Baltimore Cops Kept Toy Guns to Plant Just in Case They Shot an Unarmed Person
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And while the racial component of police shootings has been portrayed in a way which differs sharply from the actual data on race/crime/police lethal force, there IS still some element of uncertainty in the exact figures. The fact that there is any uncertainty at all in police killings being reported correctly is absolutely INSANE to me. This is not an area where we can have sloppy data. If a government agent is responsible for the death of a citizen, it is unacceptable that we not have a very clear record of all surrounding circumstance.
I increasingly believe there are kinds of anti-system crimes which should be punished with highest sentences. I'm thinking of crimes that have disproportionate, negative impact on stability and security of society. Like this. Or fucking with vaccinations, like CIA people did.
(Incidentally, I also believe that the guy responsible for fake bomb detectors (from the other thread on the frontpage today) should get at minimum a murder-level sentence, for willfully putting lives of lots of people in danger.)
That's not to say we shouldn't treat it as seriously just that it's a different intent.
The CIA did this as well in Central and South America in the previous century. They got away with it as well, of course. The series Narcos and movies American Made and Che Part One and Che Part Two are albeit partly about these subjects. Not to mention more recently the collateral murder video.
I'm not entirely sure why? I guess if you got the military and economic high ground you get away with doing things like that?
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/October-2016/Chic...
Drill rap, the music of Chicago's gangs, is ultra violent and serves as a method of calling out other crews and taunting them into a response. Thanks to Youtube, Soundcloud, and social media the spread of this music is now easier than ever. The threats that come from this music are often followed up on.
Why do they do it? As one rapper says: “If I wasn’t doing this, would you even be down here in the low incomes? Would you even care that I exist?” “You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don’t live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I’m giving that to them. I’m just playing my role.”
The parent poster was talking about how gangs become the law and order because of the lack of trust in police. I'm saying the issue is wider and deeper than that. If you read the article, it becomes clear that one of the large driving factors for these rappers is the notoriety and fame they get from doing this is oftentimes the only way they can feel significant. It's a way for them to get money, sex, notoriety. Maybe even a record deal so they can get the hell out of the place they are in. What kind of chances and opportunities does an inner city youth really have?
This notoriety can twist back in its own ways too: "The guy having the hardest time was Blaze. He seemed to be battling depression. At one point, after a shooting on a corner, he said to me, “Man, I’m so sick of this. I feel like a prisoner in my own neighborhood. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go to my job because I don’t know if the opps will be there to come after me.” He was wallowing in how badly he wanted to be done with the gang life. He told me he wanted to move to California, but his reality felt inescapable to him. He started using PCP at an alarming rate. It was his way of coping. He became difficult to be around. He would stutter and trip over his words. His complexion got bad. His hygiene, too."
It's one hell of a life and not one that I could begin to imagine.
It's a downward spiral that has been going on for decades. To make matters worse, policing is delegated to the state and local levels, which aren't under the microscope that the federal government is.
It's also not just a black or minority problem. I say this because I believe many white voters are more complacent because they don't believe they would be affected by it. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong police officer, you aren't immune to disastrous results. White voters shouldn't fool ourselves to believing they are unaffected. Remember blacks get killed disproportionately to the national population, but whites get killed in higher numbers.
It's depressing.
Holding public office is a privilege that rightly should come with a different threshold of privacy/transparency.
And yes, no nation is taking the issue of police conduct seriously if it's not even recording wrongful death consistently and reliably.
Some colleagues ran a trial on body cameras and found improved metrics, particularly around stop-and-search. The success rate of stop and search increased, officers reported feeling safer. They also noted an increase in allegations but I don't think dug into that as much as they wanted to (it may be an area where the behaviour feedback loop was slow enough to need a longer study duration).
http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/trial-results/measuring...
The police are not here to protect you, but to ensure the functioning of society. This isn't pessimism; it's a fact of legal precedent - they have no obligation to protect any citizen [0].
Justice only happens when the crime unpunished would lead to undesirable destabilization of society. Sexual harassment was rampant in Hollywood for decades, only now that it threatens stability does it receive attention.
