I don't think the problem is a select few American police officers, I feel its too widespread to blame it on a few bad cops. Without to sound predudice I think the problem IS cultural.
It seems to be something related to American egos that is accelerated 1000x when moved into a position of authority like a police officer.
I'm in the UK, and yes we have our problems however it seems reasoning or social skills of our officers are night and day and reflect behaviour observed of society as a whole.
I'm not sure it's entirely possible to dismiss cultural difference in the opposite direction, however. The Police Activity channel on YouTube has tons of unedited bodycam footage from officer-involved shootings and other events across America:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMYxKMh3prxnM_4kYZuB3g
I'd encourage you to watch the entire list of videos to get a sense for what policing is like in parts of America, and what circumstances lead to the use of deadly force. Some of them are difficult to watch, but it showcases both good and bad examples of how to handle extremely dangerous situations.
It's not an enviable job - the number of videos that start out as a routine traffic stop with the cop having amiable conversation, and then rapidly escalate to a situation where the suspect is pulling a gun on the officer, is truly mind-blowing.
The US has the highest gun ownership (1.2 per capita), double the country next on the list.
When police officers from Europe come to visit, the first thing that surprise them is how tense the police is. They are constantly in fear of getting shot.
Reducing civilian gun ownership would help a lot to reduce violence, cops and non cops alike.
> The US has the highest gun ownership (1.2 per capita), double the country next on the list.
And, looking at the list [1], gun ownership does not seem to correlate highly with crimes involving guns. Honduras is #55 according to Wikipedia, Canada is #7. So why aren't Canadian cops constantly in fear for their life, but Hondurans are? It does not seem to be the number of guns.
It'll still be a nice thing, I guess. But it's hard to do and takes decades to have impact if you don't have a very compliant population.
One issue is that in almost every other country, handgun ownership is much more restricted. A police officer is much less likely to be surprised by someone pulling out a hunting rifle or shotgun. You can't just carry one of those around in your glove compartment or in a concealed holster.
Those shootings almost never involve CCW-holders. It's often people with prior felony convictions who own firearms illegally.
In Canada there are lots of gang members who carry illegal handguns. We just don't have the same degree of poverty as some parts of the US (even though our GDP/capita is significantly lower).
Can't help but see US policing demeanour come off as trying to maintain a dominance and show off the alpha. Undermine it and there seems to be conflict.
I can approach a UK officer and undermine their authority publicly, swear and hold contempt, question their immediate presence. Joke and jest about them to their face, name call, occasional swearing and calling them pigs routinely isn't too uncommon. I have done most these things on night outs without fear to my safety or rights.
Policing is definitely different between the US and UK but so are the people behind the uniform. Bigger egos exist in US policing disproportionately.
After watching these videos, I think a big problem might be: court ruling are so severe that criminals have nothing to lose when they face arrest. So they try to shoot their way out.
This article misses the point. These types of "cultural" issues are important but secondary- the issue is that the police are breaking laws and getting away with it because of qualified immunity. They need to be held accountable, otherwise is the culture really going to change?
I disagree. The warrior culture of policing sets the baseline for all behaviour. Officers justify lawbreaking to one another out of solidarity. The belief that “it’s a war out there and enemies can jump out at any moment” underlies the concept that the law is secondary to officer survival.
When you create a proper guardian police force, officers become friendly and respected community members; they become good neighbours. What then stops them from committing crimes against members of the public is the same thing that stops most family members from committing crimes against one another: a sense of belonging, investment, and care for a community. The best example of this style of policing that I can think of is the classic small town police in small town dramas or sitcoms like Corner Gas [1]. Notice how the police officers eat at the local diner which serves as a third place [2] for the community.
Of course, the disappearance of third places from American social life is another big factor in this complicated puzzle.
a BBQ owner who had been feeding them for free for years
That's concerning, isn't it? There are federal and state statutes about bribery and gratuities, and the fact that police officers took him up on the offer day by day is worrying for many reasons. And at the end of the day it didn't even help him.
