> Finally, officers said they were asked to handle too much; they were constantly thrown at tangled societal problems like mental health breakdowns or drug overdoses, they said, for which they were ill-equipped — then blamed when things went wrong.
Sounds like they've got some common ground with the "defund the police" folks, if they'd listen a bit.
it would not have attracted any attention. it's hard to say if a boring statement like "allocate funds correctly" that inspires no critical thinking at all is more or less productive than an inflammatory one like "defund the police!" that probably gets a lot of people thinking about the issue, while at the same time causing a lot of reactionary movements to said slogan that work against it's general goals, at least in the short term.
We have approximately 400 years of "black people should be treated equal to whites". 50+ since the Civil Rights Era of "hey, there's some systemic racial issues we need to address as a country". Sure, you can argue that "Black Lives Matter" is just too hard to understand, but it -has- brought attention to the issue.
>> they were constantly thrown at tangled societal problems like mental health breakdowns or drug overdoses
Shouldn't the EMT be called for a drug overdose? You know, someone to treat the patient rather than someone whose primary job would be to arrest them for illegal activity.
Related: I know an EMT and he says people they are there to help will sometimes attack them. That's a stressful job too.
> I know an EMT and he says people they are there to help will sometimes attack them.
And EMTs manage to do their jobs without weapons. Bet your friend also has stories about police interfering with EMTs doing their jobs and threatening violence.
God I wish they spent 6months learning to shoot. A friend of mine is a corrections deputy. Her first department ran her through a single range day where she was barely able to qualify.
Then she was sent to the state cop school, where they were to get two days of instruction, then quals.
She was worried, so I took her out for about 8 hours and taught her to shoot properly.
She went, and shot a perfect score, amd was given the marksman award for the class.
She has since gone on the embarrass most of the deputies she works with on their twice a year range days.
I am, on my best day, able to shoot at a USPSA B-class level. No grand master here. And I can shoot rings around her, all day, every day.
What makes you think they aren't listening? The problem is they're just further down into the nuts and bolts of the problem than the "defund the police" folks ever get, so it only looks like they aren't listening when they ignore infeasible or impractical ideas.
In most places that is the issues that the communities face. But Police like firefighters need to exist irrespective
of any current need, so what else would you have them do in the mean time? Maybe they need to up their training to include those items. They aren't just town guards.
So we give them budget, they sort of determine how most of it is spent. At least that is how it is in most places. If they are ill-equipped, isn't that sort of on them? Where did the training go?
This quote sounds like a bit too similar to the political proposal… maybe a cherry picked quote but doesn’t seem like something most police would say without prompt.
Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society, I honestly couldn't event imagine the stress.
Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis.
I've always had respect for cops because it's one of those jobs that I just know I could never ever do, props to those in our society that do that work.
For people replying to this comment, the point is, policing isn’t as dangerous as you might think. Certainly it isn’t risk free, but people perform many more dangerous jobs. Police deaths are often tragic and a result of human on human violence though, so it tends to spark a stronger reaction than “well, a giant tree fell on Jimmy and he died”. Still tragic but there are no “bad guys” in that scenario for a lumberjack, for example. Police also are supposedly serving their communities and there is a perceived nobility to the profession that makes deaths while in service to the community much more visible. It can even trend towards a bit of hero worship. Not judging the profession itself, there are a lot of human factors in the job and certainly, anyone who has dealt with conflict can attest that dealing with other people all day is a lot more stressful than many other professions in that list.
I wonder if the stress comes from how a police officer dies on the job rather than the absolute death rate of the profession.
Lumber harvesting is the most dangerous profession in the US but I imagine that most deaths would be described as "accidents". For example, someone cuts a leg with a chainsaw, a tree snaps in a weird way, someone gets pushed off a cliff.
Police officers, on the other hand, usually due to violence while interacting with other people.
In other words, a lumberjack, roofer, etc could think that they won't die today on the job because they are being careful, because there are safety protocols set by OHSA, etc. The same might not be true for police officers because there is little that they can do to address how others will interact with them.
In a sense, police officers might process their job more closely to how a soldier process their job than a lumberjack/roofer.
It’s important to understand that this includes everyone in policing even those who work behind a desk not just those that are near the front lines so to speak. The usbls collects it for the entire policing sector not just the job of police officer:
Tell that to my wife’s old deputy (she was a dispatcher), that took a 7.62 round from an AK in the ass. Or his buddy that was medically retired after that from fucking is his back getting the shot-in-ass guy out of the fire fight.
We know different cops. The only cops I've met are mildly racist and intellectually lazy. Sure they were occassionally nice to have a beer with. But then they'd start talking and leave no doubt they aren't one of the good apples.
Imagine getting a JIRA ticket thinking, "fucking Java bug, again. Only way to fix this is to yank the power cord out."
