Police are people too, but even on a subconscious level no one in the public is really going to treat them that way. It’s impossible to treat someone who can theoretically decide your fate on a whim as an equal. The badge gives them control over you, to the extent that it’s difficult to even have a casual conversation with them for fear of accidentally revealing something about yourself that you don’t want them to know.
When it comes to de-escalation, it’s even harder, since someone who is in a highly aggressive or stressful situation understands their freedom or even life may be on the line and is that much more likely to act in an irrational way. It’s the same effect you see when you back an animal into a corner. They’ll snap at you and fight for their life even if it’s obvious they won’t come out on top.
When one human has the power to kick another one’s ass at will, they often do. It’s Psych 101.
When we don’t have that option, we figure out how to navigate the situation. LOL, a couple of months at my first tech support gig taught me to dial the haters down in a hurry! Hell, I talked a psycho down from literally torturing me one time. 3rd closest time I’ve come to meeting the scythe wielding skeleton.
What’s the answer? Fuck I know. Cops have to have power, or they’re toothless, and therefore useless. Maybe training that involves them being on the other end?
“You have no weapons, no authority, and I’m going to kick the living shit out of you unless you calm me down!” 🤷🏻♂️
Or, and this is madness, we could find a way to pull the teeth out of their unions? I’m all for worker’s unions, but cops are, by necessity, a different category of citizen.
OR, if they want to be badass military dudes, maybe the actual military could come in and school them on rules of engagement? (I’m liking this the more I think about it.)
It was either Dr. Who, or more likely Star Trek, where the protagonist said, “Police officers. I’d recognize them in any century.”
There was an interview on TYT with a former Baltimore cop who was a former military member. He talked about how bad the police who hadn’t been military were at discipline and high stress situations. He also talked a lot about how they had to drive to the poor black areas of town to get their ticketing done because they get in trouble if they gave out a lot of tickets in the white areas of town.
Fast Food workers aren’t trained to dehumanize the public and see them as a threat. Cops are. Cops are also trained to respond with violence and intimidation to any perceived threat to their authoritah.
I was once told that the American police forces chooses only people below a certain intellectual threshold to be cops so they wouldn’t think too much about or question orders gotten from their bosses 🤔 (dunno if it’s true)
There was a famous case where a single person was rejected, and the cited reason was his high IQ. The particular location had a policy of rejecting extreme IQ because evidence showed that IQ is correlated with job turnover. He sued them and lost because IQ is not a protected status in the US and because there was a cited non-prejudicial reason.
But of note, it doesn’t appear to be common enough that anyone has researched it as a statistic. It’s just that despite being run by the government, police departments have enough autonomy to set their own hiring policies as long as they are legal.
There’s a lot of genuine criticisms about the police. We should focus on those. Like their half-ass training and the laws/policies that lead to harmful behavior by them and garner well-earned mistrust.
I think the format of system, as framed around obedience to particular elite interests, and detachment from broader social interests, is completely a valid target of criticism.
Of course, arguments should be based on factually accurate premises.
I think the format of system, as framed around obedience to particular elite interests, and detachment from broader social interests, is completely a valid target of criticism.
I’m not sure what you mean in this sentence. Are you talking about the system of police applications and how they hire/train cops? Or are you talking about the overall problem where police serve laws which (not coincidentally) protect corporate interests?
If the former, I’m not sure I’d agree. If the latter, I agree 100%.
There are no explicit and uniform policies, and one as such, if it were real, likely would be well known.
However, even such a policy would seem unlikely to make much difference practically.
It is abundantly clear that the system reproduces itself by being good only to those who are good to the system.
Anyone who carries deeper curiosity, or inclination to question, the dominating systems of authority, power, and ideals, is unlikely to last long under an oath to protect them.
In the post, someone replied that they get fired if they don’t deescalate properly. It sounds like the person you referenced did get fired. So i think that does add up?
I’m just pointing out the hilariously poor timing.
If you are going to claim that McDonald’s employees have superior de-escalation skills to police…the absolute worst time to try and make that claim is fresh after a McDonalds employee murders a customer and the national news is still talking about it.
lemmy.world/c/thepoliceproblem
Show me anywhere near as many examples of McDonald’s employees failing to deescalate a situation as what’s in one week of reports posted in that comm.
What you’re trying to point out is just flat out dumb, and isn’t “hilarious”.
So you are saying that their de-escalation skills were not better than police? I would expect it to be against company policy to shoot a customer, but we’re talking about de-escalation skills here.
I’d say that the one case you have of a fast food worker shooting someone is not the same as the plethora of cases of police shooting people. More importantly though and the true subtext of this post, is that this employee got fired, arrested, and charged with murder instead of a receiving a paid vacation and a transfer to a new McDonalds two counties over.
Guess what? That single incident is in no way indicative of an overall tendency. Hundreds if not thousands of cops needlessly shooting people every single year, though? THAT’S a significant data point!
First of all I’m a mister, not a ma’am. Second of all, it’s a place to start and I never claimed otherwise.
Besides, accurate data is notoriously difficult to come by for many reasons including the fact that the main people who keep track of it are the same ones who conspire to cover as much of it up as possible.
The article says roughly 3 unjustified homicides a day, but with all the cop cover ups it could be several times that, so “hundreds if not thousands every year” is about as accurate an estimation of the number of needless shootings as you’re likely to get from anywhere 🤷
There was a Facebook post somewhere with the numbers and a tik tok of someone explaining why they are correct. These sources will make sense after you have enough hours of scrolling in the lemmy instance already provided to you.
With enough practice you will understand that we should just downvote and shun people who ask for sources. It saves so much time and helps to avoid understanding the world as it is.
2015 averaged four officer-involved homicides a day (an approximation based on those tracked by volunteers though news, incident reports and obituaries). That number has only increased since then. 2020 is regarded as an unusual year.
Also we learned that precinct coroners routinely cover for their brethren in blue, which may conceal considerably more slayings.
