George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter

Being legally allowed to stop someone doesn't mean you have to treat them like trash.

I got stopped while entering the US, they asked me to follow them in some kind of room, I did, they asked me for my passport, I gave it to them, they then put the passport on a table and went chatting on the other side of the room, a few minute later a woman came in and took the passport while no one was paying attention. 5 min later one of the chatting officer noticed the passport was missing and tried to make me confess I took it back from the table and hid it, he was very obviously trying to escalate the situation... The woman came back after a while and the threatening officer tried to pass his whole act as a joke. I lost 2 hours because these people were less organised than an elementary school kid and treated me like a criminal for no reason.

I've thought of a shorter way to answer your question.

> If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever.

Let's say we decide to pay police officers 1 million/year and really raise their standards. Great! We did it!

Why don't we just do that across the board? The answer is - we have a limited number of highly capable people.

I see the shortage of highly capable people as a problem. My previous post was a way of highlighting that. One would have to think big picture to understand the point I was making.

Regarding leaving positions unfilled - I'm not sure you've thought this through. Imagine we have a shortage of doctors and your appendix burst. Would you rather a medical student try and save your life at say, an estimated 50% success rate, or simply die?

I have this idealised vision of a police force that are more like monks. Their main training is mental, meditation, mindfulness, situational awareness, sensitivity training, de-escalation training. They are also extremely well trained in combat and self defence but almost never use it. When they do they can quickly disarm and subdue violent perps without struggle. They exist just to keep the peace between people. People could grow to trust and respect them in a way that they can't for cops.

It would have to be a lifelong pursuit like a real monk, without much financial incentive. The problem is without trust and respect it wouldn't work since no one would enlist. I'm not sure how you would bootstrap something like that.

It really isn’t like this everywhere, not at all.

I lived for a number of years on a caribbean island–modern, mix of people, pretty crowded, but a police force that was just cool af. They just didn’t get aggressive unless it was absolutely, positively, unquestionably a life or death situation. They weren’t invisible, but they weren’t anywhere near as pervasive as we see in US cities.

And I never felt unsafe there. I would walk through the worst parts of the cities at night and no one bothered you. Sure, there was crime, but basically the same shit you see in US cities where the cops everywhere and hyper-aggressive.

There is something going on with our cops and it’s a large and very deep cultural problem.

Other places have police who are drastically scaled back and the quality of life is so much better.

I’m guessing unless we alter our policing structures to where our police understand they need to make the overall community’s day to day quality of life better, these massive cracks are going to continue to widen.

Again, there were far less police and the world did not fall apart, the daily quality of life was significantly higher.

One of the major hurdles we need to get over is the rather large amount of people (and many of the police also belong to this group) who just don’t understand that people have different interests. A bad analogy, but this is a group of people who rage out when someone has pink or green hair. It’s not enough for them to personally choose to have a buzzcut, they’re furious that everyone else doesn’t also have one.

I could probably come up with a better analogy, but I think one of the answers is in there. I’m not sure how we convince those people to live and let live, because at the heart of our policing emergency is that thought process.

Expect the push for more funding of the police to be the eventual narrative. This is to allow for more training and putting more officers where they are needed.

Simply put, the defund the police slogans are damaging to the DNC outlooks in November and three major unions basically read the riot act to the DNC and members in Congress that no talk that can come back to collective bargaining being a reason police get away with so much abuse is allowed. Instead it must be that they lack training, the security of their pension system raises anxiety among the forces, and lack of officers incurs overtime furthering anxiety. So the only solution is more money for training, propping up their pension systems, and more money for community policing.

just put it this way, when that was dropped on me from a relative as their new marching orders I thought they were joking.

tl;dr the whole defund the police calling is poison in November and the big influences in politics has called their party to the carpet to change the direction of the debate