OT Black Man In Minnesota Dies After Cop Kneels On His Neck/ Portland Riots

I want you to explain that to the other girls mom.

“Hey I did nothing because the chance of your daughter dying from the stab wounds was low.”

Come on man....

 

Yeah, it sucks that corrupt and badly trained police forces have put themselves in this position. Hopefully we can get true police reform and have police departments that engender actual community trust, so that we don't always have to wonder every time a cop kills a black person whether it was racially motivated. Or whether every time a cop kills anyone, of any color, it was because the cop was a psychopath. I think that would be good for everyone, police included.

 

Cool. What does any of that have to do with still blaming a guy even after the footage came out for shooting a person trying to murder another person?

 

5,757 gun deaths in a country with 328 million people. That’s just staggering. Staggering numbers. Truly staggering.

 

Seemed clear to me. Police aren't trusted because they've been very murderous and protective of those who murder, so they tend to be judged harshly and, once in a while, overly harshly. This is a case of "overly harshly." Maybe if police stop being shitty, and become more trusted, they won't be blamed for things they shouldn't be blamed for.

It's something to consider.

 

There are 700k cops in the US. what percentage of them are shitty in your opinion?

How many of them have to do something shitty for people like you to call the whole bunch shitty? If only 365 a year do something shitty, that’s enough for one a day in a country with 328 million people and 700k cops, but that would easily be enough to convince most people that cops are shitty.

 

I don’t even like cops but you guys make me defend them because of this ridiculous logic.

 

I have no idea, but it's not a particularly relevant question--it's the police organizations that are shitty, as they close ranks around even the ones who are abusive or murderous. As long as police forces in general "protect the shield," by which they mean resist any accountability, they're culpable for the so-called bad apples. Just as the Catholic Church as an organization was culpable for all the pedophile priests--it didn't matter what percentage of them were pedophiles. As long as the organization's policy is to defend their bad actors, the entire organization is responsible.

 

But this is assuming that all departments in all cities and counties are the same. They’re not one organization. It’s a lot of small, medium and large organizations. How can you lump them all together?

the Catholic Church IS one organization.

 

When the killers of Tamir Rice get off and the department is t forced to change there is a cost. That cost is to public trust.

The more often these things happen there is more loss of public trust.

There has been too many incidents of police abuse and not enough effort to hold the bad ones accountable.

The bad ones and the ones who are enabling them are ruining everything for the civilians and the good police.

 

They are all too similar for people to distinguish. They are all the same in the eyes of the people. There is a national culture that police in this country fit into. And they all need to work together on changing.

 

I agree that things need to change. With that said, the public will never accept it if things did change. The world has grown tiny because of the internet. All it takes is a handful of bad apples and people have the perception that things are worse than they are.

 

If the bad apples are properly dealt with and reasonable action is taken to avoid that happening in the future people will understand.

 

I remember about 50 years ago when someone was threatening to jump out a window of the Meier and Frank building upper story windows. They sent two patrolmen with no experience or training in handling a potential suicide victim. They bumbled it and the victim jumped.
They sent two policemen with me when my brother's schizophrenia was acting up. I rode in the back seat along with my brother who idolized me all his life. I was sobbing at my brother's plight which was new to me and the two officers were exchanging jokes in the front seat.
There are times when someone with some mental health training is needed at least as a ride along.

 

As I said, the officer may have saved the life of one intended victim being attacked with a deadly weapon.

 

I believe in Oregon a firearm must be a long barreled 0.243 or larger to hunt big game.

 

Exactly. And .243 would also be considered an underpowered hunting rifle. But a .270 or larger is required to hunt elk. The 270 is also sometimes considered underpowered, even though it's far more powerful than a 5.56 or 7.62 used in most AR applications.

 

They're not all one organization, but they all operate very similarly in this country. Policing in America has become very uniform. Experiments in how to police are extremely rare and discouraged by national police organizations.

 

I think the problem is much larger than just the police organizations. It's our countries desire to wrap itself in a security blanket. This starts with our massive military.

Our massive police presence is a byproduct of our continued massive military. This has an impact on the type of people who apply to be cops and the type of people who they hire. When a guy spends 4 years, 8 years, 20 years in the military as a grunt and they get out with no real skill other than killing people, they don't have a ton of career choices where they can employ what they know. So a lot of them go into law enforcement. This leads to a whole host of issues. One being the lack of real training for cops. The other being the thin blue line and the "protect the shield" principle that they live by. A lot of these guys hold onto the brothers in arms culture that they learned in the military. It's the foxhole mentality. Us vs Them. I have long been concerned with a lot of the changes in our police culture. The militarization of law enforcement. The increasing tactical gear that they wear on a daily basis. The military surplus equipment that our federal government gives these departments.

To summarize, this problem goes way way way beyond just law enforcement.

Edit - one more thing, our huge buildup of military and constant churning of recruits since 9/11 has dumped probably hundreds of thousands of former military into law enforcement, along with all their PTSD and other hidden scars from combat.

 

I don't at all disagree that the militarization culture in the US, and the way we handle and treat soldiers, is a big issue. I can also agree that there's some links here between that and the police, as a lot of training probably comes from ex-military. But the vast majority of police, including those in charge of training regimens and policy, aren't from the military--a lot of the problems with police (in my opinion) is calcification of ideas and policies that have existed for generations, many of them rooted in racism, that go unexamined by those in charge. That's why police forces across the nation need an outside hand to come in and implement change, because they are largely hostile to the idea that their ideas and techniques are outdated and dangerous.

But I agree with you entirely that our national mindset of always needing more and bigger military bleeds into how we think about the police and, as a nation, we're conflating the two. Very few people seem to blink an eye at the idea that police that work the streets have access to military hardware and vehicles. It's as if a lot of people don't really see a problem with viewing the police as the military that works within our borders.