5 ms·

I am a pretty pro-police person. I gladly support law enforcement, because they have a tough tough job. I am in complete agreement here, and I see agreement wi

I am a pretty pro-police person. I gladly support law enforcement, because they have a tough tough job. I am in complete agreement here, and I see agreement with this kind of libertarian sentiment even in the conservative circles I sometimes travel in. The police in the United States are over-militarized, under-trained, and way way too eager to engage in gun fire. SWAT 'deployment' (even that is a military term) should be a last resort, not the immediate reaction, especially to an unverified phone call.

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microcolonel 8y ago
I don't particularly think they're "over-militarized" in the ways people say. I see a lot of emotional outpourings by people about how the police shouldn't have armored vehicles or even rifles. The point of these things is kinda to prevent close quarters conflicts. The problem, I think, is that they are being asked to do these rapid entries when a) they have no idea what is actually going on in these buildings and b) they are not trained like Yamam and importantly c) most reports of this nature are not false, so when they show up to these scenes they want to save the innocent and live to tell about it, not die in the line of fire and watch the innocent die with them, and occasionally d) some get into this line of work with a deranged mindset, and just want to feel what a "justified killing" feels like (and it seems like weeding these people out is never a perfect science). I think as long as people are sitting around complaining that the police sometimes use rifles (something I've seen even in Canadian cities), nobody's getting anywhere on actually solving the problems involved. The fact that the police rely on the trustworthiness of reports like this is why false & malicious reports are criminal. The police are generally not able to validate your claims, so they either go in and risk making a horrible mistake, or they do nothing and wait for the situation to "mature".
baybal2 8y ago
That's not a tough job at all. Actual "enforcement" part in "law enforcement" does not constitute even 1% of their work even in so called "warzone" cities. No way to dismiss this argument. Even in an armed to the teeth nation of America, there is no real need for an ordinary patrol officers to be armed at all. They can call the job taught when they would be doing policing in actual war zones. Even with "below the sea level" standards of police professionalism you have in US, there are no way to deny that it doesn't meet even that. No matter how you evaluate the performance of American police, it is simply terrible. I have no idea how anybody can spin that in any other way than this.
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microcolonel 8y ago

I don't particularly think they're "over-militarized" in the ways people say. I see a lot of emotional outpourings by people about how the police shouldn't have armored vehicles or even rifles. The point of these things is kinda to prevent close quarters conflicts. The problem, I think, is that they are being asked to do these rapid entries when a) they have no idea what is actually going on in these buildings and b) they are not trained like Yamam and importantly c) most reports of this nature are not false, so when they show up to these scenes they want to save the innocent and live to tell about it, not die in the line of fire and watch the innocent die with them, and occasionally d) some get into this line of work with a deranged mindset, and just want to feel what a "justified killing" feels like (and it seems like weeding these people out is never a perfect science). I think as long as people are sitting around complaining that the police sometimes use rifles (something I've seen even in Canadian cities), nobody's getting anywhere on actually solving the problems involved. The fact that the police rely on the trustworthiness of reports like this is why false & malicious reports are criminal. The police are generally not able to validate your claims, so they either go in and risk making a horrible mistake, or they do nothing and wait for the situation to "mature".

baybal2 8y ago

That's not a tough job at all. Actual "enforcement" part in "law enforcement" does not constitute even 1% of their work even in so called "warzone" cities. No way to dismiss this argument. Even in an armed to the teeth nation of America, there is no real need for an ordinary patrol officers to be armed at all. They can call the job taught when they would be doing policing in actual war zones. Even with "below the sea level" standards of police professionalism you have in US, there are no way to deny that it doesn't meet even that. No matter how you evaluate the performance of American police, it is simply terrible. I have no idea how anybody can spin that in any other way than this.

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