Our ideals of justice and freedom only but tools and illusions to keep the gears of society turning.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
Can you show me the data set that breaks down police killings by race of the killed person please?
Or can you even point me to the dataset that just lists all police killings?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
white killed by police: 495 (49.5%)
black killed by police: 259 (26.1%)
hispanic killed by police: 172 (17.3%)
other: 67
What really offsets the data is once you begin to include racial statistics on crime. Obviously police officers aren't just taking individuals out of the population and random and killing them (isolated outliers not included), so it would be irresponsible to just compare the racial component of police shootings with population representation. This data, however, varies greatly by area. However, in urban environments in particular, the racial component in crime is enormous. In Chicago, for example 75.3% of homicide was committed by black people, 24.6% by hispanics, and 3.5% by white people. To expect equal representation in police shootings, given those crime statistics, would be completely insane.
So the long story short is: given a straight comparison to population distributions, there is an overrepresentation of black/hispanic shootings by police. With the inclusion of racial participation in violent crime though, the motivation for police fatalities cannot responsibly be attributed to a racial motivation without a serious multivariate analysis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...
This is probably the best there is that I know of and it only goes back 2-3 years. The federals don't have anything complete.
Stop accepting any physically fit hothead off the street because they can be trained into the role. Lastly, as a citizen, be willing to pay more in taxes knowing that the person who pulled you over cares, is qualified, and will not shoot you and try to cover it up.
This is the tone and conclusion of this article. If you want the actual story, read the original report here: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gun...
There is - the tone of the article affects the tone of the thread. Hacker News is supposed to be about intellectually gratifying discussion, but an article whose purpose is to spark outrage results in comments full of invective and tedious boilerplate. Cathartic for people who want to rant about Americans and guns and ACAB... but we've already been there and done that and read that a hundred times.
You're confusing "intellectually gratifying" with "apathy".
You're confusing endorphin hooks and virtue signalling with action. Being outraged on an internet forum doesn't lead to progress against police corruption.
How are such straw men intellectually gratifying? How is that not tedious boilerplate? How is you reading something a hundred times even a factor compared to hundreds of murders swept under the rug? Don't wanna read about it, put an end to it.
Yes you might be able to solve police misconduct by forcing them to turn on each other and report and aggressively as possible. You probably will utterly destroy any semblance of morale and group cohesion and won't have a functioning police force at the end. Yes, we could ban guns from the population. Except that would not only require a constitutional amendment, but also solve the logistical issues of tracking down guns while simultaneously solving the problem of an armed criminal element who now has a helpless population in a massive country where response times can be 20 mins or longer. Body cams will help, but even if people trust police, how does that solve the problem where being a drug dealer is probably the best opportunity you have in the inner city? And it goes on and on.
It's a similar issue to homelessness. It's a multivariate problem that requires many different targeted approaches to deal with the entire thing. People unfortunately tend to focus on their pet issue of choice and ignore the others. Worse yet, political interests often will try to shut down each other from getting funding in order to push their own cause du jour.
> How is you reading something a hundred times even a factor compared to hundreds of murders swept under the rug?
You have provided a perfect example of what this discussion does not need, and what articles like the above lead to, thank you.
Edit (instead of replying to all of the individual replies):
I'll be the first to acknowledge that there are systemic problems in police forces worldwide, just like there are systemic problems in any large organization, especially one endowed which so much executive power.
However, any argument that paints a picture of "uniform equals bad" is, in my opinion, not only delusional, but is also a severe injustice to the good apples in public service, that is: in service to the public.
I don't buy it, the system itself enables this, if it didn't then those bad apples would have been detected and expelled before they could cause so much damage. It can be a minority doing that but they have affected so much that the whole itself is no longer trustworthy and requires reconstruction from the ground up, the foundations themselves have been damaged and as it would be for a structure or a car, when the base structure that supports everything else cannot be repaired you need a new one.
That's what should happen in Baltimore, that's what should happen with the Brazilian military and civilian police, their foundations aren't good enough to be trusted anymore.
"Bad apple" arguments only work if there's actual evidence of "good apples" working to expel the bad ones.
Because that's the standard I'm calling for.