I saw a video of police breaking up looting by rushing in and hitting everyone they could with their batons. When that's the plan and the people in the charge think it's a good plan that's the root of the issue.
To send people out there to do that and then charging them with crimes if they go too far seems a bit hypocritical to me. It needs to be a top down change where the police use the least violence possible and have the least amount of confrontation possible.
I think the underlying problem here is that we accept the trade of hitting people with batons to protect property. It's priced into the insurance. To make progress, we have to move away from the mentality that this is acceptable. There will be pushback because a large amount of infrastructure is required. Everything that can be stolen will have to have a traceable serial number. We'll have to look for those serial numbers on things like eBay and the Amazon marketplace. Insurance costs will go up. The customer experience for people buying things will go down. Massive changes in how we think about the world will have to occur. But it seems like the direction we have to go -- we don't need to be damaging people's bodies (you only get one!) just because they're stealing a watch. Prosecute them. Don't let them make money from their crime. But we have to draw the line somewhere.
(The whole arresting protestors thing also confuses me. Free speech is the foundation of our country. We should be celebrating people risking their lives to fight for an issue that matters in the middle of a pandemic. But instead, we "kettle" them, hit them with batons, and send them to jail. It's not good, and shows that our society has a LONG way to go. What's nice about being so far from the goal, though, is that small changes can have a big impact. The first 99% of the work is as hard as the next 1% after all.)
Officers move in a clear way, they do not pre-emptively arm themselves, they do not get hung up on non-violent stragglers, they take their time.
There have been two days of protests in London which are explicitly anti-police, have been very passionate, have had flashes of violence, but have NOT escalated.
Aside from the racial aspect, a lot of videos I've seen from US recently have just been crap in a professional sense.
Culture is _the_ problem, everything stems from the culture.
Also qualified immunity only applies to civil liability, it does nothing to protect police from criminal prosecution (which still doesn't happen, because culture).
Are you sure it doesn't protect police from criminal prosecution? I don't see any mention of a distinction between civil or criminal violations in anything I have read about it. Furthermore this case[0] it seems to me could have been criminally prosecuted if not for qualified immunity.
I think the focus on qualified immunity is a little bit misplaced. If something is explicitly illegal, qualified immunity doesn't apply.
There are several reasons that police get away with breaking laws, but I think the core of it is the holding from Castle Rock v. Gonzalez that the police are neither required to enforce the law nor protect the public. Do we really expect the police to follow up on each other's violations if there's no duty to do their jobs at all?
On the flip side, the cultural change will be very slow if police keep feeling pressured or entitled to break laws because of the warrior mentality, horribly injure or kill someone, and then get severely punished. I think that qualified immunity might be more important (because a change to that will force departments to change how they police) but it's a bit much to say that the article misses the point, especially when it was written in 2015 specifically about the "warrior mindset" not "how to end police brutality."
> Sue Rahr, a former sheriff [...], put it this way: “We do our recruits no favor if we train them to approach every situation as a war. To do so sets them up to create unnecessary resistance and risk of injury.”
If you treat everyone like they want to kill you, you telegraph that through your actions and mannerisms, and induce the very escalation you are worried about.
There are a few issues. One thing that I don't see mentioned very often is that a police officer is actually very rarely necessary. But they are called in anyway. There is a kind of litigiousness to American culture. Two people mad at each other? "Watch me call the cops." Someone nodding off near the front door? Call the cops. Domestic dispute? Call the cops. The cops are not really useful in any of these situations and, because of all of the problems mentioned here, often escalate the situation and make things worse.
Cops frequently end up playing the role of social worker, mental health counselor, relationship mediator, addiction counselor... and with their incredibly violent and often racist attitudes the result is predictable.
I am glad that finally these issues are being addressed. They have been festering for decades.
Nothing wrong with having one number to call for help. The problem is when only one kind of responder responds. That happens because we have too many armed, bored police and too few of other kinds of social services.
A major problem I see is the idea of only one kind of social adjustment role: the uniformed police officer.
There are situations where the warrior mindset are needed. We do need people who can deal with extremely dangerous situations involving lethal force.