Honestly, delivery people have to put up with way more shit and don't have weapons, the law, nor even a union that has their back. That's a tough job.
I can imagine how they become this way. With most offenders being from minority groups it's hard to keep an open mind if you're having to chase after them every day. Even though these problems are societal, not really caused by the minorities themselves but rather lack of opportunities etc
But if you're on the business end of society's failures on a daily basis I can imagine how this changes one's opinion.
I've worked as a technical support agent and I really started to be afraid of our company's products, being confronted with the worst that could happen to them every day. The knowledge that the calls I was getting were only about 0.1% of products in the field was easy to forget.
I’ve had a completely different experience than you. Cops who I’ve known have been pretty normal, compassionate people. They routinely tell me the most important skill in effective law enforcement is your ability to communicate.
Honestly, what conversation can we have about policing with a person who thinks a delivery driver has a more dangerous life than a cop? Only thing I can tell you is I hope you have a lot of delivery drivers living next to you if police shortage becomes a reality and crime trajectory continues on the same path as in 2020 and 2021. Or perhaps your keyboard can be as effective in self-defense as it is in the spreading of nonsense.
The paranoid mentality that any call could kill you is the exact reason why so many unarmed black people are shot. If you can’t carry out a day’s work without the unreasonable fear that you will be shot, and any action makes you “fear for your life” so that why you emptied your clip into a car, then you shouldn’t be a cop. Cops needs to have cooler heads and this should be measured and verified before allowing them to carry weapons.
I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking. I fully support this because they know that they aren’t GI Joe.
> I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking.
This is a good point and one I think is missed. Police really do need more training. When departments started phasing out choke holds I think it was a mistake. The hold itself was not the problem, but lack of proper training.
I've read some proposals that want every police officer to be at a minimum a blue belt in BJJ. For perspective, that's a year or so of training. Someone going 3x/week means they will have 20-30 simulated fights PER week. That's how you get someone to stay relaxed in a stressful and physical situation.
Of course, when weapons are involved it's a different situation. But, in unarmed situation a person with a year+ of BJJ training will easily control the other person with little danger to either of them. And the LEO, knowing this, will not reach for their weapon first.
Police departments increasingly utilize military gear and tactics. I wish they would also "take" the UCMJ, rules of engagement, and Geneva conventions.
My opinion of cops has changed as i've gotten older. I used to think they had nothing better to do but bother me, the youth, but in hindsight they have too much to do and are expected to always be on, alert, and accountable. Something that takes a lot of courage. I respect them more, especially after the extremely divisive events of the past 2-3 years, riots, attacks, etc.
I have a different view. I saw a lot of friends lose their fathers and mothers to the system thanks to dirty cops. Being white in a poor (understatement) neighborhood was an enlightening experience.
The police are very powerful voices in local governments. They have too much power. I consider the number of police officers to be inversely proportional to how civilized a place is.
I grew up with cops. One of my parents was a cop - so we spent a lot of time with them when I was younger.
Trust me, a lot of them are not really that good of people. They’re often more broken and problematic than your random person. Substance abuse is very common and acting outside the law is also extremely common. I’ve seen many LEO’s beat their wives and drive drunk while having to go out and work on the same calls. Always a bit awkward when they have to respond to a call for one of their own - I should know, I was there.
As far as I can tell - most aren’t really that upstanding of citizens and the standards are pretty lax for what gets in. Some are genuinely nice and good people but I don’t see them last for very long because they move onto better things.
I've had a similar change of heart in that I value police a lot more than I did as a youth frustrated by irrational drug laws.
Unfortunately I still have experiences which prove to me that some police have nothing better to do than annoy otherwise law abiding people. It's like any group of people, there are good cops and there are bad cops.
Right, but it seems like many of the cops have the same perception.
Could be a case where better awareness of the statistics would actually improve the problem.
Also though, danger resulting from your own stupidity, from other peoples stupidity, and from other peoples malicious activities, hit different psychologically IME. I'm willing to bet consturction workers get a lot less of the third and a lot more of the first.
Maybe something that better training could help with a bit, but probably not fix. Also selecting people who are well suited for that sort of environment.
I don't want to say policing is not hard, every first responder has hard job because they are not sent to people who are completely fine -- usually the situation involves some kind of crime or distress or both.
But, the dangers, though present, are IMO largely overstated. There are 700 thousand officers in US and on any given day some of them must necessarily come into trouble. The statistics list about 360 officers getting killed in line of duty, annually. That is 1/700000 chance of getting killed every day, over 30 year career that would amount to 1 in 70 chance of getting killed on duty or about similar as dying from all other types of accidents, including car accidents.
