An ex-cop's remorse
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Well, I'd hope not. In general TV and movie cop dramas present exceptionally poor models of policing which emphasize aggression, violence, and a contempt for the public. The last thing I'd want is for any police officer to model themselves after those distorted depictions of what a cop should be.
Most real life cops are much worse (sexist, racist, aggressive, easy to lie/tamper if they don't like a suspect, easy to pull the trigger, etc). So even the average tv cop as a role model would be an improvement.
... because they can.
In every area, power and money don't change you, they merely reveal who you are.
In the UK, the officer calls you "sir" or "ma'am" and you call then whatever you want to ("occifer" and "cuntstable" being perennial favourites).
In the US, you call the officer "sir" or "ma'am" and they call you whatever they feel like (my interactions have almost always been polite, but I've witnessed "boy", "punk", "shithead")
Edit: see also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_cop
Second, parent didn't say "you are X" but that they'd "venture a guess" based on the specific context of what had been said. So they don't need anything else (personal backstory etc) to make it -- just to apply what they know/believe is the general case for people making similar statements (positive view on the police behavior etc).
Even if you specifically are not white, it doesn't mean what the parent said doesn't apply in the general case: that whites generally have smoother interactions with the police, so their appreciation of how policemen are is more positive.
If your point was that they have better people skills than many US police officers, though, I agree fully. (Probably more fair to compare the Swiss guard to some elite squad in the US - I would be very much surprised if they didn't get quite literally hundreds of applications for each position, allowing them to be very, very picky.
Instead, the US has toddlers shooting people every day.
> 963 people have been shot and killed by police in 2016
And that is just shootings, never mind other methods of murder.
Don't downvote blindly, I was really wondering how "lawful" death could occur without gun in self defense.
That's also a not entirely uncommon occurence.
USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/08/cops-gagged...
Belgium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semira_Adamu
South Africa http://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/01/south-african-police-suff...
Sweden http://filmingcops.com/witnesses-horrified-as-cop-beats-and-...
Furthermore statements like that -- "the base rate is never going to be zero" -- show an unwillingness to even try to do better. It's excusing terrible performance rather than demanding accountability. The US currently has 1000 - 2000 police involved shootings per year. Every year. We may not be able to get to zero, but we can definitely do better than that. A lot of those shootings can be traced back to police hiring and training practices which can unquestionably be improved.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
No, it doesn't, and that's a hostile attitude to take.
"We may not be able to get to zero, but we can definitely do better than that."
Exactly how much better? Or are you demonstrating an unwillingness to address the issue concretely? Or do you perhaps not like that excessively hostile attitude on my part?
The situation is complicated, and people like to fling around statistics with the apparent intent to simply inflame passions with no regard for the result it produces. So the US has been talking all about this for the last year or so... has it improved the situation any, or has the inflammatory rhetoric actually made things worse? I look to results, not words, and I can make a far better case for the latter than the former. So I'm pretty unimpressed by the attempt to socially shame me into accepting a line of rhetoric that from my point of view has killed more than it has helped. (My current estimate is in the mid-hundreds at a minimum, just to put some numbers on it.) Whatever the solution is, this doesn't appear to be it.
I also consider the fact that it is visibly not working to trump any other vague arguments, such as, say, "but it's raising awareness". So what? It's not working. Awareness is not the end goal some people seem to think it is, it's as best a method to attain some goal, and that goal is not being attained. This rhetoric line is killing more people and corroding social fabric. Concrete results don't get changed by hypothesizing about how they could have possibly been good maybe sorta in an alternate universe. Do we care about reducing the violence, or do we just want to feel brief moments of emotional catharsis by blaming everything on cops? Because if it's the former, a change in approach is needed.
in the case of intentional we can distinguish between self-defense shootings and aggravated shootings. self-defense shootings might not have been intended to kill, in which case it could be merely aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, resulting in accidental death (i.e. manslaughter). the legal system here allows for juries to find a shooter non-culpable of homicide if there is a clear case for self-defense. legal non-culpability is a technicality (i.e. no criminal conviction), it doesn't mean there was no homicide involved. the other guy is still dead by the actions of another human. murder.
And please outline every one of those situations. Because those are just numbers, nothing else.
- How many of those were suspects who threatened a cop with a gun or some other weapon?
- How many of those were a suspect was assaulting a cop and he drew his weapon to save his own life?
- How many of those where a suspect refused the orders of the cops to put down a dangerous weapon and surrender?
In fact, all you have is numbers. Without any context, those numbers are useless.
By comparison, in Chicago this year, there were 762 homicides. That's ONE CITY which nearly equals the entire country's worth of people being killed by police in the same time frame.
There's some context for you, but I'm guessing that's not what you were after.
Likewise, the context is critical for each of the examples you listed. . .
Mike Brown - So much evidence that contradicted the whole "hand up, don't shoot" narrative:
In summary, the DOJ report concluded: There are no witnesses who could testify credibly that Wilson shot Brown while Brown was clearly attempting to surrender. The accounts of the witnesses who have claimed that Brown raised his hands above his head to surrender and said “I don’t have a gun,” or “OK, OK, OK” are inconsistent with the physical evidence.”
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/why-did-justice-departme...