"Is there evidence of 99% of supposedly non-complicit blacks standing with victims of black crime, insisting on justice for those guilty?"
If you assume that everyone in a group is guilty of some crime committed by a tiny fraction because there isn't evidence that 99% of them condemn the guilty, then you're participating in a conspiracy and you're validating a dangerous line of reasoning that can be weaponized against anyone, including groups that you care about and/or belong to.
It's not the same at all.
The idea that police nationally get together and conspire violence against the public or even a particular racial group is beyond absurd. This is among the most dubious of conspiracy theories, and I don't know how such theorists can hope to be regarded as credible, reasonable people.
Why on earth did you put "article" in quotes. Are you questioning whether it is, in fact, an article? Because that seems quite self-evident.
You might disagree with it but be assured TFA is, in fact, an article and putting the word in quotes just makes it look like you don't know what quotes are for. Hint: quoting.
Nowadays anyone can post an article on the internet. That’s great. But because of this, the definition of “article” has become basically meaningless. An article could be entirely fact based, full of falsehoods, or misrepresent facts by mixing them with opinions. There really should be a distinction between different levels of reporting. Most of the problems cropping up these past two years can be traced to the fact that people put the same credibility in a piece by some random person on the internet as they do in one by a career journalist.
On "article" though it's inappropriate. The other comment notwithstanding, an article is an article, no matter if it's written by a journalist, an amateur, or a monkey banging its head on a keyboard. There is zero credibility implied by the word.
Example:
> The "food" from that restaurant was awful
Correct usage. You are (humorously, snarkily) questioning that what you received was food at all.
> The food from that "restaurant" was awful
Incorrect. No matter what you thought of the food, the fact is that it is a restaurant (ie, a place that dispenses food, with no consideration of quality implied). This usage betrays a lack of sophistication and should be avoided.
> The "food" from that restaurant was awful
Incorrect. No matter what you thought of the food, the fact is that it is food (ie, something that can be digested as a source of nutrition). This usage betrays a lack of sophistication and should be avoided.
> The food from that "restaurant" was awful
Correct usage. You are (humorously, snarkily) questioning if the establishment you visited qualifies as a restaurant.
I would personally never use the first usage as it's kind of lazy and déclassé. But it is at least valid.
The second usage is invalid. If you think otherwise be aware you are speaking non-standard English and others, like me, will notice it.
If one thinks of a restaurant as a business that accepts money to serve you food then the comparison is the same. No matter what you thought of the restaurant, the fact is they took your money and served you food.
An article is an article is an article. What is it if it's not an article? Imaginary? It just doesn't work.
Some of the worst and most inaccurate articles I've ever seen have been written by career journalists. (Admittedly I live in the UK where the majority of newspapers are on a par with Infowars for honesty and fact checking. Maybe you live somewhere where professional journalism is more respectable).
> It is not just Baltimore cops. It is cops. They will shoot you in the face in front of your infant daughter. They will choke you to sleep for selling cigarettes. They will shoot you in the back for walking away.
This is drawing a false equivalence by assuming the actions of a subgroup represent the group as a whole. It’s no different than citing a few brutal murders from black people and then concluding with “this is black people. They will murder your children...”
No editor would ever allow a line like that to make it to publication. It’s needlessly provocative language that reveals the author’s bias and reduces the credibility of what might otherwise be a decent piece of writing.
I'm sorry, but have you ever read an actual newspaper other than the New York Times? That kind of thing makes it into newspapers with editors all the time. Hell, a lot of the time it's the editors writing it! [1]
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/aishagani/muslim-and-jewish-groups-... to pick one of the more high profile recent examples from the UKs biggest selling newspaper, in a column written by a former editor
Citation needed.
Have you missed the whole “fake news” fiasco? People will upvote and share any article that reinforces their existing beliefs and world view. Rather than approaching articles with a healthy skepticism and critical thinking, many people are consuming content based on what “team” the author seems to be advocating for. Instead of asking questions like, “what is the author’s agenda?” or “does this author have a track record of reliability?”, people are asking “does this author believe the same things I do?” If the answer to that is “yes,” then not even a follow-up article from a Pulitzer Prize winner will be sufficient to discredit it for many people.