Is that small? No, I don't think so, that is nothing to sneeze at. But is still a lot less than dying from some easily preventable diseases. So if you are Police officer and keep eating shit food it might be that the shit food is actually more dangerous to you than your job.
Going through Covid is statistically more dangerous than lifetime of being police officer. At least as an officer you are doing this (hopefully) for public good and you know and accept risks.
It is also less than probability of dying on some other types of duties.
The difference being, that policing is typically done when something already interesting happens with potentially a lot of cameras present on scene, then being investigated.
If you go to be a police officer or fireman or military, you understand your choices and the dangers you are facing. It should not be a surprise, nor it should be a reason to kill any person not to your liking, on sight.
You're also describing pizza delivery and convenience store cashier, but they don't have the legal ability to beat the shit out of their customers because someone wasn't fast enough / was too fast getting their wallets out.
In civilized countries where guns aren't ubiquitous most police call outs won't be for something that can kill them. It's bizarre to me that it's just normal in America to expect someone to have a gun. Also, let's not pretend a lot of them aren't doing it for the power trip.
I'm of the belief that the US model of policing is incompatible with an expected armed society;
This can be seen in police shootings vs armed militias at protests.. If police approached every suspect as if the suspect were open carrying a high powered semi auto pistol, they'd be much less likely to approach suspects as they do. They'd be much more respectful, keep a vehicle between them, and focus on de-escalation as opposed to confrontation.
And in a country with 44% of suspects owning a fire arm, to confront someone is the wrong move.
> Also, let's not pretend a lot of them aren't doing it for the power trip.
... and the ability (in many/most? places) to retire after 20 years with ~50% pay. SO many of these people give zero fucks about the communities they're policing because they don't actually live in them and, generally, aren't incentivized to do so. They take these jobs because it's the best of a limited number of options. They then adopt a siege/deployment mentality and bulldoze their way through 20 years of service in order to retire early and open a bar, fuck off to Florida, hang out on their boat, etc.
A couple weeks ago, I needed to shut a business down to add capacity to their electrical service. I arranged it to be late in the day, but once I got involved, I discovered it was an unexpected type of meter can and I can't turn off the power. So I have all the breakers off, no load, undo the load-side wires to the meter, live, and make it all up, also live, the last half hour by flashlight. There's enough power to incinerate me, but I know how to do my job well. I'm probably at greater risk from physical abuse of my body over decades, back and knees. Most jobs are less safe than programming.
>Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society
I'm guessing "our modern society" refers to the United States and not modern society as a whole.
As far as I can tell, in my country, only two police officers have died on the job between the years 2000 and 2016. There also seems to be a wide disparity in people who get killed by a police officer. It seems more like it's just inherently more dangerous to be American, whether or not you're a police officer or not.
Imagine just doing your best to help your local community by building some online community notice board, only for a rabid horde to start picketing your house, shouting ALL PROGRAMMERS ARE BASTARDS!!!
Imagine using your online community notice board to murder a member of your community, and when your community tries to hold you accountable your fellow programmers, politicians, and members of your political party around the country circle the wagons and shout PROGRAMMER LIVES MATTER!!!
If people were picketing me that intensely, I'd do some serious soul-searching of myself, my coworkers and my reporting structure.
If programmers were resulting in deaths in my community, I'd be picketting right with them with "I'm a programmer. Please hold me accountable. End qualified immunity for programmers."
Programmers have none of the authority, nor the history of abuses of power that cops do.
I'm not saying all or even most cops are bastards. But there's a non-trivial number of bastards, and the harm they've done to the communities they police (and to other cops, honestly) is immense.
The problem is lots of police members don't do their best to help their local communities, and the ones that do stand behind that ones that definitely don't.
Also imagine that your profession has become so highly politicized that many people actually hate you based on some misguided ideology vs how you have actually comported yourself while on the job. While I respect law enforcement, you couldn’t pay me enough to work in that field. Although . . . big tech is also becoming highly politicized so many of us may find ourselves in the same boat to one degree or another.
And if you make the incorrect commit in the moment -- or don't check with compliance, then a person is dead, you're on trial by the public; and possibly at risk for jail time.
[Addendum: And you're being promoted based on arrests, while sharing frustration with management about compliance, and likely seeing other cowboy coder style actions]
I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud. I think the police are asked to handle too many edge case situations, e.g. managing mentally ill populations, but are also grossly overpaid compared to other civil institutions, that if budgets were appropriately distributed, would lead to less of the issues police are required to intervene in. Also, among police put-maneuvering pregnant women, beating elderly bystanders just standing in Buffalo, or the myriad other documented instances of unnecessary police violence, there is a serious "bad apples spoil the bunch" issue in US policing due to the culture of other "innocent" officers backing their bad apples instead of weeding them out.