However, many, many situations need social workers more than they need warriors. If anything the warrior could back up their unarmed counterpart.
Why aren’t there other roles with different capabilities that work in concert with warriors?
I’m not sure it makes sense to only seek to retrain when probably a great share of existing police officers could be replaced with more effective counterparts with some of the same powers but completely different skills and assignments.
It is teams of skilled specialists that solve difficult problems, why do we have only one person to mend so much of society’s challenging circumstances?
It's good that those officers "get it", but the fact that we need people to act as social workers but train them to be warriors instead is a huge problem. Even the ones that manage to push past that and understand that a warrior's posture isn't always appropriate don't have the training to deal with actual social work.
I have personal experience where a uniformed, armed police officer came to a situation and did nothing but offer their presence in the face of tragedy.
The situation did not need a gun—or the ability to confront violence. It needed someone brave and empathetic and this person did that and I’ll never forget it.
They don't know what "social worker" means then - social workers have the task of helping, not murdering, people. We should hold the cops to the standard they hold us: if there is not proof of innocence, or if they have the wrong pigmentation, or if they are near a citizen having a bad day, or the moon has a phase, its justified and heroic to fuck their life, no questions.
Given that, I'm curious to know if anything has changed in the last five years, or if the article still accurately describes police training today. I would guess that it does.
Where besides the US do you see gang violence making cities deadlier than a warzone? The militarization of police seems to be a function of adapting to the job they're responsible for.
No, it's a fight fire with fire mentality that causes militarization. From a European perspective the lack of preventative measures could seem laughable if it wasn't so serious. Mental health for starters. Gun availability obviously too. Police here (OK, not all Police traditions do this here either) take deescalation training far more than gun training. There's a few case studies on French-Dutch comparisons in that regard that should be enlightening.
You don't need to win in a gunfight in order to win.
I don't think there is a European perspective. We haven't had anything close to the gang crime problem in the US in a long time, and when we did have it, guns weren't a thing.
It's obvious that there are lots of issues, but "look, we don't have them because we do X" doesn't work when we didn't have anything comparable in the first place. I'm certain that we would see very different policies if London, Paris or Berlin had the murder rate of Chicago, and it wouldn't be "let's spend more money on mental health".
Gang crime is only one small piece of why the police in the US are the way they are.
It's not hard to find stories about police brutality and police corruption in areas far from any gang activity (small towns in the midwest, for instance). You can also find stories about police departments in similarly small towns that have been able to obtain serious military-grade equipment that they definitely don't need.
And even separate from all that, you have things like civil asset forfeiture, where the police think it's totally reasonable and OK to just steal people's stuff, without the people being even suspected of any crime, and the law (in many places) allows it.
This is all part of a culture that tells cops they are above the law, they have the power, and everyone else just needs to bow down and accept that.
Then you combine that with the serious, organized efforts white supremacist groups have gone to over the years to essentially take control of the police force...
Yeah, the biggest "gang crime problem" here is the gang in blue.
> This is all part of a culture that tells cops they are above the law, they have the power, and everyone else just needs to bow down and accept that.
Certainly, I agree with that. And the US culture is very different from European cultures (which is not a surprise, given how quickly the country changes and how young it is). Comparing it to Europe where we're sitting on a very different (and much more stable still) culture with very different traditions, a completely different approach to individualism vs collectivism etc, isn't helpful, and you won't get anywhere if you dismiss 99% of the difference and then say (yes, I'm exaggerating, and no, I don't mean you specifically but people who like to point to Europe in comparison) "well, clearly, it's because the citizens don't have guns and the police wear friendlier uniforms".
Its not very different, it just went overboard with parts of protestant ethics. And you can quite literally see the price of this. However, seeing and analyzing your own problems and wrong views is always harder than seeing others. Especially when you consider some of the ideas that lead to those outcomes as somehow fundamental cornerstones (right to guns for instance, but also the ethics of eye for an eye).
