I don't live in the US, but from abroad I can tell how messed up the police are over there. The number of stories of brutality, deaths and upright bullying of every day citizens...
It's really messed up, perhaps Americans are desensitised, but I can tell you from the other side of the world - it's nowhere like this in other countries, you guys have a BIG problem with how your cops are selected and trained.
I've read over and over again that intelligence is a disqualifying characteristic for being a LEO. They want people to follow orders and be a good partner (e.g., never go against what your partner says).
My experience in CA since the 80's is that LEOs are very corrupt and really only care about their own. There are exceptions. I live in an unusual city, LEO-wise, but it is totally not the norm.
This went to court and the man who sued for discrimination lost his case.
> -- A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.
> The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.
Smart, well-educated police are how you end up with Frank Serpico[2]. Most police forces don't want men like Serpico on their forces.
[1]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
Corruption is incredibly common overseas (yes, Europe too). Privacy laws regarding law enforcement are much worse.
There’s a really good video on YouTube called “Never Talk To Police.” It’s a law professor and police officer explaining to law students why they should instruct their clients not to talk to police.
The police officer compares American and foreign practices, and emphasizes US police use deception, but foreign police use force.
I’m sure bad and good police agencies in America and abroad. The best PD I’ve interacted with is in a mid-sized UK city. The worst I’ve seen is in a major American city.
Semi automatic deception that ranks the US 30 in term of death by police, in the middle of third world countries, far away from any developed countries
Police in the US have the least training of all Developed countries on Earth [1].
The results of less training are very clear.
Yeah, you might not be getting a complete or accurate picture.
The US is geographically huge and has a large, distributed, heterogeneous population. Be careful making broad generalizations about 330M people in 10s of thousands of cities, in 50 states across 3.5M square miles of land.
Awful stuff happens sometimes. That doesn't mean it's the norm.
Translation I get all of my information about American policing through highly politicized and charged news storied that become stories only because they are exceptional and then feel justified passing judgment on an entire country that has 3 times the people and land as my country.
To say our policing systems are bad is a smear on the hard-working men and women in those systems. The US simply has challenges that European nations do not have. You can (and maybe should) debate whether or not those challenges should be present in the first place but blaming those challenges on the police is just mean.
Umm, no:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16...