I'm rewatching the Robocop Trilogy and it's laughable how poorly equipped the regular cops (and even the Rehabs in Robocop 3) are compared to modern actual cops.
What point? I think I've addressed the greatest hits with more effort than you typically muster. All I trim is the stupidly long quote trees left by lazy fucksticks.
Oh, is that what you call it? Fuck's sake. Because you can mash DELETE over D's posts? There are pubic lice we can train to do that. They're more fun to catch, besides.
wherein "OP"="original post" (as has been common shorthand here since the place opened, but you knew that). yes, we know you "trim"... makes it easier to obscure the topic and diverge into your typical screed of everyone else being lazy and entitled.
Please. I could count on one hand the number of threads that have stayed true to the topic. And that tactic has been used against everyone here, including me. The OP may be about ‘this’, but any comment may at any point spawn multiple tangents.
I remember when the San Diego PD protested the vaccine mandate by blocking a children's cancer ward for two days. Great times.
I honestly don't know how anyone can look at the police these last few years and think they are affective or adequate for their jobs. They are a waste of money.
I'd submit that one's personal experiences with X (whether police or whatever else) or even one's circle's experience with X is not necessarily a good measuring stick for the objective reality of what X is. I'm sure that there are going to be people who have only positive experiences with the police and only personally know of other people who have positive experiences with them, just as there are going to be people who have only negative experiences with the police and who know only of people who have had negative experiences. Personally, I have had the whole range of experiences, from cops who I thought/knew to be some combination of racist, lazy, corrupt, arrogant, thin-skinned, or whatever other negative adjectives you might want to assign and those I thought/knew to be honorable, self-sacrificing, fair-minded, ethical, and whatever other positive adjectives you might want to assign.
Then we get back to what better alternatives there might be. And two years after George Floyd was murdered, it doesn't seem like there has been any real momentum to present more than minor tweaks.
If we could toss out the shit ones like we toss out shit McDonald's employees, things could be fixed lickety split. But crazy judges have this hardon for making them absolutely fucking invincible.
in Ontario police training is less than 6 months until they're on the street. Imagine how much education for dealing with the realities of their job safely and non lethally could be packed into 6 semesters. For over $60K/year starting, it only seems fitting that they're actually competent to do something other than subdue. The same basic skills in deescalation and intervention I'm expected to have... I think we need to rethink the role of policing. They're looking for the bad guys to stop but I'd wager far more of their work involves attending people in crisis that they aren't trained for. Better to have trained, and even armed, social workers dealing with someone's mental health break than what we currently have.
A good alternative would be an actual functioning police service that is highly qualified and highly accountable. One that actually works to serve the community instead of padding the stats of prosecutors and the county coffers.
We recently had a very positive encounter with the police. My wife's car broke down in a busy intersection, potentially dangerous, and the police helped her get an emergency tow and shielded her car from traffic, then gave her a ride to a place where I could pick her up. I was an hour away at the time. She said he was a very nice young man. And of interest, he was almost ridiculously grateful at how thankful she was for his help. He said he rarely encountered people who didn't hate them anymore.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733 Better police training, less cops killing people, including innocent bystanders!! What a concept!
I think this chart or something similar has come up before in this thread. It needs to be repeated: correlation does not imply causation. If you took those well trained cops from those other countries and set them to police American cities for a couple years, I'd bet they would have as many issues as the typical U.S. cops. And I'd bet that if you took the shittiest U.S. cops and sent them to the countries in this chart to police, chances are they would perform about as well as the native cops in those countries. The reason: there are a lot of uniquely U.S. problems that the police have to deal with here that the best training for cops can only go so far, and policing most of those countries will rarely encounter. The foreign cops are not going to have to deal with guns or violent crime, the legacy and present of racism, the lack of a social safety net and numerous other reasons why U.S. crime is as high as it is. Or at least, such things will not be as prevalent. It's way easier to focus on de-escalation when you can be reasonably sure 99 percent of people you encounter will not have a gun and will not be willing to attack a cop.