US police receive less training than plumbers
ft.com
ft.com
He was absolutely horrified at what constituted “training” at the academy. An interesting thing about the Green Berets - while they’re certainly very capable with weaponry there’s a lot of “finesse” that goes into their role (to the point he called SEALs, Delta, etc “door kickers”).
At the academy the training on everything from de-escalation to weapons and tactics ranged from completely wrong to outdated, dangerous, etc.
Granted this is through the lens of someone the US government easily spent millions of dollars training but in discussing this extensively with him he offered several suggestions in the training regimen that seemed very simple, obvious, and likely of little increase in cost/time.
He's described several occasions from his (11!) combat tours when they had to be very strategic and calculating in "going to guns". Given the training and experience they would be relatively calm, capable, and measured regardless compared to (as one example) lesser trained units that hammer and nail. He's alive in large part to being able to talk/persuade his way out of things.
It's not a stretch to imagine a lot of the most serious issues with policing in the US (police shootings) come from very poor training all around, putting themselves in disadvantaged positions, and escalating to the point of "go to guns".
US Army Special Forces have completely different mission sets from SEALs/Delta etc, in which the latter does mostly kill/capture. SF does a lot more integration with host nation forces, training and so on. Not the same organizational goals, which is intentional.
Also there’s a bit of controversy in the SF community as they’ve spent more of their mission “door kicking” lately…
In terms of training, he’s Hispanic and with his language abilities (at least three fluently) travel anywhere SOCOM sends him he more or less blends in.
At certain times he’s described his mission as “teaching little brown guys how to fight”. That said he’s also described really dicey standoffs (literally weapons out and trained) with local militias, etc where finesse and nuance was the way to “win” (stay alive).
Point still being, police academies in the US train more “door kickers” (and poorly) than they do SF - which is what we need.
How about "Engineers/programmers/teachers receive less training than plumbers"?
You then need 2-3 years of supervised work before you are considered to be a full engineer ~ journeyman, so add in 4000 to 6000 hours on top.
On the computer science side if you don't go for engineering, you have just as many classes, and you're generally not considered to be a real, productive software engineer out of college.
In another country I studied in, to get a CS degree you need 5 years of specialized postsecondary education, and 6 for engineering (highschool ends a year sooner). That's 8500 to 10200 hours of full-time specialized postsecondary education, only for you to be considered barely useful when you come out.
As far as I'm aware in most places in the world it's even more for teachers, who deal with a normal 4 year undergraduate education, and on top of that have around a year of supervised internships.
I think it's less about bigotry towards plumbers and more about prejudice towards cops.
Like how to know exactly when they can seize people's money and stuff like that? That seems like an hour long class.
Follow the incentives...
Why would you think that? I'm assuming the sort of police training we're talking about is "if you're faced with this situation, you should do..." The most famous case of police misconduct in recent history is George Floyd, and I don't think it's controversial to say the responding officers just didn't know what they were supposed to be doing in that situation, did the wrong thing, and it resulted in a death. Better training would definitely have alleviated that situation - it definitely wouldn't have made it worse.
The purpose of police training is to indoctrinate recruits into police culture.
https://twitter.com/KatieSponsler/status/1619341593827487744
> I don't think it's controversial to say the responding officers just didn't know what they were supposed to be doing in that situation, did the wrong thing
I think if you polled 100 police officers, you'd find that that is a very controversial issue, and that many of them support Chauvin's actions. They even had an officer testify that his actions were justified at his trial.
Take the Tyre Nichols incident for example. The arresting officers failed to employ several fundamental tactics that would have resulted in a better outcome.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220128201854/https://www.washi...
If the police are doing the wrong thing, then they need to be taught how to do the right thing. Cops have a lot of extra scrutiny and protocols than moat other professions, and they obviously want to avoid ending up in jail. Good training should teach the correct way to react to situations, and then actually put them through those situations
Even something simple like "how to cuff someome who is resisting without using nonlethal weapons" would have helped a ton. This is a task that you actually need to practice rather than just read about in a book