People do that with accredited news already. For example, in communist circles there is some groups that believe that no matter what, everything that Stalin did was justified. They will bring up no amount of obscure scholars, and disregard large amounts of citations from modern scholars and new evidence to protect this world view. The same goes for any world view. Look at all the people hoping against all evidence that bitcoin is a fad.
Ultimately, people will do this no matter what quality of the evidence presented is (aside from one or two people who decide that they like X news source, there is a chance they will reverse with a citation from that news source, but no other, even if the quality of the evidence is the same). 'Fake news' existed long before it came to that name.
Which is really a response to how unbalanced the US political process has become. When the facts disagree with your point of view, ignore them. -> Reality now seems biased.
When some cops are corrupt, does it matter that the rest might be decent? An individual police officer represents the entire force. They wear the colours and the badge as a representative of the whole establishment.
Would you call the police if you knew there were such troubling corruption issues? It would definitely make me think twice - you just don't know which officer will turn up.
Zero tolerance is the only way forwards when it comes to this, otherwise the few destroy trust for the masses.
That argument can be used to attack virtually any minority.
From wikipedia:
"A police force is a constituted body of persons empowered by a state to enforce the law, protect property, and limit civil disorder"
If there are a corrupt few breaking the law, the body of persons cannot be said to be performing its duty.
It's worth reading about police accountability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_accountability
Generally the focus of reform is to hold the entire agency/force accountable.
Of course, if you replaced "cops" here with "black people", you basically arrive at the attitude of the corrupt cops themselves, and those who justify their "zero tolerance" policies, including those mentioned in TFA.
An ethnicity is a completely different thing to a law enforcement agency.
edit: If you want me to explain why, I can. A law enforcement agency is a group of people who have decided to perform a particular duty. An ethnicity is a group of people who are born that particular way.
A law enforcement agency has a strict set of rules governing behaviour, which when broken purposely constitute corruption. An ethnicity does not a have a particular set of rules, they follow the same rules as wider society. If they did have a specific set of rules, it would be considered an apartheid style society.
A member of a law enforcement agency has far reaching powers beyond a typical citizen. A member of an ethnicity is supposed to have the same powers as everyone else.
What's interesting is that by comparing the two you get a good idea of why police corruption is a terrible thing.
That the police and black people are not precisely the same sort of entity is irrelevant.
By the way - the law agrees with me. Please read about police accountability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_accountability
"The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act authorized the United States Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to bring civil ("pattern or practice") suits against local law enforcement agencies, to reign in abuses and hold them accountable.[9] As a result, numerous departments have entered into consent decrees or memoranda of understanding, requiring them to make organizational reforms"
Now apply your logic to black people, and you'll find that your views are worrying.
The basic issue is, that when the department/agency as a whole is not held accountable, they're able to avoid reforms that circumvent the issues in the future. Punish just the one police officer, and another later is able perform the same levels of corruption. It's systematic abuse of power.
This is why we must hold 'cops' or 'Baltimore cops' responsible, not just the few perpetrators.
I'm assuming based on your comments here and elsewhere in this thread that you're being purposely obtuse, and therefore I'm choosing not to engage with you further.
They are fairly commonly held opinions–that individual actions can destroy trust in an organisation, and that passiveness or tolerance within an organisation of such actions is equally as damaging.
I also think I've made fairly strong points about why your comparison is, in my opinion, incorrect. Not sure I'm being obtuse, but sorry if you think that is the case.
Yes. Of course it matters.
However the point that I'm trying to make (maybe badly) is that the Police are different to most other organisations. They're probably closest to healthcare in that the population, or maybe even distinct communities of a country needs to be able to trust the entire police force has its interest at heart.
From an outside perspective, this is failing in a bad way in the US. It is more than likely the actions of a few that is causing it.
That failure has bad repercussions, things get worse because people start taking justice into their own hands ... it leads to riots, clashes and worse. That's why you can never tolerate any corruption in a justice system.
I've witnessed first hands the riots here in London that resulted from questionable Police actions (we still don't know the full story of those events). It feels like society is crumbling when things get that bad.