In any business, a department/team that isn't serving clients is usually re-evaluated, and budgets/resources re-allocated if they don't meet some performance plan. I don't see why bringing some business-world reasoning to policing in the US is so controversial, but I suspect that's more a framing thing of "defund the police" enflaming peoples emotions, as they get mad before reasoning.
Yeah. The only time I've "needed" police was because my insurance required a police report. It's not like the police did anything except file "yep, burglary at (address)".
The number of times I've seen police in situations they were clearly unequipped for is insane though. It's a not-infrequent occurrence near where I live to see them standing around and talking to a homeless person. Regardless of the motivation (are they trying to help or hassle the person), they don't have the training or incentives to be the right people for that.
I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud
Right. I don't like how the article conflates a rise of crime with cops retiring/resigning. Cops generally don't prevent crime, but respond after the fact to sort things out.
There's also no reason a cop, as understood today, needs to show up for some paperwork stuff, like credit card fraud. Any type of civilian government representative should be trusted by the credit card company to file that away.
There's a concentrated corporate media propaganda effort in effect right now to conflate the rise in crime with the outright rejection of US police powers by the general populace.
Here are some facts from the City of Vallejo, a city of 120,000 people located 30 miles north-east of San Francisco:
- Recently featured in ABC's 20/20 show for a "Gone Girl" case were the Vallejo Police Department accused a couple of faking a kidnapping. The woman was sexually assaulted during her kidnapping, and the VPD staged a news conference claiming the whole thing was made up. The city paid the couple millions for the VPD's mistakes. https://abc7news.com/gone-girl-kidnapping-vallejo-police-apo...
- Recently fired the Police Union president for destroying police evidence and threatening a journalist. The officer was hired by his father, who was the Police Chief a few years ago. He basically threatened a black journalist who was moving from California to the South of Lynching.
https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...
- I think one thing a lot of people don't know if how much their local police officer make. Here are the stats for the city of Vallejo, the person costing the city $600K/year in wage and benefit was recently fired. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=vallejo...
Wow, that cop who murdered a bicyclist wasn't charged with a crime and continued being a cop where he then murdered yet another person. Absolutely insane.
I don't think enough people are talking about the huge change in the crime landscape. Here in Atlanta, violent crime is up 50, 60% while arrests are down 40%. We're down hundreds of cops and morale is terrible.
Cops aren't doing their jobs because they fear politically motivated prosecution. And for good reason given that a handful of them faced politically motivated prosecution.
We're still below the worst days of violent crime but it's an extremely worrying trend. It took US cities decades to recover from the high crime of the last century and we really don't want the cycle to start again.
Maybe they'd be more respected if they respected the communities they're supposed to protect? I don't know about Atlanta, but here in Chicago I've had nothing but horrible interactions with the police. How can you expect people to support you when you treat everyone like they're out to kill you?
I wonder how much of this spike in violent crime is being driven by people just being burned-out by the slow-motion and, frankly, boring "apocalypse" that is the pandemic? I've personally noticed that reckless driving is also way up, and I have to imagine many other small crimes are too. If people don't feel like they care about the world, or that the world cares about them, why should they go out of their way to respect the law? If this is the case, hopefully this will just end up being a transient spike that will settle back down to the long-term trend as people readjust to "normality".
I'm going to call BS on this. So many sensationalist stories were written about how there's "a spike in crime," but they're comparing this year to last year! Of course there was a spike in crime, last year there was a pandemic and national lockdown. Crime shifted to online and domestic, and now that the country is opening back up it's shifting back.
Take a look at the actual reported felony offenses and you'll see that yes there's a YTD spike this year, but it's still below where it was in 2019.
Also I'd really question wanting to retain police in a department that were so fickle they'd allow violent crimes to occur because they aren't worshiped enough. That is a type of self-centered police officer I'd like to leave anyways.
We've gone from 80-90 murders a year to 150 in 2020. There's absolutely something happening. I haven't dug into your numbers but reported crime rates is pretty easy to goose. Hard to hide bodies though.
My father is a Police Officer and he and any other officers with military service are using their service time to retire early. None of them enjoy being cops any more.
I don't think anyone, even the cops are saying that there aren't issue with today's current policing. And I think that is the biggest problem with the whole defund police movement. When you have one side shouting "All cops our bad" "F the police" etc, why would you expect the other side to listen, even if there were valid complaints/criticism. Of course the cops are going to bristle, dig their heels in and be stubborn. It's just human nature.
I think the movement would be more effective if this was treated like how the people tried to convince coalminers to get green jobs. Retraining for other jobs, financial support etc. I can guarantee you that plenty of cops would love to be park rangers, park wardens, student mentors, etc, especially in todays climate.
> When you have one side shouting "All cops our bad" "F the police" etc,
To keep with the hacker news software developer metaphor; It's not dissimilar from the industry often seeing Facebook developers as unscrupulous about privacy. Or Solarwinds (CEO blaming an intern).
