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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

I would go further. I would suggest demanding that all training of police officers be subject to auditing similar to how a college course can.

Now of course rules would be put in place to limit numbers, disallowing slots to be filled with affiliated persons, providing safety equipment should the course requirement for students, and a copy of all printed and electronically distributed material.

Rules to protect students and teachers from disruption could however include no electronic devices, phones, tablets, or such and professional dress and demeanor. Anyone auditing would not be allowed to interject during any class not interact with students. Observation is a powerful tool in itself.

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No amount training in the world is going to matter when there is no accountability after-the-fact.

Or when your training is directly at odds with the the job that you are expected to do by your boss.

The police, as they exist today, are largely unsuited for dealing with the majority of issues they get called out for. No amount of training is going to fix that. No amount of training is going to turn them into mental health experts, or social workers. No amount of training is going to empower them to do something useful about the pants-less gentleman yelling outside my apartment at 2 am, or about the tent city down by the overpass. [1]

Training is, however, a great substitute for actual reforms, that you can point at as a 'see, we are doing something'.

[1] What they should actually do about the tent city is an open political question, but doing a monthly sweep, where they arrest and release the occupants, and throw all their belongings in the trash is probably not a good long-term plan. No amount of training is going to stop that, either.

What the public is discovering with the recent spotlight on this subject, is that the current system of police behavior is the result of a complex web of misaligned (and frequently malicious) interests having their sway over police departments and the law.

I disagree with your characterization here, because I don't believe improved training materials are at odds with all of the other overhauls needed throughout the system.

Separately, EFF has a secondary concern here: they are interested in increased transparency around electronic surveillance practices used by the police. Information like this could be useful for mounting a legal defense by drawing attention to outdated/disproven police practices.

I would go further. Have all classes and training sessions recorded so there's record for review of how accurately curriculum is being followed, what off the cuff side commentary might be made, etc - to weed out bad instructors, bad role models. This also acts as protection for the officers themselves if there's evidence they were trained poorly or wrongly.

What's already public is pretty harrowing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwEYhIX4cbM

That is reasonable instruction for soldiers but not cops.

Can you be more specific about what is harrowing?

It presumes before the fact that all police killings are justified (Obviously there was a clear and present danger to others!), and holds up remorselessness about killing as a sort of quasi-enlightened state.

You misconstrue the content to describe it like that. The justification is predicated on the a clear and present danger to others.

What reasoning do you have to support being remorseful for saving others from a clear and present danger?

Normal people have nightmares for years after killing someone, even in the most perfectly justified cases of self defense. You don't easily recover. If you can kill someone and be more or less OK after that, you probably have antisocial personality disorder or you've had a lot of training to desensitize you to killing. Neither of those are good qualities in public service.

> Normal people have nightmares for years after killing someone, even in the most perfectly justified cases of self defense.

This isn't an answer to the question. It is in fact a non-answer that endorses the irrational as an enlightened state.

Do you think people need a justification to have feelings?

What you call misconstruing I call reading between the lines.

Edit: and I think remorse is a healthy and useful check on the excess of police violence we've been seeing. I suppose if you think it's all just fine, we're not going to have much common ground for understanding.

Justice is not served when a police officer takes the role of judge, jury and executioner. Summary execution is the worst of outcomes, and deprives victims of their most fundamental freedom. This guy doesn't think so. He wants cops to love exercising that extra-legal power. It's sick and an affront to the constitution.

Summary execution is not what is happening when a police officer kills someone who is a danger to others.

Summary execution is when an accused criminal is killed without the benefit of a trial. What part of this definition are you contesting?

The fact that they are not being killed for the commission of the crime but to stop the danger to others.

Your problem is not with the definition, but in that the definition doesn't match the situation.

Thanks to sousveillance, we've caught far too many cops on video, shooting unarmed people in the back as they're running away. I call that summary execution. Do you agree?

Another pattern we see a lot of is cops escalating situations, and then when the accused (rather understandably) matches that escalation, then the officer kills and claims self defense. I'd actually describe that as premeditated murder, because the danger is a predictable result of the cop's own actions.

In the very rare instance of an emplaced shooter, where less lethal means cannot be used and the area cannot be evacuated, then yeah, it makes sense to shoot back defensively.

Way too much of police training is focused on killing people. Training, as is done in much of the world, should focus on de-escalation.

More cops die in traffic than at the hands of criminals. It's an astonishingly safe job, considering the focus placed on "remorseless killing".

The very nature of policing needs to change.

Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police.

Mandatory regular empathy training.

Mandatory training to quickly distinguish between real and imagined threats, and to abort quickly force escalation if a threat turns out to be imaginary.

Clear rules of engagement for use of tools like batons, Tasers, and firearms.

Detective units need punishment for declining to pursue cases when resources and evidence are available. There should never be a rape kit backlog.

Reward good behavior. Officers should be proud of statistics like "greatest % of arrests this month without injury to the suspect."

Police simply don't need to handle everything. Welfare checks, mental health emergencies, and drug emergencies need a social worker involved and on the front lines.

Policing is an extremely hard job. Police academies are not preparing officers for it correctly because police departments have no incentive to actually conduct policing correctly. It all starts with political oversight and breaking down the blue wall of silence.

> Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police.

I see this suggested a lot, and I want to reiterate that having studied these sports -- being able to subdue an opponent without hurting them is a point of pride already. All reputable instructors will instill this. We can't allow the excellent reputation of these sports to influence our understanding of how police operate.

Police are not good-faith participants in the goal to injure fewer people via policing. If you teach them more BJJ, they'll use those skills to establish a dominant physical position. A practitioner of BJJ will take this opportunity to de-escalate the situation and escape without injuring anyone else or themselves. A police officer will take this opportunity to use weapons like mace and tasers, or stomp on necks and gouge eyes. They only escalate and when given the opportunity, they brutalize with impunity.

I believe we can influence the the amount of harm done by police by removing the tools they have available to do that harm. Take away all their weapons, and I believe they will more wisely evaluate how they decide to engage with citizens. Hold them legally responsible for any injuries sustained in the process of an arrest and they'll need to purchase insurance -- officers who do more harm will be uninsurable (or the expense of the insurance will make them unhireable).

Didn't California just significantly reduce the police's budget. They need to increase the budget, if they want better training. Most people don't realize how poorly funded the police is and how much this has contributed to the current issues.

Give a man to a gun and never teach him how to fight, guess what he uses at the smallest hint of a threat?

there is sufficient money in policing, how it is being used is another matter

I don't think there is. A fair bit of police hardware is allocated, not purchased. My understanding is that the discretionary budgets for things like training is fairly thin.

This is why police have so much military hardware. They were able to get these things for free due to 1033.

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