It will, in fact, have the opposite effect. Sometimes there is gross misconduct and racism on the part of the police, and sometimes you have a perpetrator who engineers his own demise.
Yeah, although the danger is overstated. There are a lot of jobs that are more dangerous, like sanitation worker, firefighter, and lineman/woman. This past year,Covid was the biggest killer of cops and they freaked out when told to get vaxxed. They are unrestrained and unaccountable.
And sometimes you have a person who doesn’t behave in the exact manner the officer wants him/her to, and the officer cannot think of any method of de-escalation other than violence. Lyoya should have done everything you say. Just because he didn’t, doesn’t make him a threat to the officer. George Flyod should have gotten into the officer’s car. Eric Garner shouldn’t have been selling loose cigarettes. Linden Cameron (13 year old with autism) shouldn’t have run from the police. People dealing with stressful situations behave in weird ways. It should be on the professional in the situation to make choices that allow for everyone to walk away from the situation, unless and until that is 100% impossible.
Yes, he deserved to die. 
Yes, the problem isn’t the police at all, it is that civilians don’t have the proper training to interact with dangerous animals cops.
Unless that would be inconvenient for the cop. In which case, murder helps them get back to their donut break that much sooner.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the cops, there will always be apologists for the cops as well, and it will be hard to change the way that the cops interact with the public as long as those apologists blame the victim with phrases like “engineers his own demise”.
Police should not be armed as a routine matter. Definitely not with a firearm, but maybe a taser or club is acceptable. If there’s an articulable and specific reason that lethal force might be required (carrying out this warrant at this location and time where known violent felon John Doe is expected to be), then let the officer check out a firearm. But parking enforcement: unarmed, traffic enforcement: unarmed, street patrol: unarmed, property security: unarmed, etc.
End the culture of fear.
That’s the training and potentially having different people respond instead of, or respond alongside the cops.
I mean, there was a police shooting some years back around here where a large, mentally disabled man had a screwdriver and was very agitated. And acting pretty much how you’d expect an agitated mentally disabled man to act.
If things had been different, maybe some sort of mental health person could have come along with the cops, and taken the lead on the encounter.
But… that would have taken the cops to have been willing to forego their “us vs. the world” mentality and not shoot the guy whenever he brandished his screwdriver.