About Police Shootings (in America, Duh)

My biggest concern is the future of law enforcement. We shed a bad light on LEO, we make them out to be the "bad guy", then who is going to want to be one? I get paid $8.60/hour as a Police Officer, that is about $56/day take home.

With the ever increasing liability law suits against officers, not departments, you have to get insurance or your personal assets can be taken away for even the most minor mistake in a "routine" traffic stop.

More and more I am hearing Officers doubting. "Is what I do worth it?" "Maybe I should do something else." It takes a special person to do the job, and we are making harder to keep the good ones.

Who is going to want to be a Police Officer in say 10 years? Then what are we going to do?

If the Police force quits, down sizes or does not recruit new people, how are we going to have any LEO out there?

The big toys that some Police departments are getting are excessive. If they need those huge vehicles then they should call the National Guard. We have created a monster with SWAT/SOG.

Of course having a divided country with an "us vs them" mindset, you need Law Enforcement to keep the peace, but that escalates the situation when one of the "us vs them" IS Law Enforcement.

Can we stop referring to black people as 'blacks'. it seems kind of derogatory and my girlfriend hates being referred to as 'a black' she prefers black person. Like Jewish people are jewish people not 'jews'

Ok I was going to avoid this thread because I tend to get annoyed by the standards of both sides of these arguments but to heck with it I gotta test my resolve to remain calm and patient some how right? So I am going to try to make this a level post as both sides are wrong with a huge capital W.

Ok lets start with the authority figures as they ought to be held to harsher standers considering the powers that we grant them. First of all cops need to learn the law and get better training. Why do I say this? Because cops seem to not get very much hand to hand training nor do they seem to know what is legal or illegal. I have seen time and again cops giving out poor legal advice or saying things that are false. Now I know that there are literally hundreds of thousands of laws on the books so how can you know them all? Well fact is that you cant. But you ought to know the laws you are trying to enforce. If you cant paraphrase the code you might want to get a second opinion or think twice before busting someone.

Secondly cops need to stop coming into situations so aggressively. Ill give a personal experience: When I got home from the military I was still on Japan time. So at 2 its 3pm Japan time and I am thirsty and cant sleep. I decide to go for a walk to get a soda or iced tea from the local 24 hour gas station. Half way there I get side swiped without so much as a hello right into a fence. I was going to start fighting as I thought I was getting jumped but I felt the cops shoulder mike hit me and realized who had me. I was then held with my hands on the fence after a pat down and the cop demanded to know who I was and why I was there. I told him the truth and got grilled for another few minutes because this cop assumed that me a well dressed white boy could not be in the ghetto that late other then to buy or sell drugs. Finding nothing suspicious with my words and having felt nothing during the pat down he could search me for he let me go. That soured me on my home town police as it was going to prove to be typical of how they treat people.

Had that cop told me to stop and let him see my hands and spoke to me like a person I would have left that situation just fine and probably even emptied my pockets for him just to put his mind at ease. But no I was treated like a criminal before I was even said hi to and judged based on my skin color and the location. That leaves a bad taste in peoples mouths and cops must fight against it. Now do not get me wrong that officer might have been typical of the local PD but there are still some great guys such as the police Sargent that handled the fact that they were responding to my home invasion call knowing I had a firearm with a very calm and pleasant demeanor. They asked to know where my firearm was just so they felt safe ( well he did two others that he silence started to speak to me like I was a criminal but he took care of it) and then spoke to me to make sure I didn't get hurt by the guy that broke in and generally treated me with respect. That man softened my views and I called the department to tell his boss that he was a credit to them. (something we should all do, if we are going to be critical we should at least give praise where it is due or where is the incentive to behave better?)

Cops hand to hand and weapons retention training from everything I know and see is poor at best. It needs to be upped. This means less money for military gear and more money for more cops and training so that they can work on being more active in the communities and better able to handle less then lethal threats without fear because they know they have good training and good back up. Some of that is on the cops to demand those things and the other side is on the citizens to demand that our money go less to fancy military toys for the cops and more to the training and man power that they need.

Now on to the citizens. When there is a shooting I always hear foolish statements of shoot them in the hand or leg or use a taser it was just a knife. Im sorry but if people are going to speak on these things you must be educated on what the proper use of force is and what proper training is. This is not the movies you are not going to hit a small moving target like a leg or hand under stress while both you and the target are moving during a lethal scuffle. Im sorry but that is a fact. No one but some of the best shots in the world could pull it off and if you are shooting your gun you cannot miss. You cant miss for two reasons the first is that one shot might be all you get and if you miss you could die. The second is any miss puts innocent people at risk of harm from that stray round. Further both the arms and the legs have huge arteries in them that will cause you to bleed out and die just as surely as a shot to a vital organ. So its not even any safer for you really.

Saying that its just a knife or bat and to use OC spray or a taser ignores how those tools work. OC spray takes a minute to kick in and tasers can miss or fail (things like a poor connection or thick clothing can defeat them). If a person is within 21 feet the rule is that they can close the gap and do damage before the average man can draw and fire their gun. That means if this cops misses that bat or knife is now on top of them and it only takes one good hit to be lethal. Thus you cannot play around and risk dying. Because a cop does not only have to worry about going home alive but that person could go on to hurt the people they are trying to protect. They could then take the cops gun and go on to do who knows what. That is not a risk they can take nor should we expect them to.