The target audience for those calls isn't the police though, so police bristling and the message not convincing them isn't a major "problem" with the message. It's not a goal either, and it brings with it some negative side effects, but given the effectiveness of the message the people behind it almost certainly consider the negative side effects worth it.
The targets are politicians (to redistribute funds), voters (to vote for politicians who will...), and prosecutors (to prosecute criminals who happen to wear a uniform).
Nor is the goal to convince cops to get other jobs. Cops don't decide on what the police budget is or how many cops there will be. The goal is to get the people who do decide that there should be less cops. Coal miners is different in that the goal was to appease the population of coal miners...
I'm not sure the message is a good idea myself, its seems unnecessarily divisive to society, and that's a bad thing. It's pretty important to understand the goals of the message when evaluating whether or not it does what it intends to though.
Democracy is said to be the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
However, I note that, from a democratic perspective, it appears that the broader public does not actually want a reduced police force, and this appears to be true across racial lines[1].
So, let us perhaps say, instead: democracy is the theory that the extremely-online elites and activists know what they want, and that the common people deserve to get it good and hard.
It is true that even among minorities support for the existence of an active police force remains high. However, the principles of policing by consent still hold: a community deserves to be policed by police it recognizes as members of that community, not outsiders, and which have the community's best interests at heart. There is still a lot of work to be done in the US regarding these things.
> So, let us perhaps say, instead: democracy is theory that the extremely-online elites and activists know what they want, and that the common people deserve to get it good and hard.
Holding a (small time) elected leadership position, this definitely matches my own observations. I have to deal with the opinions of those I represent on the matters I’m elected to handle quite frequently; the opinions of the few and the loud quite often do not match the opinions and priorities of the majority, but the few and loud do stand out, and the pressure they create gives the illusion of majority opinion.
Does this make sense, or am I not expressing myself well?
Am I the only one who thinks that police officers should be paid more, not less? These should be highly specialized and trained jobs that are hard to get and easy to lose if you're bad at them / criminal -- seems like the reality right now is that they're easy to get and hard to lose.
In my city, the qualifications for being a LEO keep dropping. It used to be that you had to have some college credit hours, which degraded to completing high school, which degraded to at least a GED. Now, I think you just have to apply and be able to pass the physical; there is basically no mental standard. On top of this, the budget is so tight that they basically have one day at the range for training.
So, yes, I agree that LEOs should get better benefits (salary, car, insurance, etc.) as well as much more training. Maybe then we can have LEOs that can handle the job instead of young men with inferiority complexes that just want to bully people.
Yes, but the accounting is not as clear as you'd think. It's a complicated relationship between understrength departments with unfilled vacancies, and overtime budgets.
Police officers throughout the country, but especially in cities, tend to supplement large portions of their income through overtime work. It means they're chronically underpaid for what they do throughout the country. And the way they bring themselves to what they want to be making is through exhausting themselves with overwork.
In Baltimore, some officers doubled their salaries. Others approached 50%. They averaged 12+ hour shifts per day for weeks. In fy 2019, a BPD sergeant made $260,000. The department went $50 million over budget for overtime. There are virtually entire books written on this, piecemealed in small budget stories throughout USA.
I agree that an effective police force probably needs to see their job as a profession and a career and that investment into officers is important, but also I think cops are already well paid.
Cops in my area cross six figures within about 5 years of joining (this is informed by police officers I know but probably far from uniform) and they get some of the best pension benefits available and have to work far less time than most other professions to receive full retirement benefits.
My understanding with my state's troopers is that they can retire with 75% of their highest earning years after working 25 years, or 50% after working 20 years.
Raising compensation from that level would make them some of the most well paid workers in the state and they only require 6 months of training.
“ The paper looked at the life expectancy for 2,800 male police officers in Buffalo, N.Y., who spent at least five years on the force between 1950 and 2005. It compared the officers’ life expectancy with that of the overall white male population of the United States. The researchers excluded women and minority officers because they accounted for a small percentage of the potential pool, which would have made it hard to conduct statistically valid comparisons.
According to the study, officers in the study had a "significantly lower" life expectancy than U.S. white men as a whole, with the gap especially large for those at younger ages.
Specifically, the study found that an officer who lived to age 50 could expect to live only 7.8 additional years, while a typical U.S. white man was expected to live an additional 35 years.
Calculations using a different metric known as the years of potential life lost found a similar disparity. The years of potential life lost for police officers aged 40 to 44 was more than 38 times bigger than it was for the population as a whole, and the average for all age groups was 21 times bigger.
Finally, using a third metric, the study found that a male police officer aged 50 to 54 years had "close to a 40% probability of death compared to a 1% probability for males in the general population in that same age category."”