The whole incident took place after Brown had just committed a strong arm robbery and assaulted the owner of a shop. There's a mountain of evidence that proves officer Wilson was well within his rights to shoot Brown but I won't go down that rabbit hole at this point.
Eric Garner - I would agree the cops acted callously in arresting Garner. That should have been a standard arrest. Take him to the ground, cuff him and put in the car. The cops were wrong in this scenario, and should have done a better job of simply cuffing Garner and getting him in the car - especially when he kept saying he couldn't breathe. There is however, still some responsibility on Garner's part that he resisted arrest in the first place, which then resulted in the officers putting him in the choke hold that eventually killed him. Had he simply allowed the officers to arrest him without incident, he'd probably still be alive today.
Tamir Rice - This was an egregious act on the cops part. Not only did the callers mention that the gun was probably fake, the dispatcher didn't rely that to the cops who showed up. The cop also acted way too fast in drawing his gun and shooting Tamir immediately without hesitation or warning. A $6 million settlement probably confirms this was the case. Not to mention the officer in question had also been deemed "unsuitable and emotionally unstable" in his last position in a different county and shouldn't even been allowed to be a cop again.
According to that 811 people were shot and killed by police in 2016 who had a weapon. So a significant % of those killed did indeed have a weapon. I clicked on a few stories of unarmed people shot and killed by police and in some cases it seems obviously justified eg they were driving a vehicle as a weapon or attacked an officer reaching for the officers weapon.
In other cases its less so, eg man killed on 12 December after neighbours mistook his crucifix for a gun or 22 November where a teenager was shot in the back for running from the police or 16 September where a mans car broke down in the road and was shot by police despite clearly complying with instructions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo...
But your point is a bit of a strawman. You can still have dishonest/aggressive/sexist/racist behavior that does not result in death.
Funny you should say that, since with ~1100 murders last year [1], that's indeed one such incident "several times a day".
And of course you can be agressive, impolite, sexist and racist, as an officer without murdering anyone too.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/15/us-police-ki...
Do you have a source for that? I Googled it and found an article from 2015 that cited less than 1 toddler shooting per week, no where near one per day!
I've worked with several hundred state and local police officers in my career through various jobs and it is a pervasive belief.
Some 60's (including seeing 60's shows in the early 70's in reruns), mostly 70's, and then 80's through '84.
Also, Starsky and Hutch & Barney Miller in his formative years. I think my point still stands.
TV and movies portray exceptionally poor models of most aspects of life, and are among the primary sources large swaths of the population model themselves after.
I do it, you do it, everyone does. And we all lie to ourselves with the same lie we use for advertising: "Oh of course I know it's unrealistic and dramatized for affect (or deliberately manipulative), but it doesn't effect me.
Besides ü?
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-t...
We do change our style from time to time. My predecessor (and the former keeper of the comma shaker) told me that she used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. She found it fussy. She said that once, in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.
---
¹ Or should that be diæresis?
² Speaking of style guides: Ooh, look! An Oxford comma!
You don't realise the massive power of the American cultural imperialism. It is a steamroller: most European people have a better knowledge of the police and justice systems of the USA than of their own country!
(And that's not only about fiction but about the news: we also know better the political system and political life of the USA than the ones of our neighbouring countries. We still know our own better, luckily :-) )
The official police are always bumbling morons and most crimes are solved by a quirky amateur with a personal connection to the case.
Why don't you guys just hire better police? Maybe Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Miss Marple should be running Scotland Yard.
You also forgot the bizarre way TV/Movies compare law enforcement agencies as well:
1) Local cops are the smart ones - FBI are the idiots
2) FBI are the smart ones - Local cops are the idiots
3) CIA/Gov Agents are the smart ones - FBI/local cops are the idiots
4) Local detectives are the smart ones - CIA/FBI/Gov agents are the idiots
It's kind of funny to see how each agency is either propped up or summarily demonized - and it changes in every movie or TV show.
TV shows are of course centered around cases where the ID of the murderer is harder to prove. That's just basic storytelling.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/395069137/open-cases-why-one-t...
Moreover, it's tough for a interpersonal conflict to rise to the level of homicide without someone else noticing.
If you can't accept that police will often know who committed a murder without having sufficient evidence, you're denying the messiness of the real world.
> this was a case of mistaken identity. “I always
> wondered—and it sounds weird—how did it feel to
> these guys who arrest the wrong guy?” Forcelli
> told me. “It feels terrible.”
Convicting the wrong guy, especially if you know they're the wrong guy even as 'due process' finds them guilty - now that's another issue entirely.
From my perspective, there is a bit of an American law enforcement culture problem. Broadly speaking, I see it as quite a bit overly-militaristic / "them vs. the bad guy" oriented, and too little oriented towards the dull community service type things that in reality is more likely to make up most of a police officer's job (http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21649507-when-la...). This explains much of the other problems, such as overly-aggressive behavior that I've personally only encountered from American cops (vs other Western nations), and often over-aggressive prosecuting where there is too much pressure to convict.
None of this necessarily reflects anything on individual officers at all. I've encountered all kinds, and broad, sweeping statements about "all cops" are going to be wrong. However, nothing will change to improve law enforcement culture if statements like the above are perceived as "anti-cop". Sadly, that sometimes seems like what happens in any debate on American law enforcement...