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You may be partly basing those views on anecdata (except the alcohol one; but blame the lawmakers for that, not the police or the parents). From my own subject

You may be partly basing those views on anecdata (except the alcohol one; but blame the lawmakers for that, not the police or the parents). From my own subjective anecdata living on the East Coast, police are rarely involved in school discipline unless someone has been very seriously assaulted. Parents I've seen also tend to be very protective of their children and apologetic for their actions, usually not wanting them to be subject even to basic discipline like detention or suspension, let alone arrest. Overparenting is rampant, but parenting-by-police seems rare. As for shooting of blacks, there is not currently any conclusive evidence that it is or isn't caused by racist policing or biased officers. A few highly publicized cases of police brutality, mixed with even more heavily publicized cases of ambiguous police response (were they really being attacked? / did they really see what looked like a gun?), don't necessarily indicate a pervasive trend. Studies to the contrary include this Harvard one (conducted by a black, liberal professor, if it matters) which even the New York Times doesn't challenge: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evid... This 2008 analysis is also interesting, albeit it from a somewhat conservative (yet respected) source: http://www.city-journal.org/html/criminal-justice-system-racist-13078.html http://www.city-journal.org/html/criminal-justice-system-rac... (Note that these only argue against disproprotionate number of shootings, not racial profiling or bias.)

maxerickson 10y ago
did they really see what looked like a gun? is a pretty low bar for opening fire. Especially when taking into account that training is shoot to kill.
- jerf 10y ago
  You have to consider both sides of the equation, though. You have to consider that the cop is a human being in the heat of the moment, who wants to survive every encounter they have in the course of their career (they're not just playing the odds in this one, they're playing them all), and whom society would also like to survive. If you overspecify caution and requirements for the cop, you'll end up in a situation we are quite arguably already starting to see in some places, where it becomes impossible to be an effective police force at all, and crime starts going up very quickly [1]. And now even more people are dead, as well as communities, and hope for the future, and all the other things like that. And this almost instantly turns out to be even worse than anything the cops ever did; we go from once-every-few-years news stories about police in a given city shooting a guy in dubious circumstances (that often, a couple of weeks later, turn out to be fairly justified, but that news story doesn't get around anything like the first one did) to "yup, another day of 10 more murders than we had per day last year". Hardly strikes me as a win. [1]: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0402/Chicago-violent-crime-has-soared-in-2016.-What-s-the-response http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0402/Chicago-viole... - and I should point out to many of you that while you politically filter that story, please note everyone involved is a Democrat.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    The typical police officer never discharges their weapon in the line of duty. Here's an example. New York City has 35,000 uniformed officers. In a given year, they have ~100 incidents involving use of firearms. So even over a 30 year period ("a career"), only a smaller portion of the force will have cause to discharge their weapon (multiple 10,000s of officers over 30 years, ballpark 5,000 incidents, so a single 10,000 ballpark of involved officers). http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/nypd_annual_firearms_discharge_report_2011.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan... To be clear, that includes all incidents, so if they shoot a dog or whatever, that's in there.
- stan_rogers 10y ago
  It's not "shoot to kill" but "aim for the centre of visible mass". Yes, that does imply lethality, but it's mostly about minimizing misses (and with that, the chances that a projectile might hit an unintended target). Once the choice to use deadly force has been made, anything other than a centre of mass shot is irresponsible and dangerous.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Yes, the training is to only use their firearms for deadly force. I find the semantics surrounding how to describe it pretty uninteresting.

maxerickson 10y ago

did they really see what looked like a gun? is a pretty low bar for opening fire. Especially when taking into account that training is shoot to kill.

jerf 10y ago
You have to consider both sides of the equation, though. You have to consider that the cop is a human being in the heat of the moment, who wants to survive every encounter they have in the course of their career (they're not just playing the odds in this one, they're playing them all), and whom society would also like to survive. If you overspecify caution and requirements for the cop, you'll end up in a situation we are quite arguably already starting to see in some places, where it becomes impossible to be an effective police force at all, and crime starts going up very quickly [1]. And now even more people are dead, as well as communities, and hope for the future, and all the other things like that. And this almost instantly turns out to be even worse than anything the cops ever did; we go from once-every-few-years news stories about police in a given city shooting a guy in dubious circumstances (that often, a couple of weeks later, turn out to be fairly justified, but that news story doesn't get around anything like the first one did) to "yup, another day of 10 more murders than we had per day last year". Hardly strikes me as a win. [1]: http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0402/Chicago-violent-crime-has-soared-in-2016.-What-s-the-response http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2016/0402/Chicago-viole... - and I should point out to many of you that while you politically filter that story, please note everyone involved is a Democrat.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  The typical police officer never discharges their weapon in the line of duty. Here's an example. New York City has 35,000 uniformed officers. In a given year, they have ~100 incidents involving use of firearms. So even over a 30 year period ("a career"), only a smaller portion of the force will have cause to discharge their weapon (multiple 10,000s of officers over 30 years, ballpark 5,000 incidents, so a single 10,000 ballpark of involved officers). http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/nypd_annual_firearms_discharge_report_2011.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan... To be clear, that includes all incidents, so if they shoot a dog or whatever, that's in there.
stan_rogers 10y ago
It's not "shoot to kill" but "aim for the centre of visible mass". Yes, that does imply lethality, but it's mostly about minimizing misses (and with that, the chances that a projectile might hit an unintended target). Once the choice to use deadly force has been made, anything other than a centre of mass shot is irresponsible and dangerous.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Yes, the training is to only use their firearms for deadly force. I find the semantics surrounding how to describe it pretty uninteresting.