Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem (2015)
harvardlawreview.org
harvardlawreview.org
It seems to be something related to American egos that is accelerated 1000x when moved into a position of authority like a police officer.
I'm in the UK, and yes we have our problems however it seems reasoning or social skills of our officers are night and day and reflect behaviour observed of society as a whole.
I'd encourage you to watch the entire list of videos to get a sense for what policing is like in parts of America, and what circumstances lead to the use of deadly force. Some of them are difficult to watch, but it showcases both good and bad examples of how to handle extremely dangerous situations.
It's not an enviable job - the number of videos that start out as a routine traffic stop with the cop having amiable conversation, and then rapidly escalate to a situation where the suspect is pulling a gun on the officer, is truly mind-blowing.
When police officers from Europe come to visit, the first thing that surprise them is how tense the police is. They are constantly in fear of getting shot.
Reducing civilian gun ownership would help a lot to reduce violence, cops and non cops alike.
And, looking at the list [1], gun ownership does not seem to correlate highly with crimes involving guns. Honduras is #55 according to Wikipedia, Canada is #7. So why aren't Canadian cops constantly in fear for their life, but Hondurans are? It does not seem to be the number of guns.
It'll still be a nice thing, I guess. But it's hard to do and takes decades to have impact if you don't have a very compliant population.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
In Canada there are lots of gang members who carry illegal handguns. We just don't have the same degree of poverty as some parts of the US (even though our GDP/capita is significantly lower).
Can't help but see US policing demeanour come off as trying to maintain a dominance and show off the alpha. Undermine it and there seems to be conflict.
I can approach a UK officer and undermine their authority publicly, swear and hold contempt, question their immediate presence. Joke and jest about them to their face, name call, occasional swearing and calling them pigs routinely isn't too uncommon. I have done most these things on night outs without fear to my safety or rights.
Policing is definitely different between the US and UK but so are the people behind the uniform. Bigger egos exist in US policing disproportionately.
Also qualified immunity only applies to civil liability, it does nothing to protect police from criminal prosecution (which still doesn't happen, because culture).
To send people out there to do that and then charging them with crimes if they go too far seems a bit hypocritical to me. It needs to be a top down change where the police use the least violence possible and have the least amount of confrontation possible.
(The whole arresting protestors thing also confuses me. Free speech is the foundation of our country. We should be celebrating people risking their lives to fight for an issue that matters in the middle of a pandemic. But instead, we "kettle" them, hit them with batons, and send them to jail. It's not good, and shows that our society has a LONG way to go. What's nice about being so far from the goal, though, is that small changes can have a big impact. The first 99% of the work is as hard as the next 1% after all.)
Compare the MPS de-escalating the protest in London today; https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1269315641217073152
Officers move in a clear way, they do not pre-emptively arm themselves, they do not get hung up on non-violent stragglers, they take their time.
There have been two days of protests in London which are explicitly anti-police, have been very passionate, have had flashes of violence, but have NOT escalated.
Aside from the racial aspect, a lot of videos I've seen from US recently have just been crap in a professional sense.
There are several reasons that police get away with breaking laws, but I think the core of it is the holding from Castle Rock v. Gonzalez that the police are neither required to enforce the law nor protect the public. Do we really expect the police to follow up on each other's violations if there's no duty to do their jobs at all?
When you create a proper guardian police force, officers become friendly and respected community members; they become good neighbours. What then stops them from committing crimes against members of the public is the same thing that stops most family members from committing crimes against one another: a sense of belonging, investment, and care for a community. The best example of this style of policing that I can think of is the classic small town police in small town dramas or sitcoms like Corner Gas [1]. Notice how the police officers eat at the local diner which serves as a third place [2] for the community.
Of course, the disappearance of third places from American social life is another big factor in this complicated puzzle.
That's concerning, isn't it? There are federal and state statutes about bribery and gratuities, and the fact that police officers took him up on the offer day by day is worrying for many reasons. And at the end of the day it didn't even help him.
> Sue Rahr, a former sheriff [...], put it this way: “We do our recruits no favor if we train them to approach every situation as a war. To do so sets them up to create unnecessary resistance and risk of injury.”
If you treat everyone like they want to kill you, you telegraph that through your actions and mannerisms, and induce the very escalation you are worried about.
Cops frequently end up playing the role of social worker, mental health counselor, relationship mediator, addiction counselor... and with their incredibly violent and often racist attitudes the result is predictable.
I am glad that finally these issues are being addressed. They have been festering for decades.
There are situations where the warrior mindset are needed. We do need people who can deal with extremely dangerous situations involving lethal force.
However, many, many situations need social workers more than they need warriors. If anything the warrior could back up their unarmed counterpart.
Why aren’t there other roles with different capabilities that work in concert with warriors?
I’m not sure it makes sense to only seek to retrain when probably a great share of existing police officers could be replaced with more effective counterparts with some of the same powers but completely different skills and assignments.
It is teams of skilled specialists that solve difficult problems, why do we have only one person to mend so much of society’s challenging circumstances?
The situation did not need a gun—or the ability to confront violence. It needed someone brave and empathetic and this person did that and I’ll never forget it.
Part of it might be gun prevalence, but the problem seems to be largely cultural to me. Police Unions abhorrent behavior entrench it, too.
The Cartels import weapons by the container load, and not from the US. And that's not including the ones they steal or just appropriate from their own government.
