Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem
harvardlawreview.org
harvardlawreview.org
EDIT:
Wow hivemind. It's for a similar reason that, in less hostile environments (say, machine shops), people with long hair put their hair back. It's like nobody's ever seen Bomb Girls before (much less any of the much more graphic images of, say, lathe accidents).
I'm not suggesting that the warrior mindset is acceptable...merely that, if they are going to carry themselves that way (i.e., as jackbooted thugs), they should probably go all the way.
Police in other Western countries receive significantly longer training courses than US police do. This is an issue rarely discussed in this topic. If people want de-escalation, they need to fund the longer training regime and more importantly pay for it.
maybe reallocating funds from military to de-escalation training would reduce surplus and improve police image and effectiveness.
(disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about)
Short hair is pragmatic, but more importantly, it is a personal preference. Nobody should be criticized for wearing short hair. Doing that makes you no better than people who talk about "long-haired hippies" disparagingly.
http://www.forgetthebox.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Ameri...
Like say the police looked more like this:
http://cdn.caughtoffside.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Swed...
Then haircut wouldn't matter. But I have yet to meet an American cop that didn't have a "military approved" haircut.
Edit1: Here's the picture I was talking about[1]. Looks like an M110? With some kind of compensator?
Edit2: That Tac light on the end of your sniper rifle just screams "I have no idea wtf I'm doing but imma sit here and look cool."
[1] http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/0...
This can't be stressed enough. What needs to be stopped is the false distinction of civilian vs non-civilian in police work and policy. That is strictly a military distinction in combat and does not apply to civilized enforcement of the law during normal circumstances. Cops are not above the law and are just civilians empowered to enforce the laws, nothing more.
It's been very positive for both children, parents and police in breaking down the notion that police are to be feared. More police departments need to do stuff like this to foster positive interactions with police.
> children [...] properly wearing helmets while riding their bicycles [given a] thank you for doing the right thing
So, children who are not wearing helmets then? I don't really get the strange idea that wearing helmets makes children safer on bikes. I grew up riding bicycles without a helmet, much as everyone else did, and has done since bicycles were invented. There were no cases (nor reports or warnings) of traumatic head injury due to lack of protection reported, to a good first order approximation. And even the statistically minor numebr of head injuries sustained by children on bikes has remained exactly that after the increase in helmet wearing. Research indicates there is no benefit provided by helmet wearing, and suggests it may even increase risky behaviour. [citation needed]
It's quite hard to find data on children only, as it happens, but the following quote gives the picture overall: "However, the Statistics Bulletin shows the UK cyclist casualty figure was 16,196 in 2006 compared to 16,297 in 2008 - an increase of about half a percent. For all road users, casualties fell from 258,404 in 2006 to 230,905 in 2008 - a reduction of 11.9%. During this period, helmet wearing increased by 3.6%." So no change in casualties with an increase in helmet wearing. This is borne out by other reports, and in general mandatory helmet wearing is discouraged as a net public health loss due to dimished cycling, causing less exercise and therefore a less healthy population.
Parents today, eh? Get those helmet wearing kids off my lawn! Thanks for listening ;)
How is all this gear useful is another question.
Whether these orders make sense is the question.
Here's a typical Swedish police car: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/images/2008/12/15/...
I think the intention in the US is that cop cars have to be less visible so that they can catch people committing "crimes" in order to fill quotas. The policy should be shifted to prevent or deter people from acting badly, and you can do that be just being more visible.
At one time, we at least used to pretend that cops were public servants. We need to go back to that.
If a bunch of gangbangers "hate" cops then that's fine. But when the good law abiding citizens within a community lose faith in the police service, then that police service becomes ineffective since the community won't help with the police's core mission. Or to phase it another way, the police are an arm of the community, they aren't a law upon themselves (in the figurative sense).
A lot of other countries do this, and it works well.
It is a completely different mindset. All law abiding citizens are now allies in this "war" rather than potential law breakers. You actually have police respond to legitimate community concerns rather than trivial things only the police care about (e.g. DUIs might be a big community concern as opposed to prostitution stings).
Honestly the first thing the US absolutely needs is citizen oversight of police (and police complaints). As long as police police themselves, nothing constructive will happen.
I suspect this has already been pre-co-opted in the United States. Journalists and community leaders and pastors and all sorts of others reflexively support, admire, and praise the police.
> A lot of other countries do this, and it works well.
