I agree with you EconPop. The country has perverted gun laws.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/is-police-reform-a-fundamentally-flawed-idea/ is an article about the poor quality of data available to measure police behavior, police effectiveness, and police reform.
Article on the use of dash cameras in one’s car to record interactions with police officers as well as their usual use to review what happened just before a crash.
https://www.consumerreports.org/law-enforcement/dash-cams-can-be-silent-witnesses-during-police-traffic-stops-and-other-incidents/
The first person mentioned using one also wears a body camera while running.
An analysis of traffic stop data:
For those who argue that overt racism and systemic racism does not exist in police departments, three officers, one a 30 year veteran, were fired today from the Wilmington, North Carolina police department for making over-the- top violent racists comments while on duty. These comments were recorded and discovered during a routine audit, and were not otherwise reported by officers who were there.
One officer said that he feels a civil war is coming and that he is ready. He was going to buy a new assault rifle, and soon “we are just going to go out and start slaughtering them (expletive)” Blacks. “I can’t wait. God, I can’t wait.”
He felt a civil war was needed to “wipe them off the (expletive) map. That’ll put them back about four or five generations.”
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/north-carolina-police-officers-fired-racist-rants-71438606
Article on how measuring bias in police encounters may not measure all of the possible places where there may be bias in policing, since police officers’ choice of whom to interact with as potential suspects can also have biases that are not noticed when looking only at actual encounters (interactions) and the results of such (arrests, searches and whether the searches found anything, use of force, etc.).
Article about a program in Eugene, OR, where about 20% of 911 calls (typically involving mental health or homelessness) are dispatched to mental health counselors and medics (a program called CAHOOTS) instead of the usual default of having the police handle them because there is no one else to handle them. The program started 30 years ago.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/05/us/cahoots-replace-police-mental-health-trnd/index.html
I saw that article a day or two ago. It’s interesting and what I was talking about in this or another thread. We need to try something else since what we are doing doesn’t seem to be working well.
Survey from 2016 of police officers:
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/01/11/behind-the-badge/
Among other things:
- Most police officers (72%) say that they *disagree* with the statement that "officers who consistently do a poor job are held accountable."
- Black officers (57%) are more likely than white officers (27%) to say that "the deaths of blacks during encounters with police in recent years are" "signs of a broader problem" (versus "isolated incidents").
- Black officers (20%) are less likely than white officers (36%) to report violent encounters with resistant suspects in the past month.
- Officers with less than 5 years of experience (53%) are more likely than officers with 5 or more years of experience (30%) to report violent encounters with resistant suspects in the past month.
- Black officers (21%) are less likely than white officers (31%) to have ever fired their guns on duty (outside of training or practice).
- Female officers (10%) are less likely than male officers (30%) to have ever fired their guns on duty (outside of training or practice).
- Black officers (53%) are less likely than white officers (70%) to report being verbally abused by community members (but rates of encountering verbal abuse are high for all groups of officers).
- Black officers (53%) are more likely than white officers (1%) to say that "whites are treated better than minorities" in assignments and promotions in their departments.
- Black officers (6%) are less likely than white officers (37%) to say that "minorities are treated better than whites" in assignments and promotions in their departments.
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/31/21334190/what-police-do-defund-abolish-police-reform-training is an article that describes what police in the US actually spend their time doing, and how their training emphasizes just the part about controlling and arresting violent resisting suspects that is now only a small part of their time spent because so much other stuff has been defaulted to police because there is no one else to deal with it.
(emphasis added)
Sheriff’s deputies, and/or perhaps some of those who called the sheriff’s deputies, apparently mistook crime victims for suspects.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/black-teens-held-at-gunpoint-by-deputies-in-santa-clarita-say-they-are-the-ones-who-called-for-help/2410810/
https://signalscv.com/2020/08/city-calling-for-investigation-into-scv-sheriffs-station-response-on-incident/
https://www.hometownstation.com/santa-clarita-news/community-news/conduct-of-santa-clarita-deputies-under-investigation-after-drawing-guns-at-teens-339994
https://abc7.com/santa-clarita-arrest-teens-sheriffs-deputies-draw-guns/6364515/
@ucbalumnus I watched that video yesterday - it was crazy! The woman yelling for those kids to keep their hands in the air sent chills down my spine.
If you have SiriusXM you may want to tune into Smerconish on POTUS Ch. 124 at 11:00 today. He will be discussing a new theory that could potentially lead to the officers being acquitted.
Rochester police get a “social work” call (person with apparent mental health issues and suicidal tendencies running around naked in the street) and botch the job, resulting in his death.
https://apnews.com/5c2f0cf366e560b7f41ebb3c964b099c
Some video from police body cameras included.
