Which countries have functional, law-abiding, non-hostile law enforcement...

Great Debates
21
  • what polar bear said in #10

BOAs are a newish addition law enforcement (?) in the Netherlands and the question of what exactly they are is a good one.

They are not police. They are not armed. But if they’re meant to be enforcing laws, they run into trouble because they have no force. They’ve been asking for weapons because they feel unsafe in their work.

From my own experience + the videos I’ve seen lately, I don’t think we’re on the right track with what we want from BOAs. If we want police officers, we should train police officers and if we want something else, we should come up with something else, define it and train people to do that.

TL;dr: Don’t look to the Netherlands for answers on this one.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A5010 using Tapatalk

22

I was reading a thread a few days ago asking black Britons for their experiences with the police; many said they had been hassled and even arrested when white guys around them were being ignored doing the same thing as them, but they also said they’d have no worries about calling the police if they were in trouble, or would even just ask them for directions, and I think that’s definitely a big positive factor.

Though there certainly are acts of violence, including a few fatal shootings and incidents like police tasing one of the guys on the local police race relations advisory panel due, apparently, to misidentification, most interactions people have here with the police are neutral or positive.

Being a white woman, I’m not in the best situation to judge, but I did work as a security guard for a while, where quite a few of my colleagues were black British or black African immigrants, and the areas I worked in were very diverse. I called the cops quite a lot in that job, and I never saw any conflict between police and my colleagues (though some of the immigrant guys could be reluctant to call) or any evidence of excess when they did arrest anyone. Even though I saw quite a few occasions when drunk friends of girlfriends of the person being arrested were getting right up in an officer’s face and yelling, unless it turned physical police just tried to talk them down or let their sober mates calm them. A co-worker from Ghana even used to criticise our cops for their non-violent approach, saying he found it boring…

Obviously I only got to see a snapshot of people’s lives, not enough to pick out subtler biases, but no-one ever seemed unduly scared; they were worried about being arrested, not injured or killed.

23

As Fiendish Astronaut says, the police in the UK are unarmed (unless they need to be armed) and they act as though they are part of the community rather than outside it. That makes a huge difference IMO.

I live in Bristol where the recent statue-washing incident took place. The police were widely praised and the senior office in charge of policing the protests was widely hailed as a kind of folk hero —even by the protestors.

I’ve recently moved back to the UK after 25 years in California and the difference in the demeanour of the police is astounding. I have multiple encounters with the police every week and they are always pleasant, smiling and respectful. Even when you watch them with a bad guy, their stance is neutral, their hands are tucked in their vests and they seek to de-escalate at every opportunity.

By contrast, every interaction I had with police in California, even in leafy, affluent suburbia felt a little bit dangerous. The officer would have his hand on his gun and would demand unearned respect —deference even —while offering none in return, even for .

I accept that, as a middle-aged white dude, I get different treatment than minority and immigrant populations get but, even in my misspent youth when I was stopped and searched on multiple occasions, they were nothing less than respectful.

Even in my worst encounter with the police here — it’s a long story but it ended with my apprehension after a long chase —the officers showed grace and humour. I’ll always remember “My wife hates it when little wankers like you get my shirts dirty.” In parts of America I might have ended up dead.

The British police are far from perfect but they are in a different universe than the police I have encountered in America.

That was thirteen years ago just after a major terrorist attack so, while it was not justified, it was understandable and the police took steps to prevent it happening again.

The police in the UK rarely kill the people they are policing —even bad people — and when they do it gets a lot of news coverage.

The population of the USA is about 5x the population of the UK. Over the period covered in the video (11 years), there were 26 killings by the police in the UK and 16,900 in the USA. That’s more than 5 times as many.

24

The top leadership of police services in the UK have been trying to make all the right noises (not least by trying to rebrand themselves as “services” rather than “forces”):

https://www.college.police.uk/What-we-do/Ethics/Pages/archive_DO_NOT_DELETE/Code-of-Ethics.aspx

It may be relevant to this that we don’t have a multiplicity of police organisations and command structures: one police force/service in any one part of the country with a clear and direct line of public accountability of professional police leaders to a relatively high political level.

But whether that has totally converted all ranks in the face of “canteen culture” and the tendency to stick together with one’s mates under pressure is another matter. When there are deaths in custody or during other interactions with the police, prosecutors can be reluctant to charge and juries reluctant to convict - there is rarely absolute cast-iron proof of guilt.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/11/as-a-black-man-joining-the-police-in-the-80s-made-me-question-my-sanity

There have been no successful prosecutions for deaths in British police custody since 1969 – here’s why

25

Does your police force see its role as

  1. Maintainance of peace and public order
    OR
  2. The pacification of the populace.

You will get a different answer. The erstwhile Royal Irish Constabulary and Royal Ulster Constabulary were examples of the later, they were professionals and great atb their jobs, but not really liked.
The trouble seems to be many US Police forces are supposed to be 1, but act like 2.

26

As I recollect that was part of something called Operation Trident by the London police. This was an operation to deal with drug gang related gun crime that was seriously affecting the Afro-Caribbean community. Murders were being committed on the streets, there were drive by shootings. Something had to be done. The intelligence was that Mark Duggan was suspected of being armed and on his way to a gangland hit. He was intercepted by armed police and he died when he resisted arrest. I don’t doubt that the police mis-handled the situation and seriously failed to deal with the copy cat disorder that quickly spread in the days that followed. But to suggest that this was a man killed by the police because of racial prejudice? The facts don’t fit.

Moreover the riots were far from protests outraged at this incident. Most were teenagers taking advantage of a situation where the police did not respond fast enough to deal with public order. It was opportunistic looting to liberate Nikes and expensive smartphones as a result of poor co-ordination by the London police who screwed up.

The history and culture of the police in the UK is that they are part of the community and enforce the law for the benefit of the community they serve. But sometimes they get it wrong and people get angry.

We have learnt a lot about the excesses of policing in the US.

But surely it can’t be bad policing everywhere?

27

To clarify a little on this: he was armed, and may have been on his way to a hit (his cousin had recently been murdered by a rival gang). Whether he resisted arrest is the part that was disputed, with early police reports being inconsistent with eye witnesses.
One officer had claimed he’d been shot at by Duggan, and the bullet had lodged in his radio. However, the bullet was later found to have been fired from a police-issued firearm.

This is true, and shameful.

IME virtually no-one in the riots knew anything about the Duggan incident. It was opportunistic.

The best context you can give is that income inequality and social mobility in the UK are comparable to the US; much worse than most of Europe. So there are a lot of young people, particularly in London, who are not invested at all in the city they see every day, and are quite frustrated.
I’m not saying this excuses anything – the riots make me angry to this day – I’m just trying to understand it a little better.

And in fairness to the police, smartphones were a decisive factor in the chaos, for one of the first times. They enabled thousands to suddenly decide to be in a particular place, sharing information on the location of police as they went. Police were not ready for that.

28

Canada? Really?

https://news.yahoo.com/canada-indigenous-chief-battered-during-220534395.html