And please read wikipedia on the subject
I don’t care what Wikipedia has to say about anything - especially where guns are concerned.
You don't need to win in a gunfight in order to win.
I don't think there is a European perspective. We haven't had anything close to the gang crime problem in the US in a long time, and when we did have it, guns weren't a thing.
It's obvious that there are lots of issues, but "look, we don't have them because we do X" doesn't work when we didn't have anything comparable in the first place. I'm certain that we would see very different policies if London, Paris or Berlin had the murder rate of Chicago, and it wouldn't be "let's spend more money on mental health".
No, it's really not, and "you're American, you just don't want to see it" is not an argument. And if it was, it wouldn't work, because I'm not American and am not living in the US. Born, raised and still living in Europe.
That's how I know that we never had anything like the US situation in recent history. Hell, even during the world wars when criminals would've had a field day, it wasn't anywhere close.
It's not hard to find stories about police brutality and police corruption in areas far from any gang activity (small towns in the midwest, for instance). You can also find stories about police departments in similarly small towns that have been able to obtain serious military-grade equipment that they definitely don't need.
And even separate from all that, you have things like civil asset forfeiture, where the police think it's totally reasonable and OK to just steal people's stuff, without the people being even suspected of any crime, and the law (in many places) allows it.
This is all part of a culture that tells cops they are above the law, they have the power, and everyone else just needs to bow down and accept that.
Then you combine that with the serious, organized efforts white supremacist groups have gone to over the years to essentially take control of the police force...
Yeah, the biggest "gang crime problem" here is the gang in blue.
Certainly, I agree with that. And the US culture is very different from European cultures (which is not a surprise, given how quickly the country changes and how young it is). Comparing it to Europe where we're sitting on a very different (and much more stable still) culture with very different traditions, a completely different approach to individualism vs collectivism etc, isn't helpful, and you won't get anywhere if you dismiss 99% of the difference and then say (yes, I'm exaggerating, and no, I don't mean you specifically but people who like to point to Europe in comparison) "well, clearly, it's because the citizens don't have guns and the police wear friendlier uniforms".
American isn't changing faster or slower than any other place either, it just is favoring certain ethics that are counterproductive to a peaceful society. Reminds me of certain other fundamentalist places in the world. It of course makes sense it would turn out this way, many early settlers went across the Atlantic precisely to be able to practice their fundamentalist versions of protestantism. Some of that carries of into this I am sure.
Seriously, take up some literature on deescalation tactics for police, and in particular evidence based effectiveness of such methods in comparisionto other tactics.
That's a small part of it, yes. But mostly, it's very individualistic, and it's very different from European cultures in that regard which will obviously result in very large differences in results.
> American isn't changing faster or slower than any other place either
Errr, yes it is. The demographic make-up of America has been determined by waves of immigration, that changes culture. And it has been happening much faster than in other places. You're rewriting history and I don't understand your motives.
Migration is similarly not exclusive to America. Tons happens in Europe too, we're humans after all! Moreover, country and language borders tend to create different spaces for local differentiation, which is something that is much rarer in the US due to the fact that Americans (almost) all speak English. It's no accident you will find most variance in places people do not speak English (Cajun culture, Spanish-American culture) or a very different English (South<>North, poor neighborhoods/cities vs affluent areas).
Step outside of the Anglosphere!
The fact is that police decided to escalate their response to gun crime is entirely on them. The desire to turn things into a "war" between police and non-police validates the decision to use guns against police. After all they're soldiers.
Further more the consistently abusive behavior of police and complete lack of consequences reinforces to abused communities that police are no different from any other gang, with the exception that they will never be arrested. That again justifies treating them as just another violent gang, and so use of equivalent force against them is reasonable.
Police also are more violent, and push harsher charges, against specific communities. By doing that they've established that they are not operating fairly, and that lack of fairness further establishes police as an enemy.
My suggestion was in regards to the rather extreme and unjustified comments the public officials were making (and continue to make) towards the police. I hope it is obvious to everyone that without police NYC will be utterly fucked within 24 hours. I stand by those suggestions. If push comes to shove they should go on strike. The vast majority of them are good men and women, and they deserve to be respected.
In other words, I'm not 15 years old, I see nuance, and I want some real, lasting solutions to these issues. Sue me.
I'm tired of seeing people talk about riots: it doesn't matter because arguing about it gets you nowhere on the real issue of police brutality.
Holding up "calmness" as such a positive thing automatically discredits angry people, which is what I'm calling out here.
The fundamental truth of the situation is that you can't disband the police, and "defunding" it, partially or fully, is not a serious solution to the problems we face as a society. Anyone who suggests this with a straight face doesn't want solutions, they want to continue to be angry and upset.
We can (and should) reform it. We can (and should) train it better. We can (and should) hire better people to work in it. We can (and should) fire/prosecute bad apples faster where there's evidence of wrongdoing.
You CAN'T DO any of this by stigmatizing the police profession or reducing funding. It's not a serious suggestion. You also can't do that by burning a police car or looting a Target. I hope these truths are self-evident enough, but if not, I don't know what to tell you.
At the moment you're parroting The Internationale even without knowing it: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internationale
I don't need to remind you where this particular road ends. As someone who grew up under a communist regime, believe me when I tell you this: you won't like it.
Binary thinking of this sort is the root of our problems.