At this point I can't imagine the local community, particularly minorities, have any trust in the authorities. Isn't that failure, why not train a new police force with new uniforms and then phase out the old?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Service_of_Northern_Ire...
Worst year of Troubles: 1972, 479 troubles-related deaths. I'm unclear as to whether that includes "background" non-political crime, so I'll round it up to 500 (current NI murder rate is about 1/100k pop).
Current Baltimore murder rate: 373 in 2017.
Murder rate for three Baltimores: 1119.
That makes today's Baltimore twice as lethal as Troubles NI, with all its carbombs and troops on the streets.
It's a mess that to me would seem to warrant national intervention. https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21724399-americ...
edit: add a dodgy esimation
Belfast poulation in 70's: 431k
% of troubles deaths in Belfast : 43%
=> murder rate: 479 * 0.43 / 431 = 44 homicides per 100k
But as you note, the NI figures is only the political murders so it can only really be compared against a similar subset of Baltimore homicides e.g. "gang violence".
So replacing the actors would either need to be done periodically, or would have to be done with an entirely new set of rules.
This is also my bias for things like the banking crisis. When something like that happens, it's too easy to blame something like greed. But that's missing the point. If you don't change the rules or some other aspect of the game, you are going to get the same situation again.
Obviously there is an issue with the environment but that doesn’t really affect the current situation: namely bad behavior in the police department.
Corrupt and criminal cops need to be prosecuted. The system needs to change going forward (equipment, policies, training, community outreach, etc).
That's definitely true. Punishing the egregious cases is a step in the right direction. But, there are a million other things that need to be fixed, including many things outside the police department's control.
Dropping the hammer on police may sound like it would be satisfying, but if I lived in a place where the community suddenly decided to cast the whole police force as villains, I'd move my family out for fear of the spike in crime that will certainly result. I can't think of a city in the US that hasn't endured a murder wave once the vilification of police became fashionable.
Or is your argument that police brutality and dirty methods are necessary to keep minorities in line?
Is this like Minority Report's Pre-Crime division, where the Baltimore PD just knows these kids are gonna commit murders when they grow up, so it's better to plant guns on them and remove them now?
Also, "vilification of police" has never been "fashionable"; it's arisen for decades in response to police crimes, and will continue until we restructure wholesale how PDs work.
Where are you going to get the people and money for a “new police force”? BPD is already severely understaffed.
Future, more civilized, societies will one day study the ruins of America with bafflement. Like, what were they thinking? Was this what liberty was to them?
Routine traffic stops, or felony traffic stops? I've never heard of that happening for the former, although there may be a few examples out there, but it's far from the norm. But that is indeed normal for a felony traffic stop, like when pulling over a stolen car, or after chasing a suspect from the scene of a crime, or if the car waited a really long time to pull over, or if an outstanding warrant was found when they ran the plates.
However, let's assume that the government has ideologically came to the same conclusion you've made and drafted a new constitutional amendment which outlawed gun ownership. There are incredible practical issues with actually enforcing it. How do you expect to collect 300 million firearms[1]? What do you do with 300M firearms once you have them?
There are also high rate of illegal (and therefor untracked) gun ownership in gang controlled areas. How do you expect people to feel about being disarmed when they live in an area surrounded by violent, illegal gun owners who haven't been disarmed?
What about the people who are gun collectors? Who may have spent their entire lives tracking down and collecting antique guns? Who's personal wealth may be largely in gun assets? Does the government pay them for each gun? Who the hell is going to trust the government to set a fair price for these guns? How much would it cost to buy 300 million gun and all of the related accessories and ammunition?
I'm barely scratching the surface here and this is assuming that Congress has already passed a constitutional amendment! Banning guns in the United States will never happen, because before any of these practical implications become relevant a new amendment needs to be passed in order to override what our founding fathers and a lot of the country see as the second most important amendment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...
Name one more western first world country besides the US, where cops shooting someone is hardly news. And no, the problem probably isn't guns.
In the US there's about 1 gun per resident, Germany 0.3, UK 0.06, and Canada 0.3. Meanwhile there were about 987 fatal shootings by cops in the US in 2016, compared to 13 in Germany, 4 in the UK, and 9 in Canada. Even adjusting these numbers for population and number of guns per resident, you will still be off by an order of magnitude.