American isn't changing faster or slower than any other place either, it just is favoring certain ethics that are counterproductive to a peaceful society. Reminds me of certain other fundamentalist places in the world. It of course makes sense it would turn out this way, many early settlers went across the Atlantic precisely to be able to practice their fundamentalist versions of protestantism. Some of that carries of into this I am sure.
Seriously, take up some literature on deescalation tactics for police, and in particular evidence based effectiveness of such methods in comparisionto other tactics.
> Its not very different, it just went overboard with parts of protestant ethics.
That's a small part of it, yes. But mostly, it's very individualistic, and it's very different from European cultures in that regard which will obviously result in very large differences in results.
> American isn't changing faster or slower than any other place either
Errr, yes it is. The demographic make-up of America has been determined by waves of immigration, that changes culture. And it has been happening much faster than in other places. You're rewriting history and I don't understand your motives.
You should read up on Protestantism in Europe. Netherlands in particular if you want to understand American Protestantism. So many settled east(ern Europe) as well as west. Those story don't get the same footlight as American ones, but if you dig a little, it's there. It's really not different.
Migration is similarly not exclusive to America. Tons happens in Europe too, we're humans after all! Moreover, country and language borders tend to create different spaces for local differentiation, which is something that is much rarer in the US due to the fact that Americans (almost) all speak English. It's no accident you will find most variance in places people do not speak English (Cajun culture, Spanish-American culture) or a very different English (South<>North, poor neighborhoods/cities vs affluent areas).
I know many Americans won't (want to) see it that way, but yeah, that's precisely what we did. What you see in the US is not effective, it is however very old-testament. I guess it makes at least some feel better, fighting fire with fire.
> I know many Americans won't (want to) see it that way, but yeah, that's precisely what we did.
No, it's really not, and "you're American, you just don't want to see it" is not an argument. And if it was, it wouldn't work, because I'm not American and am not living in the US. Born, raised and still living in Europe.
That's how I know that we never had anything like the US situation in recent history. Hell, even during the world wars when criminals would've had a field day, it wasn't anywhere close.
Actually I believe the biggest reason could be mundane. As far as I understand most US police officers are working alone. So even one unarmed sucker punch means game over. I would be scared.
In Europe police patrol is usually 2 police officers, so there is much less worry, which allows you to deal with the situations more relaxed.
Us cities aren’t deadlier than a warzone. I used to go to nightclubs in the most violent neighborhood in dc in the middle of the crack epidemic as a naive suburban white kid and never felt unsafe and the worst thing that ever happened was my car getting broken into. I’ve been to places in the developing world where drug gangs drive around on trucks with mounted machine guns. There’s nowhere in the US like that.
Statistically it’s not even close. Even in really dangerous cities like Chicago or New Orleans, they pale in comparison to how many people are dying in Syria or even in places like San Salvador — and even San Salvador isn’t that bad.
Where aside from the US do you see police shooting unarmed people?
The fact is that police decided to escalate their response to gun crime is entirely on them. The desire to turn things into a "war" between police and non-police validates the decision to use guns against police. After all they're soldiers.
Further more the consistently abusive behavior of police and complete lack of consequences reinforces to abused communities that police are no different from any other gang, with the exception that they will never be arrested. That again justifies treating them as just another violent gang, and so use of equivalent force against them is reasonable.
Police also are more violent, and push harsher charges, against specific communities. By doing that they've established that they are not operating fairly, and that lack of fairness further establishes police as an enemy.
That kind of makes his point though, doesn't it? Those places usually also see the militarization of police, or straight up the military taking on law enforcement duties.
Spending the night hanging out with people from Syria I think they might disagree with your depiction of US cities. Measurements in mm are different than those in lbs.
The Cartels import weapons by the container load, and not from the US. And that's not including the ones they steal or just appropriate from their own government.
