Matt_W
4517
These things specifically seem like smart ideas. This is what local politicians here in San Diego are latching onto as action points:
You’re like an expert at trolling by straw-manning. The protests are an expression of angst, rage, and despair at the injustice of decades and centuries. It’s ridiculous to expect that every protest sign will by unified on a particular policy agenda. That doesn’t mean that no one has thought about one.
magnet
4518
There several countries where police do not carry firearms. Maybe we could learn something from them.
Is 1/10 in officers or 1/10 in money spent? Because I’m pretty sure all that military hardware is expensive as shit, and most police doesn’t need it.
Menzo
4520
The only people who say “all lives matter” are people who are so afraid of conflict they want to pretend that racism doesn’t exist in America.
Not all of them are racists themselves. There are plenty of people who just can’t deal with conflict at all.
Highly dependent on unit/region. I grew up with a girl who became a cop and ended up retiring early. She became depressed after spending so much time at traffic accident scenes and dealing with the aftermath.
Ironically, this is a problem with Black Lives Matters as well. The name would imply all black lives effected by violence, but that’s not the case. Reading the main webpage it is clear the scope is specific to state and vigilante violence against blacks. I do still question that narrow focus, but that’s based on my experience which isn’t the same as others.
I mentored a black girl for a few years, taught her a trade and helped pull her out of a bad situation. Poverty basically. She was doing awesome and I loved her. She was shot and killed. It wasn’t a cop this time, but a black man. I wish the cops would have been there to stop him.
I know that this tragedy plays out way more often than the cop one and much of it is rooted in the same racist past. It’s all connected. A part of me feels that it doesn’t play the same because no white people were involved… and economics. Maybe for that reason the Black Lives Matter movement needs the narrow focus to have a chance of success.
I just don’t know how you can produce a cop that can step into such violence and stop it without breeding some violence into them.
To be fair, not carrying firearms in a country that encourages open carry of firearms is more or less abdication of any ability to compel citizens to do anything, since all the crazies would do is wave guns around and say “make me”.
Probably don’t have quite the same gun problem though…
Menzo
4524
That’s a good list, but I’d add:
- Eliminate no-knock warrants
- Demilitarize police
- Require body-cams and immediate firing for anyone who intentionally disables theirs
Menzo
4525
The thing that we can learn is that the 2nd Amendment screws us. It’d be naive to disarm police in a country where so many others have guns.
Matt_W
4526
Yeah, I agree. I’d also like work toward elimination of union influence over police hiring/firing, ending qualified immunity, and establishing civilian oversight committees with disciplinary authority to review police activity.
Step in to what violence? As I commented a couple of days ago, police killed > 1000 citizens last year, while police themselves suffered only 47 deliberate violent deaths last year. 47 is less than one a week across the entire country. It rather seems like the police are bringing the violence with them.
Police approach traffic stops as if they are life and death struggles, because the rule of policing is if you have any trepidation at all go ahead and kill people. It’s insane, and it certainly isn’t the public’s fault.
Let me be honest i’m not convinced the militarization of police is unrelated to the declining deaths among police officers.
Like all problems police are being tasked with too many jobs because there aren’t enough social services around. Basically the perfect solution isn’t just deescalating violence by police but enabling mental heath capacities and facilities, actual solutions to homelessness and the overlap between homelessness and mental health issues, the war and drugs and criminalization of drug use, lack of opportunities in certain communities, ect.
I go back and forth on this. The bar for these needs to be incredibly high, but I’m not sure eliminating them entirely is wise. There are definitely times and places where giving the bad guys a free shot at you is not a desirable outcome. But damn, you better be 100% sure that the people in there are going to shoot you on sight and that there are no innocents present, and establishing that high of a standard may just not be possible.
Yup. Unfortunate, but true.
magnet
4530
Sorry, I should have said “where police do not routinely carry firearms”. They are still available for exceptional circumstances, sometimes only for specially trained officers.
Police do not routinely carry firearms in Iceland, and they have a fairly high gun ownership rate.
Is this a real thing, or just Twitter being Twitter?
It’s not the hardware so much as the psychology. How does Iceland’s gun violence rate compare to that in the US?
The problem with this list is that much of it is toothless. It amounts to saying try harder not to use violence, but largely leaves it up to the police to decide if the cop in question tried hard enough.
You have to take away their immunity from civil judgement, take away their practical immunity from criminal judgement, take away most of their weapons, and take them out of the equation for much of what they are doing now.
The first time I ran across the ‘8 can’t wait’ idea was on Twitter, where someone was explaining why it won’t work. I will try to find that tweet but here is a similar one.
Menzo
4535
Yeah I agree with this and it’s been talked about up-thread in the discussion about “defunding police.” We need to stop making a police patrol-person the first responder for every situation. Or at least pair them with social workers who are the ones who initiate contact for marginalized citizens - the homeless, mentally ill, disabled, etc.
Menzo
4536
You might be right, and it’s a complicated issue. Perhaps eliminating qualified immunity would help to address the times where police are just straight-up negligent and bust into an innocent person’s home, or recklessly fire upon inhabitants.
But the reality is, criminal or no criminal, if someone busts down your door, I think you should have the right to defend yourself. There’s no way you can process 30 people yelling “POLICE!” as they break into your house and throw flashbangs.
So maybe allow no-knock warrants in extreme situations, but they’re not allowed to charge anyone inside for defending themselves in the process.
