> There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.
- Commander Adama
- Commander Adama
I'm starting to think it was more than just sitcoms
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...
No; no I don't. I need police to be better equipped upstairs, maybe take some queues from the British or German police.
A slim portion of the American population is heavily armed, and police don't deal with armed suspects in something like 99% percent of 911 calls. In that <1% of cases, we can call SWAT. That's why SWAT exists, to be a highly trained, militarized version of the police.
British Police
When they are not arresting mothers or 80 year olds for not wearing a mask or holding a sign.
https://www.dumpert.nl/?selectedId=7998859_cd38b070
German Police
They actually called in Jet Fighters, Helicopters and a few thousand active military. After have at least 1000 police looking too. In total over 5000 personal to find one guy in a forest. Seems excessive.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/17/german-police-...
As a former Marine, until watching our cops in action this year, I was all about them. Now I'm disgusted with them, and will do everything I can to take the toys away from these children. Until you've seen them first hand (or you are one... Just quit and live a better life), it's actually really hard to believe just how awful they are. Are cops are the "war on drugs" cops who bend or disregard every rule so they can "come down hard" and "make an example". That's the attitude. And if you think that's okay... Wait till your kid gets pulled over, or stopped for riding a bike through the wrong part of town. These people are thugs, and operate where no laws will touch them.
I don't understand the position ACAB or NCAB (N = No). Clearly, some cops are bastards.
In The Netherlands my experiences with the Dutch police have been good or at worst neutral. I have been surprised numerous times how downright friendly and relaxed cops here can be. Even at the few demonstrations I been to (most notably two anti war in Iraq demos) no trouble whatsoever.
Even if you speak for US only I have a hard time believing the entire police force of US is rotten.
"In Germany, for example, police recruits are required to spend two and a half to four years in basic training to become an officer, with the option to pursue the equivalent of a bachelor’s or master’s degree in policing. Basic training in the U.S., by comparison, can take as little as 21 weeks (or 33.5 weeks, with field training). The less time recruits have to train, the less time is afforded for guidance on crisis intervention or de-escalation."
This isn't a single cherry picked event; it is the minimum required standard. I think that perhaps our police are just poorly trained thugs compared to the Germans; the British police force has a more comparable training to ours (36 weeks I believe), but they ARE NOT ARMED. In order to carry a firearm, they need higher rank, more years of experience, and additional training in order to carry a firearm.
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/06/am...
I disagree with this assertion. It's very hard to generalize this type of property; really the only way is to use some type of normalized data, and that faces the problem which plagues all generalization, in that it doesn't apply to large swaths of what is being generalized across. I think that Detroit is a violent place, and if you generalize across all of Michigan, you'll see Detroit isn't representational.
There are some places in the US, mostly in dense urban areas, where gang and organized criminal violence is a problem. These places need to have well armed violent response units. Cops should not be engaging every situation in these places as if they are all extreme violence situations, but in the case that there are people shooting at other people, call on those violent response units.
We assume a lot of inevitables in this case, specifically that an interaction with law enforcement will likely end in conflict
In fact, it gets weaker and weaker as guns improve because the required amount to “stop” a human had been grossly overestimated.
.308 hunting rifle cartridge, still deemed necessary to stop charging wild animals, has muzzle kinetic energy of 3.5kJ. .223Rem for AR-15, used in wars against humans, is 1.8kJ, 9mmx19 used in latest “tactical self defense” PCCs is just 0.5kJ.
Bullets are all deadly if it hits and when it hits.
That's a false dichotomy and misses the main point of the argument to reduce police militarization.
Nobody is upset when SWAT responds to a school shooting or a terrorist act. The problem (I suppose a really good problem to have after all) is that those things almost never happen, even though they are the ones we see on the news and can quickly retrieve in our minds. You're more likely to die in a plane crash than in a terrorist act in the US.
That begs the question: if militarized units don't have enough violent crime to respond to, but are still a full time unit then what do they respond to? The answer is why people are upset and it's because we are sending them to respond to drug offenses and to execute search warrants instead. Situations thay they inevitably end up escalating (on average) and killing people in.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...
I have yet to see any statistics showing that militarizing the police makes them any more effective or safe.
The police need to be trained in how to de-escalate; they need to be trained not to "dominate" every situation they're involved in. The need to be demilitarized, and SWAT units need to be expanded slightly to deal with the small number of cases every year that demand real firepower.