The biggest factors do revolve around guns though. Not just numbers, but the culture which feeds into itself and the perception that guns are not a problem, but a solution ("The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun"). Of course, this then provokes a "Have-a-go-Harry" take on confrontation where people who are woefully ill-equipped to deal with a situation attempt to do so. The lack of training, the fetishisation of guns, and the sheer number of guns are all extremely significant factors in gun crime. Take away any one of these and the rate of gun crime would drop significantly. Unfortunately, any solution has to work within the framework of "no further regulation" to even get close to implementation which rules out swathes of methods
I was reading a reddit discussion some time ago, where most commenters concluded that it's fine to shoot a burglar entering your house at night, which feels very alien to me. Sure, it's a frightening situation, but in my mind a burglary clearly doesn't justify the, potentially deadly, use of a gun. Those are not equal actions and measures.
burglary clearly doesn't justify the, potentially deadly, use of a gun
2. My claim was that there are not many cities with a trend of cops murdering unarmed black men, so your comment isn't a valid rebuttal, however true it may otherwise be.
This is like the game where you can say a sentence where emphasis on different words changes the meaning, i.e. "I don't agree that cops murder black people" versus "I don't agree that cops murder black people." In text you can be ambiguous, and if anyone disagrees with your defense of cops, you just back off into the weird statistical claim about race that isn't that important.
So I ask you: are you defending cops murdering people and getting away with it? If not, why are you posting? I suppose it's academically interesting if cops murder all the races evenly, but it sure comes across as if you're defending cops murdering people and getting away with it.
It's not a red herring. The implication that "police murder blacks" is that there is a racist component in police murder, but the data show that this isn't the case, at least not in the last decade. I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether or not this is better or worse.
> So I ask you: are you defending cops murdering people and getting away with it? If not, why are you posting? I suppose it's academically interesting if cops murder all the races evenly, but it sure comes across as if you're defending cops murdering people and getting away with it.
No, of course I'm not defending murder. I'm posting because fixing problems requires properly understanding them. I understand that many people have no qualm with worsening the problems they purportedly care about so long as it lets them get a punch in against some group of people they dislike; however, that's not really my style.
There's actually considerable evidence that adverse interactions with law enforcement of all kinds (and not just LE murder) are not evenly distributed by race.
Whether that is a result of deliberate LE racism vs. other factors which contribute to such encounters being distributed disproportionately by race has more mixed evidence.
See Day 2 of [0].
[0] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gun...
I can cast sweden in a similar light. Or even Disneys magic kingdom.
Also, one cannot paint with such a wide brush as "The USA." It is the same mistake as any American visiting London, Paris, and Berlin -- and then saying they have seen "Europe." They didn't see Europe -- they saw globalized mega-regions that happened to be located on the European continent.
Unfortunately, Baltimore is an outlier when it comes to violent crime, corruption, and poverty. It is an urban center in decline and in need of all kinds of help. (This is where I stop, else it becomes political very quickly).
Compare Baltimore to places like Denver, Dallas, or Phoenix, and you will see very different cities. The US is huge in geography, population, and economics. Pinpointing an outlier and concluding that the entire country is poor and dangerous does not make for constructive conversation.
We would do ourselves a favor to talk more about the specific problems Baltimore faces, and then look at the broader American context to see which sister similar cities have tackled similar problems.
Frustratingly I can't find anything more recent, because I'm sure I read that last year, or the year before, we were down to one round fired.
It's actually more interesting to track number of times weapons are drawn, which is usually also reported as a use of force. It's less precise, but numbers are slightly higher.
And then there is some regulation, and well trained police.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/how-many-people-are-killed-...
It is like only a few lines actually have something to say, but the rest is just filler content. It is like someone wrote an article of a few lines, and someone else just extended it with random sentences to fill a page.
To make matters worse, usually the page is also polluted with advertisements and referencing articles in between paragraphs.
I have no experience in this field but I would guess they have a low pay (financial incentive) and very little training (leading to lack of professionalism). Is it so?