So in short we must demand education and understanding from BOTH sides. BOTH sides are behaving poorly and refusing to give ground. What we must do is educate ourselves and advocate education for others. We must seek to make compassion drive our goals and motives no matter how bad things seems. Because the fact is that when we make it us against them we make it more dangerous for all involved. So even if we do not want to show compassion we should simply out of self preservation if nothing else.

The dangers of turning police officers into revenue generators.

Best read with the live links at its source: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines


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I'm a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing
by Redditt Hudson on July 7, 2016

"On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with."

"About that 15 percent of officers who regularly abuse their power: a major problem is they exert an outsize influence ...."

Full article: http://www.vox.com/2015/5/28/8661977/race-police-officer

Sounds like a reflection of society then? As those numbers feel very familiar, to how I've seen people behave in various walks of life. Unfortunately at times and depending on circumstance it can mean 85% of people are doing the wrong thing when they needn't be
:S

Here's what Michael Moore has to say: (from Stupid White Men)
* Who gave us the black plague? A white guy.
* Who invented PBC, PVC, PBB, and a host of chemicals that are killing us? White guys.
* Who has started every war America has been in? White men.
* Who is responsible for the programming on FOX? White men.
* Who invented the punch card ballot? A white man.
* Whose idea was it to pollute the world with the internal combustion engine? Whitey, that's who.
* The Holocaust? That guy really gave white people a bad name (that's why we prefer to call him a Nazi and his little helpers Germans).
* The genocide of Native Americans? White man.
* Slavery? Whitey!
* About 20 percent of young black men between the ages of sixteen and twenty- four are neither in 'school nor working- compared with only 9 percent of young white men. Despite the "economic boom" of the nineties, this percentage has not fallen substantially over the last ten years.
* In 1993, white households had invested nearly three times as much in stocks and mutual funds and/or IRA and Keogh accounts as black households. Since then, the stock market has more than doubled its value.
* Black heart attack patients are far less likely than whites to undergo cardiac catheterization, a common and potentially lifesaving procedure, regardless of the race of their doctors. Black and white doctors together referred white patients for catheterization about 40 percent more often than black patients.
* Whites are five times more likely than blacks to receive emergency clot-busting treatment for stroke.
* Black women are four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth.
* Black levels of unemployment have been roughly twice those of whites since 1954.

Every time they catch a serial killer, it's a crazy white guy. Every time a terrorist blows up a federal building, or a madman gets four hundred people to drink Kool-Aid, or a Beach Boys songwriter casts a spell causing half a dozen nymphets to murder "all the piggies" in the Hollywood Hills, you know it's a member of the white race up to his old tricks.

I'm just going to say this:

We can't blame all people who are of the same race or nationality as an individual or organisation who does bad things, that would lead us to even heavier separation in society. Plus, it would be ignorant of us to do so.

Silas Mercury wrote: ...

Anyone can find a zillion bad things about anyone. But my boss is a white guy and a war hero. My secondary boss is an amazing father and one of the most genuine people I have ever met and he's a white guy. My uncle is a white guy and was a FANTASTIC cop.

And Michael Moore... he's a sensationalist filmmaker whose goal is to make back enough money to cover the cost of the movies he makes, plus enough to pay his bills for the next ten centuries if he can.

Never trust anyone with a stake in what they're telling you. He's a used car salesman. Use your brain, do a little research and check his facts. Don't just swallow it.

Karn wrote: I get paid $8.60/hour as a Police Officer.

that seems non sensical to me
i left Austin Tx couple yrs ago and the living wage was basically 10hr

im not doubting, i am expressing unhappy surprise; the job should obviously pay more

Karn wrote: With the ever increasing liability law suits against officers, not departments, you have to get insurance or your personal assets can be taken away for even the most minor mistake in a "routine" traffic stop.

i hadnt heard of this, could you share an example that youve seen?

Karn wrote: The big toys that some Police departments are getting are excessive. If they need those huge vehicles then they should call the National Guard. We have created a monster with SWAT/SOG.

i think that one of the problems is that police are adopting a mentality that looks more like that of an occupying military force than that of being public servants

Br Jon brought another level of nuance into the topic with the way that cops are being used to bring in revenue; when officers are required to act in ways that maybe werent really designed with the best interests of the public in mind, but with ulterior motives such as fundraising or as a bullet point in a political campaign, or whatever, where does officer accountability begin and end?

"just doing our jobs" IS a fair defense, up to a point
we all do our jobs or we lose them, but where are the limits and what are the mechanisms for change or challenge in the event that the expectations placed upon officers are not totally consistent with the public good?

with the Eric Garner case, i dont see someone who died for resisting arrest, i see someone who died for selling loose cigarettes

did the cops do anything wrong in that situation?
imo not exactly; the choke hold can be argued as a wrong but i train in jiu jitsu and we do that all the time
personally i dont think it was that bad the way the officer did it

im more bothered by the fact that he had to be arrested at all, selling loose cigarettes is not a crime that people ought to lose their freedom over, especially when you consider that the police have to use violence to take that freedom away if the person loosing it doesnt submit (quickly enough)

i dont care that he had a "criminal record," and i dont care that other people were selling drugs; HE wasnt selling drugs

if drug dealing is a problem in the area, by all means please do arrest (and choke hold) the drug dealers

i found this to be a pretty good article on the case, it offered some context that was not present in some of the other coverage

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-garner-police-chokehold-staten-island.html


choke holds are against NYC policy, so you can make that case against the single officer (i wouldnt, personally) but otherwise, the police were doing what they were supposed to do, as were the medical personnel, but isnt the outcome unacceptable in respect to the threat?

i think so