Why did they need to have guns drawn and that many cops, even if the flag had been correct? A car involved in a homicide investigation doesn't mean it's even being driven by the suspect. It's not a positive ID at all
This training is supposedly for "officer safety." But being a police officer in the US isn't even in the top-10 most dangerous fields, and the vast majority of deaths are from traffic accidents or health issues while on the job (e.g. heart attack/stroke), not gun-related. So it is more likely a cultural issue within the profession.
(pretending my parents, wife, children are police officers and posting from that perspective, but do not like taste of boot nor Flock - just thinking logical on the ground procedure accounting for broken larger system)
I don’t know why the first thing that comes to mind is calling in for backup and having a cop in a mascot costume get out, with body armor and a completely concealed weapon at the ready underneath. They cheerfully chat up the adult driver, say hi to the kid & give a sticker, and once they assess it’s safe they can move onto the next call while the uniformed officer comes to discuss the situation. Doesn’t help the adult much though I guess, we’d know about the concealed weapon. … btw maybe sending a drone or a robot actually came to mind first, but those solutions are uncomfortable - OK w/a million caveats maybe
(Instead of posting something so stupid I could’ve left it at I hope there’s a happy medium!)
Our constitution itself gives us a blueprint because it states, in no uncertain terms, a "well-regulated militia"; not "each individual citizen".
> the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
what does "the people" mean to you?
(If anyone wants to alter the 2nd so it’s more in line with their views, there’s a clear legal path. Pass an Amendment or call a Constitutional convention.)
are these the same people? so only the militia gets to be secure? Are you sure?
And yes, I'm absolutely certain. Go ahead and test your theory against the American government and I'll wait to see you on the news.
i never made that claim. "that's what they call a strawman" - Poli-sci Ph.D.
so you say that there's a difference between "the people" in the second amendment and "the people" of the 4th amendment. Can you back that up at all?
"About as risky as low paid delivery work" doesn't seem unreasonably high to me basically. Most cops die in car crashes, not being shot by potential suspects as it stands.
it's a pretty high bar to say that all three people the police kill every day were warranted.
most line of duty deaths involve not wearing a seatbelt.
Fun fact; apparently that's just like a local police force's motto (LAPD's originally), and not a national policy for all law enforcement in the US. While reading about this some days ago, I came across this:
> The phrase “To Protect and to Serve” originated as the motto for the Los Angeles Police Department before being adopted by departments throughout the country. The popular phrase has turned out to be quite misleading. Through a series of former decisions, the courts have affirmed that the police have no legal obligation to prevent harm except under specific circumstances [...] The Supreme Court upheld the precedent set in DeShaney and affirmed that State actors, in this case police departments, have no legal duty to protect - https://guulr.com/2021/05/10/a-review-of-to-protect-and-serv...
I think overall the motto is simply a marketing term today.
A guy got shot after being swatted not so long ago and that would be a data point with no injuries for officers, masking the real victims.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_...
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...
Citation needed.
You don't think that has something to do with the exact policies you are objecting to? They call them "high risk stops" for a reason.
Policing in Mexico is ~100 deaths per 100,000 compared to 11.3 deaths per 100,000 in the US.
100 deaths/100,000 is on par with logging workers in the US, which is the #1 most dangerous field.
Do better research.
Then 9/11 happens a few years later and we end up with 1) police being trained in counterinsurgency tactics and antiterrorism response by the FBI, and 2) an ongoing military surplus program where the Army dumps all of its used weapons, armor, and armored vehicles on the police every time they upgrade.
As far as I'm personally concerned, all of these things were mistakes, but I'm not going to sit here and act like they were completely unjustified responses to nothing. My own experiences having been in the Army during the Iraq and Afghanistan years is suck it up. You volunteered for a job knowing you'd get shot at every now and again, but you're not a hostile occupying force. Your job is ultimately to serve the people, which does mean protecting them from some extremely violent criminals out there, but the bar for action should be a lot higher than it is. The overwhelming majority of the time I served, the rules of engagement stated you can't shoot unless fired upon first. It is legal to open carry in the countries we were in, so it was never acceptable to shoot someone simply because they were carrying or because you felt your life was in danger. I never understood why the police couldn't be held to the same standard.
These things ebb and flow in a series of counterveiling overreactions, but the Internet of today does a poor job of remembering just how violent the 80s and 90s actually were.
I speak to folks about the USA sometimes, and guns come up. We are known for that. They think they want them. I get it... they do sound cool.
I try to explain that in the USA, the ratio of guns to people is far above 1:1. Therefore, if I was a police officer approaching any car, I would assume that the driver had a gun. That reality increases the chances of bad things happening due to human factors. "Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a twitchy wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"
Sometimes, this seems to wake people up to the reality of ubiquitous firearms. Please note, I am not making judgements here. These just seem like facts.
Why would every speeding pull-over become a wild-west situation? If possessing a gun is a right, then mere possession is no reason to suspect criminality is afoot.
