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Comment by Imnimo | Hacker News Reader

Probably for the best. I'm very skeptical that police training decreases misconduct. If anything, it probably increases it.

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> it probably increases it.

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.

>Why would you think that?

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.

Everywhere around the world it does - because police is a civil service everywhere, and national laws and regulations exist to set their standards and procedures.

I think it's also worthwhile to point out that federal departments like FBI (which require a bachelor's degree) tend to have lower rates of misconduct. There's at least a small amount of self-control and critical thinking needed to graduate university, which presumably weeds out some of the more unstable candidates.

I looked up if there are any studies about this. I found this one from 2014: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/109861111452204.... Paywalled but referenced elsewhere as "more in-service training police had, the fewer cases there were of police misconduct."

Your opinion is ill-founded. I doubt that anyone in military or law enforcement agrees with you.

Take the Tyre Nichols incident for example. The arresting officers failed to employ several fundamental tactics that would have resulted in a better outcome.

Yes, clearly the officers were just confused and trying their best when they beat him to death. If only someone had told them not to do that.

Police are bad at their jobs, but we should not teach them to be better at their jobs?

That would be great, but it's not the option we're presented with. Police training emphasizes escalation of force, it frames interactions with the public as a battle, and spends an inordinate amount of time on firearms and combat.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220128201854/https://www.washi...

There's no sense in saying that's what police training is when clearly it could take many different forms

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

I will certainly agree that if police training were completely different, then it might be helpful to have more of it.

You think with more training, they would have been able to give him a non-lethal beating?

I think they would eagerly have followed a better course of action that didn't lead to getting fired and then prosecuted

In New York City, the police take citizens back to the stationhouse and brutally beat them where there are no cameras.

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