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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

It is just not a good time to be a cop. The right says you aren't doing enough, the left says you are doing too much. It is demoralizing and the pay just isn't there while the job market for doing other things is really hot. Cities, their governments, and the people who live in them (who elect the people who run the cities) will have to figure out how to re-build their police departments, but don't expect the police officers themselves to come up with their own solutions.

The USA lost in Vietnam, went on to have a very mixed record in the 1980s, got their confidence back in the early 90s, lost some of it in the mid to late 90s...and...well, the 00s taught the USA military again to be humble. Not a good template for municipal police departments.

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Poll after poll shows that the military is the most respected institution in American life. Crucially for this conversation, it has an excellent esprit de corp. The kind of self-pity that we now see among the police is something that would not be tolerated for even 5 minutes in the military. So it is an excellent model when we consider how to reform the police.

> Crucially for this conversation, it has an excellent esprit de corp.

There have been plenty of scandals in the USA military that have sullied its reputation. "Poll after poll" is just anecdotal, and not born out in practice.

> So it is an excellent model when we consider how to reform the police.

Militarizing the police is not the answer. Imagine if the police acted like those MPs at Abu Ghraib.

I don't think the parent is suggesting the police be militarized; rather that they could look to the US military's experience in combatting organizational racism and improving both professionalism and cohesion.

The US military has had its share of scandals but I have yet to see that degrade the normative US opinion of our "soldiers," namely that they do a hard job on our behalf and deserve respect and gratitude for that.

I don’t think soldiers have any kind of special reputation, at least among non southern urbanites. They do a job that they get paid for, some of them are good, a few are bad, etc… there is a swath of the country that holds that in high regard, especially in the south and in rural areas, but that isn’t normative in all areas.

While the numbers might bounce around from year to year, we should look at the long-term trend, which is that the military has been the most trusted institution in the USA at least since 1992:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/06/29/the-in...

Soldiers have a special reputation.

Imagine if the police acted with the military's ROE. I think I'd have seen a lot less civilians murdered by police in the past few years.

These are the ROE's that permits them to bomb a car with water bottles and kill 10 civilians without recourse?

Careful what you wish for there...

You should look up the ROE for a roadblock.

> Poll after poll shows that the military is the most respected institution in American life.

Not even the military is safe anymore:

>Trust in the military is dropping significantly, new survey suggests

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/03...

While the numbers might bounce around from year to year, we should look at the long-term trend, which is that the military has been the most trusted institution in the USA at least since 1992:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/06/29/the-in...

Yup, the cops I know here in San Francisco say it's a bad time to be a cop.

Also, the cops get blamed for things that are outside their control, like car break-ins, "They [the thieves] know that the most they'll get is a citation, so they'll be out on the street in a couple of hours," said Pete McLaughlin, retired.

Also we have a District Attorney (Chesa Boudin) who doesn't like to prosecute non-violent crimes, so rampant shoplifting has caused at least one CVS (at the corner of Eddy & Van Ness) to close.

The inability to lock these people up is frustrating, most of us aren’t blaming the police for that. Heck, it might not even be the DA’s decision (in Seattle, unlike SF, even if the DA wants to prosecute, it can be jammed up at the county level), and often it’s just a resource issue (too many low level property offenses, not enough lawyers and judges, or jail space). We need to be really in in tough on crime to fix those issues, and we still aren’t really. Policing is just one part of that, and right now is a horrible time to hire more police (like it is for hiring in other jobs ATM).

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