They can do it because their culture(s) isn't so toxic.
The expectation of unlimited trust is just as bad for police work as total distrust, because neither is well aligned to what is important: That the police are there to serve the community, not to serve some laws or some ideals. When policemen feel that they are better than other people, nothing good can come out of it.
This is part of the American police's self image too. I can find plaques for sale at the supermarket with inspirational sentences about the superiority of law enforcement above mere mortals.
I can only imagine how those products would fail to sell back home in Spain.
Here is the real question: how do you do community policing in the low-income black neighborhoods of Baltimore? How do you rebuild trust?
[1] As well as the practice of ignoring the deaths of gang members. Maybe they got themselves into their predicament, but you're not going to build trust among their friends and family by treating their deaths as inconsequential, especially given the prevalence of gang membership along a wide spectrum of involvement.
Time.
Unfortunately trust is earned, and once it is lost it takes twice as long to win back. Baltimore might have issues between the police and community for tens of years to come, but if they start working closely with the community, and actually making changes based on community feedback you may see it turn around slowly.
It may also help to recruit from within the community, more black officers, and more locals in general. That will help sew the bonds of trust between the police and the community (rather than it feeling like us Vs. them).
In general the police need a much better attitude from the top upon down.
You arrest and prosecute the perpetrators just as quickly and with just as much or more punishment than the "regular" public would get. And you keep doing that to any cop who breaks the law. You also get rid of (and prosecute) the "good" cops who don't report the bad ones.
IOW you show the community that you (the local government) means business when it comes to ending the problem.
This is why I say the police are corrupt. Looking the other way is corrupt, even if you didn't take part in the corruption.
Would the officer in McKinney the other day feel compelled to resign if he hadn't been caught "red handed" on video? Would his fellow officers have even reported him? I seriously doubt it, and because many of us probably have that doubt then it's up to the police to make that idea unthinkable among the public.
I don't know how true that is or if Camden is typical enough that the experience would generalize.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/us/politics/obama-to-limit...
What might exist in Camden that doesn't exist elsewhere is that, at least as far as local government goes, Camden doesn't have the governing tensions that exist in other cities, with a rich "governing class" (read: white yuppies) doing all that they can to "protect themselves" from "the others". Like all cities, it gets thoroughly screwed by the State, but at least locally, has far less of an internal "us" and "them" than, say, Philadelphia (which lies just across the river, and has neighborhoods with similar problems to Camden, but less policymaking authority to address them).
I'm no expert on this, but I can think of important counterexamples, so I'm not sure this is true at all.
Counterexample #1 - New York. It seems that this name is pretty much synonymous with the city plus a bit of surrounding area, and the upstate regions are completely forgotten. In particular, the areas that have to host NYC's water supply get particularly hosed: their economies are significantly based on tourism and fishing, but the flow of the Upper Delaware is entirely governed by NYC needs, ignoring the fish. Further, the State has banned fracking, largely in order to guarantee the integrity of the reservoirs, and at the expense of the only opportunity that those living on the Marcellus Shale have to escape their rut.
Counterexample #2 - Austin, TX. Again relating to water, it seems that the city gets priority access to water (a scarce commodity in much of TX). Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan were sacrificed, emptying to something around 30% capacity (I forget the exact numbers) until our recent floods, so that Ladybird Lake (the center of the city) could be kept beautiful and full - and they're even talking about building a water park. So suburban and rural interests were subordinated to aesthetics in the city.
Does this make you uncomfortable? Can you picture this girl as your sister, or your daughter?
Think about the real world consequences of warrior policing. This doesn't sound like keeping the peace. It sounds like a child molester's rape fantasy. That girl will be scarred for life. She will fear the police. She will fear men. Is that what we want, as a society? Is this what liberty and pursuit of happiness are supposed to be?
Do we want to be the kind of people who make excuses about how she deserved it?
So, yes - if she deserved it, then I absolutely want to be the kind of person who makes that excuse!
You have a large population of soldiers, many who come back home after their tours of duty, where they were in effect an occupying force. And then they get a job in law enforcement. They are used too a certain way of doing things in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they bring that culture home with them. Even for those who didn't serve, as the article notes, this "warrior culture" has bled into police forces everywhere.
In the military, they say "train as you fight." Well guess what they've been training to do? Hint: it's not the warm and cuddly community policing. When you're used to "fight or fight," in the military, and then you're put back in the civilian world, these issues come to the fore.
