Police killings more likely in agencies that get military gear, data shows

If the reverse is true, you are positing that American society, the most wealthy society in the history of Earth, is so dangerous that we need jackboots and APCs in the streets. I don't buy it for a second. I think cops should be unarmed, and if they are armed, they should at least pretend to be as brave as their propaganda portrays them as and resist shooting people even if it puts them in danger.

EDIT: To be even more clear, when you are not literally in a state of existential civil war, deploying militarized police is a political judgement not an evidence based one. It is a tool of para-military force used against the less powerful by the more powerful. I would argue that paramilitaries are never appropriate in civil society, even in a state of war.

So it's a 5-6 month training window with a trial period upon hire (which most jobs have). That's similar to for example a Comcast installer.

I have no experience with the specific training and so on but it sounds a little short/rudimentary compared to a lot of other places.

>I don't doubt that this is true at all, but it still points to major systemic flaws in how police are managed throughout the country.

I think that's what Jocko's point is, there's a systemic lack of training in police forces across the country, and some portion of the newsworthy interaction with the general public stem from that.

>Such failure warrants massive overhauls to the system, regardless of whether it's a training issue or something more sinister.

Unless the federal government takes control of law enforcement nationwide, it's not even obvious where how you would start a 'massive overhaul to the system'. You'd probably have to start with declaring martial law then plan to operate that way for the next 5-10 years as law enforcement is reshaped from the ground up.

The likelihood that anyone in our current administration or on deck would attempt that is vanishingly small, and the likelihood that they would actually pull it off even less so. It's likely going to take decades to fully repair this, and I think we need to consider incremental improvements vs some kind of big bang change.

> "Lack of training" is, frankly, a really piss-poor excuse when you're seeing videos like George Floyd. How much training do you need to know not to kneel on someone's neck for almost 9 minutes?

It's not piss-poor, it's just not a complete explanation. There isn't one. More training isn't going to help if you don't have sound policies at their foundation. Policies need to be adjusted for sure, practices need to be expanded to build a relationship with the community, and then training needs to be increased to navigate the broad set of circumstances that police officers may counter. All of this might not have prevented Chauvin from doing what he did, but it seems likely that if the other officers at the scene were better equipped across those dimensions we wouldn't have had the same result.

I stopped and read this. Thank you very much for sharing. It is excellent and very well-written.

For anyone who hasn't read it, this is a similar, excellent article in the New Yorker on an ex-CIA officer's experience working as a beat cop on the streets of Atlanta. It dovetails magnificently with the ProPublica piece.

The Spy Who Came Home: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/07/the-spy-who-ca...

I believe that the following three paragraph-long quotes serve as a sufficient tl;dr:

"According to David M. Kennedy, one of the nation’s leading criminologists, American policing is practiced more as a craft than as a profession. “The kind of thinking that should go into framing and refining what a profession of public safety should be has still not been done,” he told me. Officers are deployed as enforcers of the state, without being taught psychology, anthropology, sociology, community dynamics, local history, or criminology. Lethal force is prioritized above other options. When Skinner joined the police force, everyone in his class was given a pistol, but none were given Tasers, because the department had run out."

"At Georgia’s state police-training facilities, the focus is “all tactics and law,” Skinner told me. Officers are taught that “once you give a lawful order it has to be followed—and that means immediately.” But the recipient of a “lawful order” may not understand why it’s being issued, or that his or her failure to comply may lead to the use of force. There’s no training on how to de-escalate tense scenarios in which no crime has been committed, even though the majority of police calls fall into that category. It is up to the officer’s discretion to shape these interactions, and the most straightforward option is to order belligerent people to the ground and, if they resist, tackle them and put them in cuffs."

"“This is how situations go so, so badly—yet justifiably, legally,” Skinner said. Police officers often encounter people during the worst moments of their lives, and Skinner believes that his role is partly to resolve trouble and partly to prevent people from crossing the line from what he calls “near-crime” into “actual crime.” The goal, he said, is “to slow things down, using the power of human interaction more than the power of the state.”"

"Europe, but only the parts I like"