In my somewhat large city/town, our police force is rather respectable.
In mine they are.... not.
And this is why the police are fucking inept.
Please do not make sweeping generalizations about a group of people based on the misinformed actions of a few. The overwhelming majority of police officers are intelligent and make rational choices in the line of duty. This incident wasn't so much caused by ineptitude or stupidity as it was by a lack of clear communication and incorrect decision-making based on that lack of communication.
Umm... this incident was kind of caused by lack of communication, but that lack of communication was caused by people making bad decisions, including
about 1/3 of the Cleveland PD disobeying direct orders.
And not all generalizations are bad.
Many are bad because they're based on a lack of information or on making connections between people where none exist. For example, there is absolutely no reason to believe that skin color is a universal factor in personality/behavior/culture. That is an ignorant generalization.
However, there are many generalizations that can be made based on groupings that people place themselves in by their choices, common interests, etc. For instance, it's pretty safe to assume that any Dwarf Fortress player is someone who enjoys complex problem solving, doesn't judge things superficially, is willing to engage themselves in non-social activity for long periods, is decently internet-savvy, etc. These are not guaranteed things, but they're very highly likely to be true for the majority of the DF community.
Similarly, it's also safe to assume a lot of things about police officers. That is an organization they chose to place themselves in, and it's not like choices have no basis in the nature of a person. Like any organization, it also has its own internal culture that will have an effect on a person who spends extended periods of time immersed in that culture. Police are a high-profile presence in daily life everywhere (I see at least one for every 5 minutes of driving where I live), so there's also no lack of data on their behavior. The generalizations people make about them are not based on misinformation. They're based on the fact that police misconduct is
a daily occurrence across the country, and the reactions of the organization as a whole to these incidents.
A couple years ago, we had an officer plow over 4 motorcycles while driving drunk on the job. Fellow officers showed up to the scene and mishandled all the evidence so that it couldn't be used in court. The two who are mainly responsible for fucking up the case were demoted... and then quietly re-promoted about a year later to even higher positions than they held before the incident. This kind of thing does not point to the misconduct of a single officer, but corruption embedded in the institution itself. As does the fact that officers who oppose the abuses of their co-workers
are actively weeded out.
I have a bunch more stuff I could share from friends, too. Thankfully, I've managed to avoid much interaction with them. I have a friend I've known for about 6 years who became an officer a couple years ago, and I can already see how the internal culture has changed him. One of our mutual friends was a victim of police abuse not too long ago. He was given a bad psychiatric prescription. He called for an ambulance but police showed up first and immediately attacked him because he was acting strangely. Our buddy on the force actually defended this.
Hell... I was talking about this yesterday with the guy who is sitting behind me right now, and he related that his cousin died recently while in police custody, because he was diabetic and they neglected his condition... chronically neglected it, even. They had to get him emergency care multiple times because of neglect, and never bothered to take any steps to improve their procedure.
A secondary issue is that most police departments are under extremely tight budgets, which reduces the amount of training that officers can receive. The situation under discussion is a textbook case of training breaking down, which would likely have been averted had the funds for such training been available.
I very much disagree.You could say that they're receiving obscene amounts of
misallocated funding. They have no shortage of military-grade hardware and training in violence (with an apparent focus on self-defense over public defense), but it seems like they have no training in how to interact with people positively, or how to determine appropriate levels of force, or basic understanding of their role in society.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14933422 times)