Not to be mean or unfair, but some of these soldiers who come back have PTSD and other mental issues (not their fault), but I've wondered how much of that also plays a role in police violence and the way police officers handle themselves in stressful situations.
Now, I'm probably older than you, old enough to have watched the first run of hagiographic Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. F.B.I. TV series that ran until 1974, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_F.B.I._(TV_series) ), but I assure this is nothing new. E.g. I can remember more than a few debates I had with co-workers in the '90s on the War on Drugs, I said we could have that, or a free nation, but they were so petrified by the prospect of their children doing drugs that they preferred they'd live in an eventual police state.
EDITED: added eventual, since this was in the context of where we were going, still a confirmed trend two decades later.
This was in the context of the society they were helping to create for their children and grandchildren. We're not there yet, and the reaction to the gun grabbers of that time (Americans arming themselves like never before after 9/11 and its response told us we were own our own) suggests there's a strong and developing counter-force developing, but the potential is there. There are certainly too many politicians in high places and other influential members of our ruling class who'd like to institute a full blown police state. That's one reason I'm interested in Strange Loop controversy.
ADDED: as for how things are today, since I can and do legally carry concealed almost every time I walk out the door, and how my police department has changed since back then, it's my considered opinion I am in more danger from the police than criminals. None of the latter have ever pretended to try to run me down with their car.
That is Orwellian state. In it the policing is internalized in the individual.
Typically it means the police are an instrument of whomever is controlling the state to keep themselves in power, e.g. per Wikipedia "Police state is a term denoting government that exercises power arbitrarily through the police. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_state).
I also like to define Japan as a police state, a polite one, granted, but policing was done for the convenience of the police, not for "justice" as we at least attempt. I.e. it's more important to close a case than get the real perpetrator, which was made easy by a "judicial" system with a combined "confession" and conviction rate exceeding 99.9% (really). Past tense because citizen jurors of some sort have recently been added to the mix, although I note that the history of that in England suggests it'll be a long time if ever before that becomes anything resembling the common law system.
I don't think you fully grok how many more people the US imprisons, a country would have to execute tens of thousands of people per year for decades to match the amount.
Police are thugs, far worse than any gang.
I wonder if you grok the concept of per-capita statistics, or comparing like demographics, and I'll note that one of the hallmarks of modern police states is slaughtering a lot more people than they publicly acknowledge.
the US police state slaughters more people than is acknowledged, it requires a UK newspaper to get the correct amount.
Cite court cases all you want, they directly contradict what the police get away with everyday, you plainly see on tape them beating and killing people, planting evidence, destroying evidence and private property, and it happens without consequence.
You are a police apologist, defending murderous thugs.
Good cops in a few rural places where they're too busy to be bad or thugs.
Bad cops who don't directly commit crimes but are part of the Blue Wall of Silence that covers up for:
Thug cops who assault citizens and their dogs (and see elsewhere in this discussion for a cat executed by a cop, but that seems to be rare).
(There's also dirty cops who e.g. get paid to do stuff like look the other way, but we're not talking about them and I don't think they're now hardly as bad a problem as thug cops, but they are another argument for ending the War On Drugs.)
I believe the majority of cops are "bad cops" per the above, which does not mean there aren't a lot of thug cops, neither of whom I make apologies for their crimes.
Well, let's try a thought-experiment with some napkin-math, focusing on "man-hours dominated by the state per capita" and comparing incarceration to execution.
Assuming a stable incarceration rate of 1%, it follows that 1% of all "man-hours" in the nation is being taken, or about 88 man-hours per person per year.
Now, let's assume that another nation, the Bizarro States of America, achieves the same effect, but purely through less-frequent executions. The executed average a "lost remaining life" of 30,000 hours. (~35 years.)
That would require 0.29% of an execution per person per year. The BSA would have to execute 876 THOUSAND people every year to match the USA.
Cops conducting no knock raids for a low level meth dealer scarred a young boy and lied to his family about the severity of his injuries (claiming he'd just lost a tooth) [1]. Just check CNN for all the recent stories of unarmed black men, boys and teenagers killed by cops. An officer in Alabama paralyzed an Indian man who didn't obey his commands because he couldn't speak English [2] (at least he's been charged).
This may not be the same as police states seen in other parts of the world for the majority of Americans. But for many, we've already crossed that line.
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/US/family-toddler-injured-swat-grenade...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/27...