If you inspect rollercoasters I figure you could probably be pretty lackadaisical on the average inspection. If you don’t take each one deadly seriously though and there’s no way of knowing when it’s important to, maybe it comes flying off the track, so you follow your checklist each and every time without exception.
(So glad I’m not employed to or in a position where I need to own weapons.)
You reminded me of a salient line in BSG:
“There’s a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemy 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.”
Except that majority of households (58%) do not have a firearm:
* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...
and when it comes to individuals, it is the majority (70%) that do not own one. The numbers are 'skewed' by a few individuals that own a lot of them. Statistically you'd be more correct to assume the person in the car does not have one (unless, perhaps, they're a white guy):
* https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...
If I'm ever elected God Emperor of the United States I'm going to make beating XCOM 2 a high school graduation requirement just to impart some basic statistical intuition into the population. Everyone needs the experience of having a 99% chance to hit and missing the shot, let alone 70%.
I understand that thinking (see also 'would you play Russian roulette with those odds?'), but the "(>)1:1" comments hides the underlying distribution, which I think colours how people think about the (alleged) pervasiveness of firearms in the US.
As another example of perception versus reality, most people probably don't think of Canada as 'gun country', but we're in the top ten per capita (probably because of the history/culture of hunting up here):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
And if you're going to teach people about odds and statistics, perhaps it will help people understand that guns tend to make people's homes less safe:
* https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2013/03/guns-in-homes-a...
Yes, merely owning a gun does make you statistically more likely to die of a gun shot, but only in the same sense that owning alcohol mean you're more likely to drive drunk, owning a car means you're more likely to die in a car crash, and having a house wired for electricity means you're more likely to die of electrocution.
For instance, that article says that the risk of suicide is 5x higher with a gun in the house. Well my risk of suicide is presently zero, and 5 x 0 = 0.
There's a great deal of individual control over the risk when it comes to personal ownership. Compare that to a cop who is professionally obligated to pull over a large sample of people they don't get to select, and this sample is disproportionately violent or otherwise untrustworthy.
GGParent commentator here. My point is: let's role-play as a police officer pulling over a car in the average US State vs. the average EU country.
In both of those continents, we cops have guns. However, what are the chances that the driver has one? In the EU, would you ever have your hand on your holster while just approaching the pulled-over speeder? Only in very special cases. Meanwhile, you better in the USA, right? I mean, you have your owns kids at home, and there is a decent chance whoever you just pulled over has a gun, right?
---
crosschecked stats: (please confirm)
"While about 32% of US adults personally own a firearm, the individual gun ownership rate across the EU sits much lower at roughly ~5% of the total population."
However, due to gun availability, concealed carry, and handguns...
"A person in the United States is roughly 200 times more likely to have a loaded, accessible gun in their car cabin compared to a person in the European Union."
So, as a police officer in the USA pulling over a car, I should be around 200x more worried about making it home to my family. Two hundred freaking x.
No wonder US police officers are freaked the fuck out. I would be as well.
(200x is a guesstimate. However, a sanity check using US carry surveys and EU carry-permit numbers lands somewhere in the 60x–400x range)
That sort of thing depends on what is "normal". Many states in the US could have around 10% of the population carrying a firearm. Armed interactions with the police are common and the vast majority are a non-issue. The typical police response to "I have a license to carry and a firearm in the vechicle" is typically "Where is it? Just don't touch it". Happens all the time.
Now, is there a statistical difference? Maybe. It's hard to say because you would need to apply the same policing culture, legal system, and population dynamics to a lesser armed country. I don't know of any good choices for that combination.
Anyone can become a cop in 6 months. Not everyone is temperamentally setup to be a great cop. That, there, lies the rub.
I would be absolutely terrified if people with guns came up to me, whether they're cops or not, and if I had a gun with me, I'd be much more likely to go for it in that scenario compared to a normal human interaction. But IDK, maybe I'm an outlier?
In general cops err on the side of protecting themselves from danger and I can't fault them for that. How would you approach a car whose driver is suspected of homicide?
Obviously someone made a mistake here but I'm not sure this has anything to do with Flock. The car had an "APB" out. We want cops to pull over "wanted" cars, right?
Police could solve a ton of these issues if they investigated before they tried to apprehend. If we're going to live in a surveillance state, use the damn surveillance for situational awareness. Right now, the cops just get a hit like "APB - Homicide" with no retrospective analysis or attempt to verify. It's essentially an unverified tip - they should use some expertise and tools to try to validate it before they commit.
But they don't, because there's no cost or penalty to them for overreacting, and there's a risk if they underreact. It's really an incentives problem. I don't know if the right spot to address it is with the individual officers or the department, but someone should have some huge liability for this mistake.
https://www.youtube.com/@PoliceActivity
It's pretty unvarnished; there are good shootings and bad shootings, they just post everything released. There are ~2700 videos right now. Pretty big sample.
I think you might reconsider your "If I were going to approach" statement.
don't?
wait until they are out of the car and you can tell that they arent armed and also arent wieldign a deadly weapon -the car itself.
flock is adding a false urgency