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Comment by grepex | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like that guy may have been exaggerating a bit. Aggressive people are a liability. Especially in law enforcement. Not just to the department but to fellow officers. They stir shit up and it is dangerous and annoying.

Cops do need more training, like dramatically more training. I think the screening process is trying to solve a really difficult problem. You don't know if/how someone will be corrupted when they have a little bit of power. Or how they will change over time.

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I’m pretty sure the commenter you responded to agrees aggressive people are a liability and that’s the problem with current hiring(or at least the hiring contemporaneous to when they heard this).

From my own personal conversation with a hostage scenario trainer for the police, he said de-escalation forms only a tiny percentage of his training because that’s not what the cops want, even though he would make that the majority of the training given a free hand, since de-escalation doesn’t just increase the chances of the hostages being safe, but also the cops and the first responders.

Yes, I'm sure they would agree but I'm pointing out that the department/agency would agree as well. I don't think that departments were actively seeking out aggressive people, but rather seeking out people who could handle getting aggressive when a situation calls for it. Someone who can't get aggressive is likewise a liability.

I do see what you are saying regarding de-escalation. It seems like one of those things that is easy to mistakenly dismiss as "easy" and focus on something like firearms or tactics training.

It's very different in other countries. My partner is a psychologist and was at a scene where police were called in, she commented afterwards that they were using established de-escalation techniques that she was very familiar with to defuse the situation (I didn't recognise any of it, she's the expert here). So they'd apparently had fairly extensive training in de-escalation as well as experience in applying it.

They do not need more training. They training they already get trains them to be aggressive and abuse people. We need less of that, not more.

It's obvious you're speaking from a place of emotion and not from knowledge or logic.

Even if that were true the answer wouldn't be to not train them more. The answer would be to give them more proper training.

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