You don't need it. You have DA-s and mandatory sentencing ... as effective, but a lot more subtle and less visible.
Today, we have pervasive state surveillance, a culture of secrecy that permeates every level of government, and a society that maintains a separate class of police and law enforcement officials who arguably operate with near-impunity, with tacit sanction for everything from extrajudicial beatings (and, at the risk of sounding overheated, SWAT-based extrajudicial executions) to prosecutorial misconduct. Thanks to Bennis, SCOTUS has ruled that the government may seize your personal property if you are the innocent owner of an item that the government might proceed against in rem (e.g., United States vs. $124,700) -- and those proceeds then go to fund further law enforcement and security operations.
We live in a state where Lincoln's fear that "all the laws but one go unexecuted" is the spoken and unspoken impetus for all security and law enforcement efforts -- every immigrant may be a terrorist, every demonstration a riot, every black man a gang member. In a state that is organized for the security and convenience of the police power, what else is there to call it?
i live in China and i do not miss the cops in the US.
A friend of mine is a social worker with the county, dealing with people's aid - food stamps, welfare, etc. He has to deny people benefits multiple times every day. This morning, one of his co-workers denied food stamps to someone. That person went outside, got a rock, came back in, and hit the social worker in the head with it, sending her to the hospital.
Won't be seeing "Support our social workers!" stickers at the Wal-Mart anytime soon.
If nothing else, look at where all the gear that the police use is coming from? It's surplus from the wars [0].
[0]http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-polic...
Bill Lind has written extensively on this topic.
But I also think (key word, think, it's a hypothesis, no current hard data to back this up at this point, see above paragraph on how I need to do this, but I've been too lazy/busy) this may be highly regional. In the sense that I live in a state with a large number of military bases/troops/persons who go into the military. They come back from their deployments, they go back home, they join the local PD. Some states have less of this than others.
Further, others have made this point, and I guess I was not as clear as I should have been, but in part, you only need one officer who's a vet to come into the department and he says, "When I was in Iraq, this is how we did it..." I don't think that's a huge influence, but I do think it's part of spreading the military culture that the original article is talking about.
Call it militarization of the police, hero worship, cargo-cult, whatever. I believe at the end of the day, the effect is the same, the GWoT has had negative impacts on how America has chosen to police itself.
These guys were gearing up - and psyching up - to fight the War on Drugs long before any War on Terror.
Clothes help define our relationship to others. How much does it change the attitude of a policeman to be wearing body armor and riot gear rather than shirt sleeves?
I can see where it comes from, US officers are armed, and need to be so because they frequently face armed criminals. They have to deal with a different situation. The problem is that those members of the US public that are not armed and actualy have no intention of criminality, or if they do in a minor and non-threatening form, are being dealt with by armed police officers expecting to deal with armed violent thugs. That's a recipe for utter disaster.
There's no easy answer to this. It's right to support police that have to deal with life threatening situations daily. But equally the non-violent public do not deserve to face potential threats to their life and violent coercion in routine interactions with law enforcers.
It is really not "the public" at large, at least not in many cases. The police seems to be profiling and directing excessive force towards non-Caucasians, as it was so obvious in the shocking incident in Texas.
This case, which sort of crystallized the problem, all started with a typical overweight Walmart white-trash female attacking a group of noisy (?) children in the pool.
For the outsider, the US looks a very unpleasant place to be if you're not white. Not to mention the huge incarceration rate for minor offenses, and the proportion on non caucasians there.
I used to come to the US at least once a year, staying for up to 2-3 weeks on holiday. I haven't in a long time, and I will probably not anytime soon.
It's increasingly becoming a sad and scary place.
Watching the video, while has was telling the girl to get on her face, several teens were encroaching and yelling. The one he chased with gun out came up behind him and made a motion that looked like he was feinting pulling out a gun. I think the events in Ferguson and otherwise and causing some to become a bit more cavalier, as if they've "earned" the right to act that way during a police action due to what has happened elsewhere.
If anything, the safer generalization is that cops are the ones that have a history of acting recklessly in their interactions with non-police. Especially considering that they are civil servants, whose job is to protect all people with equal consideration.
Can we please stop this politically correct nonsense of calling any controversial comment involving race racist?
And buddy, that is implying the superiority of one race over another. Which is racist.
Do you also find it racist when prominent black people criticize what they term "entitlement" problems amongst blacks? (Not that the OP specifically mentioned "black people" but I want to follow your line of reasoning.)