Has anyone considered a PTSD epidemic among the LE community. These people are sent out day after day to possibly hostile situations. Usually it’s not good news they come across due to the nature of the job. Some of them have likely seen colleagues be seriously injured or killed. As these protests have shown they face widespread hostility even when they haven’t actually done anything themselves individually. Cross that with the usual mix of mental issues present in a population and it seems to me like you have a situation where people forced to the edge snap. Like other roles in society they can’t complain about what’s wrong with them or they risk losing their careers and family’s financial security. Empathy cuts both ways, yes government injustice isn’t right but if we don’t understand people’s circumstances we blind ourselves to a possible solution.
I don't recall asking you for what I should or should not do. And in any case, I'm not "dismissing" people who are angry or upset. The case looks pretty clear cut to me: George Floyd's death is tragic and those responsible should be prosecuted. Literally _everyone_ agrees with this. Nor does the article "dismiss" anything. The article presents the most viable, adult way out that I have seen suggested thus far.
The fundamental truth of the situation is that you can't disband the police, and "defunding" it, partially or fully, is not a serious solution to the problems we face as a society. Anyone who suggests this with a straight face doesn't want solutions, they want to continue to be angry and upset.
We can (and should) reform it. We can (and should) train it better. We can (and should) hire better people to work in it. We can (and should) fire/prosecute bad apples faster where there's evidence of wrongdoing.
You CAN'T DO any of this by stigmatizing the police profession or reducing funding. It's not a serious suggestion. You also can't do that by burning a police car or looting a Target. I hope these truths are self-evident enough, but if not, I don't know what to tell you.
Given the structural issues with police departments, training, unions, prosecutors, the history of policing, a complete disassembly and start from fresh principles may well be warranted.
I don't need to remind you where this particular road ends. As someone who grew up under a communist regime, believe me when I tell you this: you won't like it.
Yes, I am pro-police, and anti-looting. That categorically doesn't mean what you think it means though. I support racial justice. I support police reform, demilitarization, and pushing back against police unions. I think unjustified police brutality, like in the case of George Floyd, should be prosecuted, and it undermines the respect many people have for the police profession. This respect is a _requirement_ for the police to be effective. I also think Chauvin should have been fired in disgrace years ago.
My suggestion was in regards to the rather extreme and unjustified comments the public officials were making (and continue to make) towards the police. I hope it is obvious to everyone that without police NYC will be utterly fucked within 24 hours. I stand by those suggestions. If push comes to shove they should go on strike. The vast majority of them are good men and women, and they deserve to be respected.
In other words, I'm not 15 years old, I see nuance, and I want some real, lasting solutions to these issues. Sue me.
Being calm and balanced is good, yes. But that's not the same thing as saying that anger is not justified, and that it automatically means that the angry person should be dismissed and their anger treated as a symptom of an immature or unbalanced person.
Vore was simply noting that, given the current circumstances, m0zg's original comment could very easily be read as saying, "Ah, good, here's someone who's actually worth listening to. Not like those angry, irrational protesters."
The protesters aren't really suggesting anything realistic though. Or if they are, their message is completely drowned out. I feel like society is united around the murder of George Floyd. Now is the time to figure out solutions. Whoever is instigating the riots, however, is driving a wedge into that unity. In the atmosphere of widespread, severe unrest, most people would _easily_ prefer safety over justice. It's been shown again and again. Whoever is driving this wedge knows exactly what they're doing.
In several places that I've seen, there have been specific lists of demands that the protesters have given. In general, they center around bringing to justice those officers who have participated in brutality, and effectively reforming the police in their municipalities so that these situations cannot arise again.
Frankly, wherever the police are instigating greater violence, they are making more certain that the protests will go on longer and get more publicity than in places where they're being allowed to be peaceful.
Well, many footages show police using excessive force on peaceful protestors: rubber bullets, pepper sprays, shoving people to ground. As you said, I have a feeling that these officers know exactly what they're doing.
I literally never said that. I said to not dismiss the angry people. Of course people can talk about it calmly, but putting it on a pedestal as "Very good, adult take" is absolutely patronizing to those affected.
It seems to be something related to American egos that is accelerated 1000x when moved into a position of authority like a police officer.
I'm in the UK, and yes we have our problems however it seems reasoning or social skills of our officers are night and day and reflect behaviour observed of society as a whole.