It’s possible that because they live less, one could argue they should be compensated more to account for their more imminent death.
Depending on the municipality (ie, tax payers) police are paid really well or really poorly. My city, Miami, police probationaries start at $55k, and that's just a high school diploma. On the flipside, the highway patrol, who work the same areas, start at $37k.
Are you aware how much LEO actually make, once you factor in overtime pay and the clever way they rig their pension amounts? It's probably higher than you'd think.
Readit News
Sounds like they've got some common ground with the "defund the police" folks, if they'd listen a bit.
Dead Comment
Shouldn't the EMT be called for a drug overdose? You know, someone to treat the patient rather than someone whose primary job would be to arrest them for illegal activity.
Related: I know an EMT and he says people they are there to help will sometimes attack them. That's a stressful job too.
And EMTs manage to do their jobs without weapons. Bet your friend also has stories about police interfering with EMTs doing their jobs and threatening violence.
Then she was sent to the state cop school, where they were to get two days of instruction, then quals.
She was worried, so I took her out for about 8 hours and taught her to shoot properly.
She went, and shot a perfect score, amd was given the marksman award for the class.
She has since gone on the embarrass most of the deputies she works with on their twice a year range days.
I am, on my best day, able to shoot at a USPSA B-class level. No grand master here. And I can shoot rings around her, all day, every day.
* gestures in the general direction of... everything *
Dead Comment
Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis.
I've always had respect for cops because it's one of those jobs that I just know I could never ever do, props to those in our society that do that work.
https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...
Lumber harvesting is the most dangerous profession in the US but I imagine that most deaths would be described as "accidents". For example, someone cuts a leg with a chainsaw, a tree snaps in a weird way, someone gets pushed off a cliff.
Police officers, on the other hand, usually due to violence while interacting with other people.
In other words, a lumberjack, roofer, etc could think that they won't die today on the job because they are being careful, because there are safety protocols set by OHSA, etc. The same might not be true for police officers because there is little that they can do to address how others will interact with them.
In a sense, police officers might process their job more closely to how a soldier process their job than a lumberjack/roofer.
https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf
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roofers don't have to worry about making a split-second decision about whether or not they have to kill someone before they kill you.
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Imagine getting a JIRA ticket thinking, "fucking Java bug, again. Only way to fix this is to yank the power cord out."
Honestly, delivery people have to put up with way more shit and don't have weapons, the law, nor even a union that has their back. That's a tough job.
But if you're on the business end of society's failures on a daily basis I can imagine how this changes one's opinion.
I've worked as a technical support agent and I really started to be afraid of our company's products, being confronted with the worst that could happen to them every day. The knowledge that the calls I was getting were only about 0.1% of products in the field was easy to forget.
You must not have worked with a lot of support staff
I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking. I fully support this because they know that they aren’t GI Joe.
This is a good point and one I think is missed. Police really do need more training. When departments started phasing out choke holds I think it was a mistake. The hold itself was not the problem, but lack of proper training.
I've read some proposals that want every police officer to be at a minimum a blue belt in BJJ. For perspective, that's a year or so of training. Someone going 3x/week means they will have 20-30 simulated fights PER week. That's how you get someone to stay relaxed in a stressful and physical situation.
Of course, when weapons are involved it's a different situation. But, in unarmed situation a person with a year+ of BJJ training will easily control the other person with little danger to either of them. And the LEO, knowing this, will not reach for their weapon first.
The police are very powerful voices in local governments. They have too much power. I consider the number of police officers to be inversely proportional to how civilized a place is.
Trust me, a lot of them are not really that good of people. They’re often more broken and problematic than your random person. Substance abuse is very common and acting outside the law is also extremely common. I’ve seen many LEO’s beat their wives and drive drunk while having to go out and work on the same calls. Always a bit awkward when they have to respond to a call for one of their own - I should know, I was there.
As far as I can tell - most aren’t really that upstanding of citizens and the standards are pretty lax for what gets in. Some are genuinely nice and good people but I don’t see them last for very long because they move onto better things.
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Unfortunately I still have experiences which prove to me that some police have nothing better to do than annoy otherwise law abiding people. It's like any group of people, there are good cops and there are bad cops.
Could be a case where better awareness of the statistics would actually improve the problem.
Also though, danger resulting from your own stupidity, from other peoples stupidity, and from other peoples malicious activities, hit different psychologically IME. I'm willing to bet consturction workers get a lot less of the third and a lot more of the first.
Maybe something that better training could help with a bit, but probably not fix. Also selecting people who are well suited for that sort of environment.
