111–120 of 356 posts
Am I the only one who thinks that police officers should be paid more, not less? These should be highly specialized and trained jobs that are hard to get and easy to lose if you're bad at them / criminal -- seems like the reality right now is that they're easy to get and hard to lose.
Probably, but so should teachers, nurses, etc. Can you name one occupation outside politics/lawyers where you think people should be paid less?
=)
Here are some facts from the City of Vallejo, a city of 120,000 people located 30 miles north-east of San Francisco: - Recently featured in ABC's 20/20 show for a "Gone Girl" case were the Vallejo Police Department accused a couple of faking a kidnapping. The woman was sexually assaulted during her kidnapping, and the VPD staged a news conference claiming the whole thing was made up. The city paid the couple millions…
Just an FYI, your first link, (abc7news), is broken - "PAGE NOT FOUND".
But a lot of the problem is self-inflicted. The bad apples may be few, but instead of making a show of culling those from the force, they celebrate protecting them. We need less militarization, a lot more transparency, an actual separate oversight organization that has the power to police the police. And we need to 'defund the police' only in the sense that we need to quit asking them to be social workers, and actually shift funding to that department so it can be properly staffed.
It's possible, and very desirable, to rebuild trust in our police force. But we do need to agree on that first. It's become yet another front in the ongoing tribal warfare so I don't think anything meaningful will change in the near future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they don't want that either. They want to keep everything they have and have other people handle all of that stuff they don't want to.
Bit of a broad brush there, innit? Who is "they"?
I wonder what society would be like if every person had a mandatory stint as a part of a police force (like countries that have mandatory military service). It would make everybody everybody part of both sides. Probably not practical, but an interesting thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The paranoid mentality that any call could kill you is the exact reason why so many unarmed black people are shot. If you can’t carry out a day’s work without the unreasonable fear that you will be shot, and any action makes you “fear for your life” so that why you emptied your clip into a car, then you shouldn’t be a cop. Cops needs to have cooler heads and this should be measured and verified before allowing them t…
Except "so many unarmed black people are shot" is a lie. A larger per-capita percentages of unarmed whites are shot than blacks.
https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-cle...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123070/police-shootings...
Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society, I honestly couldn't event imagine the stress. Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis. I've always had respect for cops becau…
We know different cops. The only cops I've met are mildly racist and intellectually lazy. Sure they were occassionally nice to have a beer with. But then they'd start talking and leave no doubt they aren't one of the good apples. Imagine getting a JIRA ticket thinking, "fucking Java bug, again. Only way to fix this is to yank the power cord out." Honestly, delivery people have to put up with way more shit and don't h…
But if you're on the business end of society's failures on a daily basis I can imagine how this changes one's opinion.
I've worked as a technical support agent and I really started to be afraid of our company's products, being confronted with the worst that could happen to them every day. The knowledge that the calls I was getting were only about 0.1% of products in the field was easy to forget.
Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society, I honestly couldn't event imagine the stress. Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis. I've always had respect for cops becau…
Law enforcement can be dangerous but it's only #22 in occupational death rates. Lumberjacks and roofers are far more likely to get killed. https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...
Democracy is said to be the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. However, I note that, from a democratic perspective, it appears that the broader public does not actually want a reduced police force, and this appears to be true across racial lines[1]. So, let us perhaps say, instead: democracy is the theory that the extremely-online elites and activists know what the…
> Finally, officers said they were asked to handle too much; they were constantly thrown at tangled societal problems like mental health breakdowns or drug overdoses, they said, for which they were ill-equipped — then blamed when things went wrong. Sounds like they've got some common ground with the "defund the police" folks, if they'd listen a bit.