Why not just say "blacks", anyway? Everone knows what we're talking about here, but if you say "blacks have an entitlement issue", it's harder to pretend that you're not a bigot.
While I hope our society has progressed a little, something like this post often reminds me how many people embrace thoughtlessness and anger.
Law enforcement has always directed this kind of treatment towards non-whites in the US. What has changed is that there are now cameras everywhere so the officer's word isn't enough anymore and they have begun to subject middle and upper middle income white people to the same kind of treatment that used to be reserved for black and brown people.
For the outsider, the US looks a very unpleasant place to be if you're not white.
Racism isn't a US-only problem. There are incidents of European soccer fans making monkey noises when black players come onto the field. In some parts of Africa, there are issues with the government seizing land owned by whites.
It's not even always about race. Every Irishman with whom I have ever spoken has told me stories about how they and/or their (grand)parents were treated by other Europeans.
I don't know if it's possible to fix the underlying cause of these problems. Whenever people think in terms of "Us vs Them", they find justifications for doing all manner of terrible things to each other. It's just that police are the ones tasked with enforcing the laws of a society so when the laws reflect this conflict, so does the behavior of the police.
But we are getting better at overruling our monkey instincts with reason and compassion. So that's a good sign.
What makes a racist more irate than anything? Seeing one of "Them" with one of "Our" women.
Denying good housing, education and employment to the "other" group will make them less able to compete for females from "our" group.
There are versions of this on display in the animal kingdom as well. Male lions are known to kill cubs sired by other males so that they can replace them with their own offspring. In the Gombe Chimpanzee War, females were kidnapped, raped and killed as a method of destroying the "other" group.
I also agree, humanity has come a long way and is getting better.
'Officer Safety Training' is all about banging in the concept of "There is no such thing as no threat. There is only a known threat and an unknown threat." It's even on posters around the college showing a police officer talking to an old lady carrying some shopping.
I'd describe it more as a siege mentality than warrior. However it leads to officers drawing batons in completely inappropriate situations and causing all sorts of problems for no reason.
I'm thankful firearms are not routinely issued as these same officers would just as quickly draw a gun and completely fuck a totally innocent situation into a major incident for no reason.
I had colleagues who were proud to be nicknamed Tackleberry. Not a good situation.
The great advance of cameras being cheap and ubiquitous has effectively been countermoved by "Yeah, we saw the video, we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong" or district attorneys that either decline to prosecute police abuse or treat grand juries in police-abuse cases completely differently than they would in any other case.
Which, I suppose, can be a reinforcing cycle; in another sub-thread Army vet remarkEon said "it's like they're at times forgetting these are citizens and not enemy combatants." As the police continue to lose support from the populace, including the traditionally supportive right, more and more of us become enemy combatants in a sense even if the vast majority of us don't take action. And with the concealed carry sweep of most of the nation, we don't actually need the police so much.
The irony is, of course, that being a police officer is not even a very dangerous job. That leads me to conclude they're just a bunch of cowards with an inferiority complex out to hurt people to make themselves feel better. I'm sure cops exist who aren't like this but that doesn't disprove the fact that the majority are. Then you add their racism to the mix... Cowards will be cowards.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/10/us/mississippi-police-officers...
Routine traffic stop. Pretty sure I've never heard of a developer being murdered during a pull request.
> That leads me to conclude they're just a bunch of cowards with an inferiority complex out to hurt people to make themselves feel better. I'm sure cops exist who aren't like this but that doesn't disprove the fact that the majority are. Then you add their racism to the mix... Cowards will be cowards.
Congratulations, I think this is the most bigoted and stereotyping post I have ever read on Hacker News. Ever.
The point being that being a police officer isn't as dangerous as many other professions that aren't considered dangerous.
DamnYuppie:
> We have large populations of minorities who feel entitled to behave badly without any consequence because the color of their skin.
I dunno. DamnYuppie may be winning. At least joesmo is bigoted against people because of their chosen profession. Unlike DamnYuppie who's bigoted against people for the color of their skin.
Even so, you can compare the job to anything, and find statistics that sound more impressive. More children die via drowning in swimming pools than by gunshot wounds, but that doesn't mean that gun control discussions are immediately null and void.
I have been places in life, and known people, that have an intense hatred for cops and are happy to express their desire for an open season on them. People that if facing arrest for something small, will use any weapon at their disposal - gun, knife, vehicle - to get away. The fact that someone doesn't know of this world - it's not proof it doesn't exist, but simply a blessing for that person.
