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>if the police show up anywhere, be it an Occupy protest or a carjacking, there is likely to be mayhem and bloodshed. If you grew up in the US (I can't speak f
by Hasz 9y ago
>if the police show up anywhere, be it an Occupy protest or a carjacking, there is likely to be mayhem and bloodshed.
If you grew up in the US (I can't speak for other countries), I think most people, despite the media coverage, would say otherwise. There's way too many cops for this to even make sense. If even 1% of police interaction ended in a death, there would be literally millions of people dead by cop every year.
>chickenshit mentality where no risk to an officer's safety is tolerated ever.
Again, I'm not sure this is true. Are cops selfless superhuman crime fighting machines, charging heedlessly into danger? Of course not, and it's unreasonable to expect them to be. I would go so far as to argue we don't want heros. Heros are a band-aid fix, a substitute for good training and careful decisions made possible by always selfless, often reckless, decisions. We shouldn't be putting officers in a situation where they need to step up to become a hero.
Of course, there is the unpredictable event that necessitates a hero, but we should be working to reduces these edge cases.
- justaaron 9y agoI think we are waiting to hear: "and this culture of impunity and valuing their own lives above the lives of the people they swore an oath to protect needs to end and we need to re-train our forces and hold those who use deadly force accountable" That would go further than making excuses for the rash thinking on the part of trigger-happy leo's. The "swatter" should be charged with 2nd degree murder, minimum, but this particular instance is just the icing on a cake in which over 1000 people die every year from leo firearm discharge, and that is due to a culture within law enforcement that needs to CHANGE NOW. We have seen this coming for over 50 years, and it's OUT OF HAND at this point. It's past time for legislative actions to have taken place. We are absolutely globally isolated in this regard (unless you count Duterte as good company and a supporter of the sort of society America should stand for.)
- Hasz 9y agoOf course. I think bodycams are a huge step in the right direction, in terms of holding police officers accountable for their actions whilst also protecting them from false claims. Culture change is fundamentally slow, but I think process is being made. We're talking about a whole new generation of cop, from new supervisors to new codes of conduct and police union leadership. The comparison to Duterte is unfair and minimizes the atrocities in the name of justice happening in the Philippines. The NYT has/had an excellent article, replete with photos, of the devastation. It is a whole order of magnitude more people in a much smaller nation.