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Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

nytimes.com

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Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#341

Post by sanjiva »

About 20 years ago, when I was living in Yorktown Heights NY (in Westchester county - a pretty high end county just north of NYC), we had to call 911 once because my then wife slipped on the ice and fell when she returned from work late night.

I called and said what had happened and within a short time we had police, ambulance and a fire person show up (I guess they were all bored).

IMO that's part of the problem in US policing: The assumption is that the people are bad (in my case that I had hit my wife I guess - I was interviewed by the cops before she was taken to hospital for a checkup). I called 911 for a medical emergency, not a criminal issue so why do cops have to come and treat me like a criminal. If you think that something is wrong then you find a way to find something wrong.

I wrote a blog about US policing a few years ago because I feared for my son's safety: https://medium.com/@sanjiva.weerawarana/police-in-us-need-to....

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#342

Post by RhysU »

gherkinnn wrote: post #31
bserge wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing it would've been better if they went with "Distribute funds properly" instead of "Defund the police".

Only absolutist sentiments make good slogans.

I want this on a t-shirt. It is funny with an exclamation point.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#343

Post by jakelazaroff »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #324
jakelazaroff wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And the relevant sentences, within the paragraph about CIT: > CIT officers make up about 15 to 20 percent of patrol officers and receive 40 hours of training that focuses on scenarios derived from actual incidents. Officers receive extensive training in de-escalation techniques. It's ambiguous whether "officers" in the second sentence refers to all officers or only CIT officers (I read it as the latter). Rega…

In reply to your edit, you also need to account for the same training that may or may not be provided in all the other cases. This review article did not highlight any such data, but it likely exists in the research under review or in other available research

Sure — but the point is that given the evidence we’ve discussed so far, there’s no reason to believe de-escalation training is more normative than that disturbing seminar.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#344

Post by RickJWagner »

Let's see....

- Dangerous work

- Cast as the villian by national media and politicians

- Under constant scrutiny

- Low Wages

- Target of organized agitators

- Occasionally doxed, with threats to family

TBH, it was the last political cycle that spelled the tipping point.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#345

Post by Corrado »

frankbreetz wrote: post #197
bmmayer1 wrote: post #44

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.

I can agree, but I think higher pay should come with more qualification. The qualifications for police officers are laughably bad https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2020/06/11/ohio-requir...

In my city, the qualifications for being a LEO keep dropping. It used to be that you had to have some college credit hours, which degraded to completing high school, which degraded to at least a GED. Now, I think you just have to apply and be able to pass the physical; there is basically no mental standard. On top of this, the budget is so tight that they basically have one day at the range for training.

So, yes, I agree that LEOs should get better benefits (salary, car, insurance, etc.) as well as much more training. Maybe then we can have LEOs that can handle the job instead of young men with inferiority complexes that just want to bully people.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#346

Post by zepto »

ceejayoz wrote: post #283
torstenvl wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You posted a Twitter link to one caricature cartoon in an unnamed paper. It is dishonest to say you've "demonstrated" that anything happened "regularly." And it is dishonest to conflate the entirety of the time elapsed - it's indisputably clear who has the better historical reputation. And it is dishonest to suggest that a false allegation of X is moral justification to begin doing X.

This is pretty trivial to research. https://time.com/5099513/martin-luther-king-day-myths/ > In the 1960s, the vast majority of white people, South and North, disapproved of the movement’s tactics. In a May 1961 Gallup survey, only 22% of Americans approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing, and 57% of Americans said that the “sit-ins at lunch counters, freedom buses, and other demonstrations by Negroes were hurt…

> "You're being divisive!" has long been the cry of the status quo. The arguments made against BLM and Defund - including the "it's communism!" stuff;

Just because a complaint has been heard before doesn’t mean it’s wrong, indeed it could just as easily mean it’s being said again because it is valid.

Dismissing people who have a valid criticism as ‘the status quo’ to be ignored, is by definition divisive.

It is the literal opposite of inclusive behavior.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#347

Post by roenxi »

IncRnd wrote: post #288
brutusborn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our language is full of ambiguities, and this is one. Both interpretations are listed in the Cambridge dictionary. The truth is: clarity require lots of words, and that makes a terrible slogan. Most people react stronger to a slogan than a nuanced discussion, so the messy slogans will remain.

> Both interpretations are listed in the Cambridge dictionary. That is due to a change that was made in the last year. [1]. Historically, that dictionary has defined defund as "to stop providing the money to pay for something". The change to the Cambridge dictionary entry was made recently in response to the "defund the police" discussions, so we can't use the newly changed meaning as always having meant to "divert s…

And, indeed, the Cambridge dictionary appears to be bizarrely focused on the use of 'defund' in the context of us military/police defunding.

They've obviously written the definition in light of US political events. Pretty weird. It doesn't make sense to define words in context of current political events, they are supposed to have more staying power than that.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#348

Post by ceejayoz »

zepto wrote: post #346
ceejayoz wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty trivial to research. https://time.com/5099513/martin-luther-king-day-myths/ > In the 1960s, the vast majority of white people, South and North, disapproved of the movement’s tactics. In a May 1961 Gallup survey, only 22% of Americans approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing, and 57% of Americans said that the “sit-ins at lunch counters, freedom buses, and other demonstrations by Negroes were hurt…

> "You're being divisive!" has long been the cry of the status quo. The arguments made against BLM and Defund - including the "it's communism!" stuff; Just because a complaint has been heard before doesn’t mean it’s wrong, indeed it could just as easily mean it’s being said again because it is valid . Dismissing people who have a valid criticism as ‘the status quo’ to be ignored, is by definition divisive . It is the…

> Dismissing people who have a valid criticism...

I'm not inclined to assume "BLM is communism!" as valid criticism. Bad faith actors work really hard to derail conversations about racism and police reform; at a certain point, you have to dismiss the same age-old arguments that've been made and debunked at every step along the way.

See also: All the anti-miscegenation arguments that turned into anti-gay marriage arguments that turned into anti-trans ones, with basically just a find/replace for the term used.

Returning to the point at hand, I believe I've sufficiently demonstrated that MLK's sterling reputation is a more recent phenomenon, and at the time of his actual actions he was being treated and discussed similarly to how many activists are today.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#349

Post by theossuary »

treis wrote: post #313
theossuary wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to call BS on this. So many sensationalist stories were written about how there's "a spike in crime," but they're comparing this year to last year! Of course there was a spike in crime, last year there was a pandemic and national lockdown. Crime shifted to online and domestic, and now that the country is opening back up it's shifting back. Take a look at the actual reported felony offenses and you'll see th…

>I'm going to call BS on this. We've gone from 80-90 murders a year to 150 in 2020. There's absolutely something happening. I haven't dug into your numbers but reported crime rates is pretty easy to goose. Hard to hide bodies though.

They've also seen an increase in domestic violence by ~150%, so yeah, that's a pretty obvious indicator of where the murders are coming from... It's not a bunch of street violence preventable by policing though, it's a bunch of dysfunctional families that could be prevented with education and community.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#350

Post by ttfkam »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #117
yardie wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can imagine how they become this way. With most offenders being from minority groups it's hard to keep an open mind if you're having to chase after them every day. Even though these problems are societal, not really caused by the minorities themselves but rather lack of opportunities etc 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 worke…

Most policing is in minority neighborhoods, but not necessarily most crime.

For example, white drivers carrying drugs is higher, but Black folks are more likely to get stopped and searched for drugs.

So it's not that Black folks commit more of these crimes, they are just monitored more closely than their white counterparts regardless of outcome or reality. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...

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