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[nenjin]

I've always thought there are two reasons to become a police officer:

-You legitimately want to lead a life of service to your community.
-You want an excuse to shoot people and have a power trip.

Maybe it can be both at the same time. But they've known this reality since the 60s, and psych tests are intended to weed out latter from the hiring process.

But I've also heard that PDs have reduced the bar on what it takes to become a cop as well. So it shouldn't surprise that when you lower the bar, you lower it in all areas that actually matter.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If I might take a moment to spare my standard condemnations, a lot of the problem lies not just in selfishness or training but the ethos of these organizations in both culture and goals.

I've seen people point out more than once that modern police surely must be better than, say, the nests of racist corruption or city politics that were more prominent in decades past. This does identify a strange development, because these things while still prominent are definitely less tolerated now, yet paradoxically exist alongside the extreme neurosis and militarization trends that weren't as common during the Y'all Ain't From Here Boy and The Mayor Wants Them Gone period either. (Though Joe Arpaio shows just how far it can still go and that fuckers like him can get away with pretty much any crime short of actual armed insurrection.)


So what the fuck is going on? How can police be less corrupt and more corrupt? The answer is in the goals of "policing", as an abstract. The war on drugs isn't solely to blame, but it's certainly the singular largest problem. The whole idea of policing was destroyed by the drug war, twisted out of shape. Drug enforcement is literally the very first thing a lot of people think about when they think "police". Consider that. That's fucking crazy. If we want to think of police as societal monitors, as people who really are standing against chaotic violence being inflicted on all of us...then what police do now has effectively no relation to that. Nearly all of them are spending nearly all of their time enforcing against what? Drug enforcement and traffic law, and even then tending to target the most benign forms of both?

It should be no wonder to anyone that police casually murder, entrap, and rob people when police have no connection to society and are encouraged to set themselves apart and above "normal people". They are the "thin blue line". "Civilians" don't understand "what it's like" on the streets we all live on. They "know" when someone is guilty and they have no objection to "hitting people with whatever [they] can" if they feel "disrespected" after hitting a normal person with a life-disrupting charge that most likely is for behavior which is no harm to anybody.

This is a problem deep as human psychology. Police are now encouraged to do no less than dehumanize everybody in society outside of their bubble. That's how in some ways police are becoming even more brutal and even more destructive to society than in the worst pre-modern periods of US history, and why extreme behaviors that wouldn't have been out of place in putting down a civil rights march or clandestinely murdering a "troublemaker" are just suddenly there.

It all comes back to this disconnection. There is no hope for an ethos of public service and discretion in such an environment, and it reinforces itself through even further disconnection by way of training authored by similarly disconnected people and rightfully obtaining the wrath of society through all the horrible shit police do and encourage each other to do. How the fuck are you going to even investigate serious crimes if people have literally come to prefer criminals or are scared to even call the police because of what they might do to them? The only "apples" in the police aren't bad, they're the few people who have the strength of conviction and self-reflection to resist all of the above, and as we've seen even these folk are at risk of targeting by their fellows. The tree is what's rotten.

I'm not nostalgic for the police of an era I didn't live, but I do think police then at least seemed to be a part of society. As they say, your neighbors don't refrain from murdering you because it's illegal, but because of the human pro-social instinct. Modern police are (intentionally, to a degree) taken right out of that system, given extensive legal permissions, and set loose on the world. The results, whatever else they are, should not be unexpected.

[SalmonGod]

The question is if there's enough people who are actually that selfless to hire, and if we can pay them enough to not shoot up everything at the slightest provocation.

This goes back to the question of whether the net effect on society of officers who are unfit is positive or negative.  My opinion is I'd rather have an understaffed police force that cannot attend to everything it ideally should, then an police force that's staffed to do everything, but does it in the worst way.

Plus I hear the paperwork and admin procedures and whatnot for killing someone is at times less onerous than having to process someone not slated for the morgue, so less lethal just means higher costs for generally already underfunded precincts even if you discount any difference in outfitting costs. Fiscally it's arguable there's much incentive to substantially disarm, basically.