There are very, very bad people in this world, that if given the chance would take your MacBook, your iPhone, your iPad, and your money. "But but.. you don't understand! They'd never hurt me! I retweet about social injustice!"
There's some very, very bad cops who abuse their authority. But for someone to say that there's no danger is incredulous.
And fuck your passing dig at accusing me of armchair activism; I've served in actual wars, as infantry, where I was less well-equipped than some of these suburban police departments. I am fully aware that danger exists, and what it looks like. It is being overstated.
And I apologize if my words suggested a dig at you - I was still addressing the idea that it's a safe pedestrian job filled with intentional racists. I really was speaking to the general HN'er, rather than you specifically. I think you'll agree that there is a lot of armchair activists who have never seen a battle field, or a bullet wound, and whose opinions are shaped more by Twitter and emojis than reality.
A brief record search indicates approximately 440 Chicago PD officers died in the entire 20th century -- remarkably similar to the number of murder victims in the city per annum among the general population.
Police officers need training, and they need public support, and they need good leadership and a healthy government to support and oversee them -- but they don't need breathless hyperbole that justifies warfare-grade equipment loadout.
This is probably lower than the accident rate of traveling salesmen.
Pretty sure developer isn't the line for "very dangerous job".
Ah yes, let's demonize a large, heterogeneous group of people because they seem to be inappropriately making generalizations about a large, heterogeneous group of people....
How many more Chicago Blacksites, 'accidental' deaths while in custody, and shooting and killing of unarmed citizens do people need to have happen before the cop apologists stop their hero worship excuse making?
This has a good set of links to articles and reviews of his book - http://www.theagitator.com/2013/08/05/all-things-warrior-cop...
The police have taken to videotaping people who are heavily drugged and out of it. For instance, someone laying stoned in an alley with a needle hanging out of his arm. Of course medical services are summoned too.
The police then make the effort to track these people down to find them at a time when they are not intoxicated and show them the video of themselves... trying to wake them up to the truth and consequences of their addiction.
I don't know how effective this effort is, but I appreciate the police acting like decent human beings rather than bully thugs.
[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/22/how-chicago...
If the police are warriors, if they are going to war, who are their enemies?
The answer no one speaks aloud is "We are".
Also, in broader society, my impression is that paranoid, angry outlooks are now often accepted as legitimate, 'real' and strong by at least part of a certain segment of our society, rather than being seen as weakness, out-of-control emotion and shameful judgment. For example, this perspective is embraced on a certain cable news channel, it's a hallmark of a certain political movement, and you can see some leaders competing to prove who is angrier and crazier. There's an underlying cultural debate here, also. Many people support this police behavior.
These guys could do worse than read some Terry Pratchett - his Sam Vimes character had a fine appreciation of the difference between a soldier and a policeman.
I'd say it's a culture problem both police and the people they interact with both have a warrior attitude.
Sure in some jurisdictions. But not all.
I work with LE in the field as a paramedic, and in the office as a SW Dev. Lots of agencies. Most of the LE folk have been super professional and very mindful of their public service role. Even in stressful situations.
From what I've seen, most cops are just regular people, not wanna-be soldiers.
That's what causes the problem. Police apologists imagine circumstances that justify their abuse, and are absolutely certain that's what actually happened.
If there was a video, I wouldn't imagine. I'd watch and see what happened.
Well you saw the video of him robbing the store and assaulting the clerk moments earlier but that doesn't bother you?
Edit since I can't reply:
At least you didn't say "Police murder innocent black child" so that is a start. His actions moments before make the cops story more likely to be true.
But whatever crime he committed, extra-judicial summary execution seems a bit harsh.
Treating criminals this way doesn't make crime go away. And it breeds an attitude among cops that harms people who never committed even petty crimes.
Even if there was a video of him murdering someone that wouldn't justify killing him on the spot. It would justify arresting him and letting his punishment be decided in court.
You say this as if people are looking for an excuse to riot. No one wants a riot, it's bad for the participants, the police, the community, and the local economy. The only winners are looters.
US police kill about three people a day, and shoot and harrass many more and all with hardly any consequences. They even openly operate 'blacksites' where people are detained without rights and tortured, sometimes even killed.
These are not the hallmarks of a free society, it is the symptoms of fascist military rule.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/10/the-counted-5...