Article on “get out of traffic citation free” cards issued by the NYC police union:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-courtesy-cards
@ucbalumnus - most of what you’re posting here has been well known, to anyone who follows urban policing in America, for nearly half a century.
Cops in America are forced to be social workers-- a role for which they are not equipped and against which they are unfairly and wrongly measured.
No other advanced nation assigns them this misfit role that we do. (Perhaps the British have started to do so, but they don’t have to deal with anywhere near the level of violence that US cities do.)
For over 40 years US politicians of both left and right have dumped on our police the responsibility to sort out-- haphazardly, post-hoc and often in the teeth of opposition from showboating local elected officials-- almost all of the most dysfunctional elements of American urban society.
Among other monstrous problems, these include all the pathological behaviors of unbelievably violent drug addicts and murderous gang members whose rites of passage include random slaughter of their neighbors, as well as the self-destructive actions of mental health sufferers who were de-institutionalized in the Reagan era.
(Note that this “reform” of Reagan’s is evidence of bipartisan ownership of the problem.)
The solution is not to blame the police but to fix those institutions that give rise to such extraordinary levels of social dysfunction in this nation’s urban areas.
If we Americans could agree on the above and stop trashing our police, we might start solving our problems and move forward. Peace.
(and peace out, for me)
The dumping of social work leftovers (that no one else wants to deal with) onto police (and the resulting mismatch) is not well known to the general public. Most people (whether praising or protesting the police) seem to have an idea of what police work is that is very different from what police officers actually do on the job.
Believe it or not, violent crime has gone down considerably over the past few decades, probably due to the end of leaded gasoline. But people seem to believe that crime is going up all the time. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-convinced-crime-is-rising-in-the-u-s-theyre-wrong/
For one police department that posts a weekly summary of police actions, the most common type of incident they found worth noting is a call regarding homeless people.
Seems like you agree with some of the lefties who seem to have realized that social work problems need actual social workers, and that dumping the social work problems on police is a bad situation. Unfortunately, they seem to have used the slogan “defund the police” for that (really meaning that some money allocated to police can be used for actual social workers, so less police would be needed since police would not be doing social work) – it is a really bad choice of slogan when they keep having to explain what it means when the obvious meaning is something different entirely.
However, some police officers and departments actually do have problems with corruption, racism, etc. that are independent of the inappropriate use of police to deal with social work leftovers. That needs to be cleaned up as well.
Most Americans recognize it’s a complicated issue.
The 538 article is garbage.
Re the decline in crime, most New Yorkers, and educated people who follow James Q Wilson or Heather MacDonald, have known for decades that NYC’s murder rate and violent crime rate generally declined by about 85% between the year Giuliani was elected and the year De Blasio was elected.
James Q Wilson attributed this partly to the decline in the use of lead paint, as you note, but much more important was Compustat tactics and aggressive policing; more and longer incarceration of violent offenders; and the steep reduction in the use and trafficking of crack cocaine.
I suspect that many more Americans are aware of some/all of these causes in the sharp fall in violent crime from 1994-2014 than you or the whelps at 538 think. It’s a fair bet that most Americans now understand the post-2014 implications of what Heather MacDonald calls the “Ferguson effect.”
Anyway, that’s it for me. Peace out.
Most of the protests with policing has to do with the fact that people of color have heard or seen abuses of power committed, especially within urban areas. There has been little recourse for those abuses in the past, but smartphones and Police body cameras have brought those abuses into the homes of most Americans. I can admit that the mission of the Police (especially those who work in urban areas) is outrageously complex and those Police forces have not always been given the tools to deal with that complexity. But some urban areas do a much better job than others .
The biggest issue that I have personally observed has been the “temperament” of some officers, especially when it comes to deescalating a situation. My own experiences with the police make me wary of any interaction, but I believe that a well-trained police force can overcome that obstacle by being professional and courteous. I have tried to get rid of my own biases and start fresh when I deal with law enforcement today, but I find myself 15 years old again and being quickly approached by an officer with his hand on the holster and being detained. I know that the police saved lives where I grew up (I hate the all-negative narrative around the Police), but they also inflicted trauma to innocents, just like the criminals and gangs that they were protecting my neighborhood from.
How would you fix our issue with Police being used as social workers? I am always curious about real solutions.
Also, recent examples suggest that some police seem to be selectively blind to some gangs. In Kenosha, obviously armed gangs from outside the city came in, but the police at the scene paid little attention to threat that they posed, even after one of them apparently shot and killed two people (the suspect was arrested later elsewhere). That is not a formula for increasing community trust in the police that is essential for police to do their job effectively.