I've heard this, too.  I rarely bring it up, because it's the kind of thing that feels like it will get me discarded from any discussion out of hand as a tinfoil hat.  But I've seen it accused of the police by activists many times that they delay or deny medical attention because a survivor of a wrongful use of deadly force can put up a much stronger, more expensive legal battle.  If they die, police have more power to control the narrative.

There was one story a few years ago, it would take a lot of work to dig up again, but..... If I'm remembering properly which incident this was tied to, a family was forced by police to watch their son bleed out on their living room floor.  He laid there for a couple hours, while the police went about sealing off the area.  Wouldn't summon medical help, or allow the family to do anything but stay put and watch him die.  Kid probably could have survived if there had been immediate response.  Police were there because the kid had been threatening suicide.  They were the first emergency responders to show up and he didnt follow orders, so they shot him and claimed he had charged and reached for an officers gun, while the family denied this.  Father went digging later and managed to get his hands on an internal manual that had denying medical attention in those situations as part of their policy.

[Egan_BW]

We'd literally be better off if we put the military in charge of policing.

[NullForceOmega]

No, dear gods no, as someone who served the absolute last thing you want is military law enforcement on the streets, the goals and methods are just too utterly different for it to be any kind of good idea.  Soldiers make bad cops, because soldiers are for killing.  The cops are bad, but soldiers are WORSE.

I said this before, but the only reason we should ever consider fielding the military as law enforcement is in order to ensure stability during a transition to new policing systems.

[Rolan7]

We'd literally be better off if we put the military in charge of policing.

And this is how irrational fearmongering leads to martial law, then dictatorship.
Just keep escalating the threat of that terrifying "other".

I'm not sure if this is better or worse than suggesting we're better off facing violent criminals.  Pretty sure your personal odds are a lot better, but your freedom's over the Rubicon.

[smjjames]

The police have already been pretty heavily militarized as it is.

[NullForceOmega]

There are still massive fundamental differences in the two groups.  If you throw some rocks and garbage at the police they'll raise their shields, toss smoke and tear-gas, and probably turn the hoses on you (if they get really worried they start shooting with rubber bullets and beanbags).  Do the same to soldiers and they start shooting people and preparing to shell the area with mortars.  The police have been increasingly 'militarized' in recent history, but the gap between how they deal with things and how actual soldiers deal with things is unbelievable.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

While military policing is obviously undesirable, I among many others noted that the only period of relative peace during the Ferguson protests was the two days where the police were replaced by national guard. Suddenly the "rioting" was completely respectable protesting, and I don't think it was because they were afraid of getting gunned down since the police had DoD refuse and were threatening to gun people down themselves.

Simply put, the national guard had the discipline to actually know if they were in danger or not, as opposed to the reflexive neurosis and agitations of the police. Call it a sign of how severe the situation is that the national guard did better despite it not being their jobs.

[Egan_BW]

Right. Obviously that's not what the military is for, but at the very least they're not trained to be paranoid cowards.

[NullForceOmega]

That works fine for a day or two, but when you start talking about replacing the police with soldiers things change.  Soldiers aren't trained for dealing with civilians, they are trained to destroy the enemy.  I understand entirely that the police are doing a terrible job and need to be reigned in and probably completely re-trained, but the military is NOT the answer to this problem.

I agree that they are better trained, but they aren't trained to do what police do.

[Egan_BW]

Or fail to do, in this case.

[Rolan7]

Right. Obviously that's not what the military is for, but at the very least they're not trained to be paranoid cowards.

National Guard is also not military.  They're reservists who mostly handle environmental crises.  Not beat cops who are at risk every shift, or military who are at risk and also occasionally in open combat.

No disrespect to the NG, I have a good friend in the program who's been very busy in California.

[smjjames]

Also, apparently military veterans can make better cops, at least from the ancedotes, not every military veteran is going to be fit for police.

It probably speaks a heck of a lot less about military as cops and a heck of a lot more about training and de-escalation.

[NullForceOmega]

Or fail to do, in this case.

That is an entirely valid criticism, there are huge problems with many police agencies in the Untied States right now, and there need to be solutions.  But really, military intervention is not a good idea.

smjjames: That is true, some veterans are very well conditioned for the role of police officer, the average gropo on the other hand is not.