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But, the dangers, though present, are IMO largely overstated. There are 700 thousand officers in US and on any given day some of them must necessarily come into trouble. The statistics list about 360 officers getting killed in line of duty, annually. That is 1/700000 chance of getting killed every day, over 30 year career that would amount to 1 in 70 chance of getting killed on duty or about similar as dying from all other types of accidents, including car accidents.
Is that small? No, I don't think so, that is nothing to sneeze at. But is still a lot less than dying from some easily preventable diseases. So if you are Police officer and keep eating shit food it might be that the shit food is actually more dangerous to you than your job.
Going through Covid is statistically more dangerous than lifetime of being police officer. At least as an officer you are doing this (hopefully) for public good and you know and accept risks.
It is also less than probability of dying on some other types of duties.
The difference being, that policing is typically done when something already interesting happens with potentially a lot of cameras present on scene, then being investigated.
If you go to be a police officer or fireman or military, you understand your choices and the dangers you are facing. It should not be a surprise, nor it should be a reason to kill any person not to your liking, on sight.
If that’s the case, objectively, many other jobs deserve more respect first.
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This can be seen in police shootings vs armed militias at protests.. If police approached every suspect as if the suspect were open carrying a high powered semi auto pistol, they'd be much less likely to approach suspects as they do. They'd be much more respectful, keep a vehicle between them, and focus on de-escalation as opposed to confrontation.
And in a country with 44% of suspects owning a fire arm, to confront someone is the wrong move.
... and the ability (in many/most? places) to retire after 20 years with ~50% pay. SO many of these people give zero fucks about the communities they're policing because they don't actually live in them and, generally, aren't incentivized to do so. They take these jobs because it's the best of a limited number of options. They then adopt a siege/deployment mentality and bulldoze their way through 20 years of service in order to retire early and open a bar, fuck off to Florida, hang out on their boat, etc.
I'm guessing "our modern society" refers to the United States and not modern society as a whole.
As far as I can tell, in my country, only two police officers have died on the job between the years 2000 and 2016. There also seems to be a wide disparity in people who get killed by a police officer. It seems more like it's just inherently more dangerous to be American, whether or not you're a police officer or not.
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If programmers were resulting in deaths in my community, I'd be picketting right with them with "I'm a programmer. Please hold me accountable. End qualified immunity for programmers."
assert great_power == great_resposibility
Etc
I'm not saying all or even most cops are bastards. But there's a non-trivial number of bastards, and the harm they've done to the communities they police (and to other cops, honestly) is immense.
Won’t lie, I’d probably hop outside and join them.
[Addendum: And you're being promoted based on arrests, while sharing frustration with management about compliance, and likely seeing other cowboy coder style actions]
After all, you don't have a union.
In any business, a department/team that isn't serving clients is usually re-evaluated, and budgets/resources re-allocated if they don't meet some performance plan. I don't see why bringing some business-world reasoning to policing in the US is so controversial, but I suspect that's more a framing thing of "defund the police" enflaming peoples emotions, as they get mad before reasoning.
The number of times I've seen police in situations they were clearly unequipped for is insane though. It's a not-infrequent occurrence near where I live to see them standing around and talking to a homeless person. Regardless of the motivation (are they trying to help or hassle the person), they don't have the training or incentives to be the right people for that.
Right. I don't like how the article conflates a rise of crime with cops retiring/resigning. Cops generally don't prevent crime, but respond after the fact to sort things out.
There's also no reason a cop, as understood today, needs to show up for some paperwork stuff, like credit card fraud. Any type of civilian government representative should be trusted by the credit card company to file that away.
- Recently featured in ABC's 20/20 show for a "Gone Girl" case were the Vallejo Police Department accused a couple of faking a kidnapping. The woman was sexually assaulted during her kidnapping, and the VPD staged a news conference claiming the whole thing was made up. The city paid the couple millions for the VPD's mistakes. https://abc7news.com/gone-girl-kidnapping-vallejo-police-apo...
- A police officer shot and killed a person riding his bicycle without a helmet, when the person did not stop. The city paid the person's family millions in settlement. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/5-7-million-settlement-r...
- Officers practice of celebrating kills with ceremony and badge-tip bending was recently uncovered. https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge...
- Recently fired the Police Union president for destroying police evidence and threatening a journalist. The officer was hired by his father, who was the Police Chief a few years ago. He basically threatened a black journalist who was moving from California to the South of Lynching. https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...
- I think one thing a lot of people don't know if how much their local police officer make. Here are the stats for the city of Vallejo, the person costing the city $600K/year in wage and benefit was recently fired. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=vallejo...
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/5-7-million-settlement-r...
https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=vallejo...
https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...
Cops aren't doing their jobs because they fear politically motivated prosecution. And for good reason given that a handful of them faced politically motivated prosecution.
We're still below the worst days of violent crime but it's an extremely worrying trend. It took US cities decades to recover from the high crime of the last century and we really don't want the cycle to start again.
