I’m not aware of all of the knocks on the SPE, and probably couldn’t legitimately form an opinion about them in part or in whole.
But here’s Zimbardo’s take on most of the slings and arrows in aggregate:
In other words, the sheep (not elephants) prefer to have the wolves rather than sheepdogs in charge. The donkeys know better, but are too stubborn and disorganized to band together to make the necessary changes.
So you think that only the categories of (1) rich people; (2) people who are willing to go into severe debt; and (3) people who are willing to spend years at getting a prerequisite should be allowed to become police officers. And anybody outside of those categories aren’t worth looking at, regardless of their ability or temperament.
Isn’t that basically how being a doctor or a lawyer works?
Yes, but those are positions with a lot of responsibility, those positions might hold the futures or even lives of people in their hands…
Oh, wait, I see it now.
You don’t have to be rich or go into severe debt to get a bachelor’s degree, but I still agree that this is a great argument for universal higher education!
Or pretty much any white collar job?
Remember in Knock on Any Door when Humphrey Bogart opens Webster’s and reminds the newspaper management that “profession” is an occupation undertaken for the public benefit. Doctors and lawyers as opposed to what we call “professionals” today who are anyone with nice clothes and clean hands working only for their employer’s benefit.
The police used to be part of the Professional Managerial Class: which admittedly blurred the line between public service and enforcement/management of the lower orders on behalf of the ownership class. (Teachers and nurses were also considered PMC, but then they were demonized by the Right and expelled in the 1990s).
We could still put policing back among the professions, but the cultural change would be to put the PMC as a whole back as benefiting the public good. A PMC career not as a sinucure as the haves and have-nots are further halved.
Midway through high school, kids could be guided into any number of careers, instead of high school as just a pen to keep kids off the streets, and those with an aptitude for law enforcement are started on that path. Why not ROTC for cops? If nothing else, catch the bad apples early.
Where is “here”?
Fuck off you pompous twat
I think the European system makes getting a degree a lot less dependent on being rich/going into debt so that needs to be fixed in America as well.
No idea why you listed No 3 as a negative. Yes, potential policemen should be willing to spend years. We expect that of our doctors, why not our policemen?
Also, it’s not like a bachelor’s degree is useless except for being a policemen, so it’s not wasted time.
Amendment: we don’t expect cops to actually clean up anything. We just expect them to keep the lid on the pressure cooker of a failed society.
This was a huge eye opener for me, having moved from the US to Europe a few years ago. Previously, I would have been in the chorus calling for reforms in supervision, training, and accountability.
I no longer believe that. It’s irrelevant.
American culture is rotten. It turns its back on its marginalized and vulnerable. There is no safety net. You work to keep from falling into the hole of the abandoned. If you fall in the hole, either through your own failing or random happenstance, you’re on your own. You are expected to get out of the hole entirely by your own effort.
And it’s the job of the police to guard the edge of the hole.
All the talk of retraining and reforming the police is a waste of breath, because the people outside the hole have been taught to be terrified of the people inside the hole, and that the police are the line of defense. As long as this cultural framework persists, the people outside the hole will accept almost any behavior and action by the police as long as it keeps them safe from the scary people inside the hole.
It doesn’t work like that here. There are social-assistance systems and mental health professionals and drug-treatment agencies and other specialists whose job it is to engage with the broken and struggling people who need assistance in their lives. In the US, the only interface these people typically have with the state is the police, and the only role of the police is to ensure that these people do not cause trouble for the people outside the hole.
Where I live in Europe, the job of the police is much, much narrower. They are also much better trained, with a two year academy on top of requiring a college degree, but even this is deceptive. In the US, six months of training covers an impossibly broad range of topics, considering the absurd number of issues the police are expected to be first responders for. In my region, two years of training is much more focused, on a smaller range of responsibility.
A recent example from the news, to illustrate the difference: We saw a news report that an unstable individual had entered a shopping area brandishing a knife and threatening civilians. The police descended on the location and established a perimeter. Then … they waited. They kept people away, and nobody got close to the man. They moved the perimeter as the guy wandered around in a bubble. It took hours. Eventually the guy just got tired, and they were able to detain him without any struggle or injury. And they took him to hospital, not to jail.
This is how it should work. But in the US, it will never happen like that, as long as the people outside the hole see the crazy man with the knife as (a) less than human and (b) an inconvenience that’s delaying their visit to the froyo shop.
They may cluck their tongues when the police rush in and club the guy into submission, but then they go buy their froyo and never think about it again.
Addendum: I don’t want to be misunderstood here; I’m not taking the side of the police, suggesting that good intentions have been corrupted by a diseased national culture. Rather, it’s that the opportunity to exert power over those who cannot fight back will naturally attract the worst kinds of people to the work. It’s a vicious cycle.
I knew three people back in the US who became cops, all with stated positive intent. Two were military and wanted to continue service.
One of the three quit within a few years, disgusted at what was expected. The second was forced out; he attempted to push back within the system, reporting violations of policy and racist colleagues, and was quickly branded a troublemaker. The third embraced his inner asshole and is still a cop today.
The entire system is the problem — not just the police, but the culture they serve. One cannot fix one part of it without addressing everything.
Which is part of why I’m no longer there.
I did not mean to imply that this was your position, and I apologize if this is how my reply came off.
It is, however, my opinion, that what I describe is the basic problem. Too many people seem to be of the belief that the police will only mess with “those people” and that as long the police are doing so, they have no problems with the police. What the people with those types of attitudes, who tend to be predominantly Republican but who IMHO are more akin to sheep these days rather than elephants, don’t realize is that even though it’s less likely to happen to them, they are still at risk of ending up on the wrong end of an encounter with the police. Democrats realize there is a problem, but as the whole “defund the police” thing shows, are too disorganized to effectively make the necessary changes, even when they hold the offices needed to make effective changes (chief of police, the person / legislative body who hires the chief of police, the legislatures in charge of regulating police unions, and judges making rulings on cases before them regarding police unions).
The problem with that is 1) two career families and 2) people change jobs. If people are homeowners, they can’t pick up and move. If you own a home in a city and every town in the area has an “only residents” rule, ypur boss knows you can’t quit. You know you can’t quit. Ypu have to advance where you are, if you are to advance at all. Its a horrible feeling. Also, if your spouse works you can’t find a home that balances the commute: they will always have the long drive, because you have to live where you work.
I think one key problem are that so many LEOs come from LEO families. Literally 75% 9f the boys and a good chunk of the girls do a short stint in the military and then into law enforcement. The wives work for local government in some capacity, if they work. The macho, us vs them, military mindset is mutigenerational.
I don’t know if I’ve ever known a police officer who wasn’t from a police officer family. Dad, uncles, someone. Usually lots of them.
Is there a practical solution, or are us poor Americans in our benighted dystopia just screwed?
Kansas City, MO had that rule. The state legislature passed a law revoking it.
This is part of the problem. You don’t know the difference between the words “police” and “peace”? Or have you been conned into thinking they are interchangeable? What are you going to be conned into next, “Love officer”?
It’s the term used as a blanket term for any policeman, sheriff, constable, special agent, etc… Look at the second paragraph:
Wikipedia doesn’t teach me English.