The world was a much more violent place, and it's been steadily getting less violent.
There's no reason we couldn't instantaneously recover from to the recent increases in violent crime.
Take a look at the actual reported felony offenses and you'll see that yes there's a YTD spike this year, but it's still below where it was in 2019.
YTD crimes: 2019 - 10,963 2020 - 9,022 2021 - 9,928
Really the only scary increases in crime have been in domestic violence (which I bet also explains the increase in murders).
See https://www.atlantapd.org/home/showpublisheddocument/3037/63...
Also I'd really question wanting to retain police in a department that were so fickle they'd allow violent crimes to occur because they aren't worshiped enough. That is a type of self-centered police officer I'd like to leave anyways.
We've gone from 80-90 murders a year to 150 in 2020. There's absolutely something happening. I haven't dug into your numbers but reported crime rates is pretty easy to goose. Hard to hide bodies though.
I don't think anyone, even the cops are saying that there aren't issue with today's current policing. And I think that is the biggest problem with the whole defund police movement. When you have one side shouting "All cops our bad" "F the police" etc, why would you expect the other side to listen, even if there were valid complaints/criticism. Of course the cops are going to bristle, dig their heels in and be stubborn. It's just human nature.
I think the movement would be more effective if this was treated like how the people tried to convince coalminers to get green jobs. Retraining for other jobs, financial support etc. I can guarantee you that plenty of cops would love to be park rangers, park wardens, student mentors, etc, especially in todays climate.
To keep with the hacker news software developer metaphor; It's not dissimilar from the industry often seeing Facebook developers as unscrupulous about privacy. Or Solarwinds (CEO blaming an intern).
The targets are politicians (to redistribute funds), voters (to vote for politicians who will...), and prosecutors (to prosecute criminals who happen to wear a uniform).
Nor is the goal to convince cops to get other jobs. Cops don't decide on what the police budget is or how many cops there will be. The goal is to get the people who do decide that there should be less cops. Coal miners is different in that the goal was to appease the population of coal miners...
I'm not sure the message is a good idea myself, its seems unnecessarily divisive to society, and that's a bad thing. It's pretty important to understand the goals of the message when evaluating whether or not it does what it intends to though.
However, I note that, from a democratic perspective, it appears that the broader public does not actually want a reduced police force, and this appears to be true across racial lines[1].
So, let us perhaps say, instead: democracy is the theory that the extremely-online elites and activists know what they want, and that the common people deserve to get it good and hard.
1 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
Holding a (small time) elected leadership position, this definitely matches my own observations. I have to deal with the opinions of those I represent on the matters I’m elected to handle quite frequently; the opinions of the few and the loud quite often do not match the opinions and priorities of the majority, but the few and loud do stand out, and the pressure they create gives the illusion of majority opinion.
Does this make sense, or am I not expressing myself well?
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2020/06/11/ohio-requir...
So, yes, I agree that LEOs should get better benefits (salary, car, insurance, etc.) as well as much more training. Maybe then we can have LEOs that can handle the job instead of young men with inferiority complexes that just want to bully people.
Police officers throughout the country, but especially in cities, tend to supplement large portions of their income through overtime work. It means they're chronically underpaid for what they do throughout the country. And the way they bring themselves to what they want to be making is through exhausting themselves with overwork.
In Baltimore, some officers doubled their salaries. Others approached 50%. They averaged 12+ hour shifts per day for weeks. In fy 2019, a BPD sergeant made $260,000. The department went $50 million over budget for overtime. There are virtually entire books written on this, piecemealed in small budget stories throughout USA.
Cops in my area cross six figures within about 5 years of joining (this is informed by police officers I know but probably far from uniform) and they get some of the best pension benefits available and have to work far less time than most other professions to receive full retirement benefits.
My understanding with my state's troopers is that they can retire with 75% of their highest earning years after working 25 years, or 50% after working 20 years.
Raising compensation from that level would make them some of the most well paid workers in the state and they only require 6 months of training.
According to the study, officers in the study had a "significantly lower" life expectancy than U.S. white men as a whole, with the gap especially large for those at younger ages.
Specifically, the study found that an officer who lived to age 50 could expect to live only 7.8 additional years, while a typical U.S. white man was expected to live an additional 35 years.
Calculations using a different metric known as the years of potential life lost found a similar disparity. The years of potential life lost for police officers aged 40 to 44 was more than 38 times bigger than it was for the population as a whole, and the average for all age groups was 21 times bigger.
Finally, using a third metric, the study found that a male police officer aged 50 to 54 years had "close to a 40% probability of death compared to a 1% probability for males in the general population in that same age category."”
It’s possible that because they live less, one could argue they should be compensated more to account for their more imminent death.
=)