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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

#301

Post by jakelazaroff »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #297
jakelazaroff wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, this is referring to a very specific subset of police: "crisis intervention team" officers within the 3% of departments that use a "police-based specialized police response" to mental health issues.

That is not a correct reading of the quoted analysis. In tabular form: CIT 3% police-based specialized mental health response 12% mental- health-based specialized mental health response 30% no formal policy 55%

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). Regardless, according to this analysis only 0.45–3% of all patrol officers receive this training that is specifically with regard to people with mental illness.

Edit in case my math is unclear: according to this research, 3% of all department use CIT or similar. Assuming 100% of officers in those departments receive the training, that works out to 3% of all patrol officers. Assuming only the ~15% of CIT officers receive the training, that works out to 0.45% of all patrol officers.

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

#302

Post by AnimalMuppet »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #106
mtrower wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, let us perhaps say, instead: democracy is theory that the extremely-online elites and activists know what they want, and that the common people deserve to get it good and hard. Holding a (small time) elected leadership position, this definitely matches my own observations. I have to deal with the opinions of those I represent on the matters I’m elected to handle quite frequently; the opinions of the few and the…

obnocracy - rule of the most obnoxious?

Volumocracy - the rule of the loudest.

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

#303

Post by WealthVsSurvive »

dfxm12 wrote: post #292
bairrd wrote: post #55

I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud. I think the police are asked to handle too many edge case situations…

I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud Right. I don't like how the article conflates a rise of crime with co…

There's a concentrated corporate media propaganda effort in effect right now to conflate the rise in crime with the outright rejection of US police powers by the general populace.

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

#304

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

jjcon wrote: post #298
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you sum the numbers for all types of moving vehicle sources of hazard? If you do the math, it does appear to exceed the number of incidences of being shot on the job.

Yes and even then it doesn’t Additionally the claim wasn’t, ‘exceed the number of incidences of being shot on the job’ it was, ‘majority of [deaths] are traffic accidents’

Depending on your perspective, the claim is not entirely incorrect.

The most neutral reading of the presented data is that police are equally likely to be shot, have a moving-vehicle accident, and have a job related illness.

The remainder of job related hazards are extremely marginal in comparison to those three.

Guns, vehicles, and illness compose the near totality of incidents and those incidents are distributed nearly equally between the three hazards.

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

#305

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #301
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a correct reading of the quoted analysis. In tabular form: CIT 3% police-based specialized mental health response 12% mental- health-based specialized mental health response 30% no formal policy 55%

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…

I didn’t understand why they chose to include that extra information about CIT, but maybe the authors were just being thorough.

I did read it as if it were written: 15-20% of Memphis Police patrol officers are also CIT officers

edit: I’d highlight that the authors did emphasize the intensive nature of de-escalation techniques for CIT training and that perhaps they were singling out Memphis as “state-of-the-art” police policy, at that time, with regard to law enforcement officers being tasked with mental health care.

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

#306

Post by matwood »

plank_time wrote: post #59
_fat_santa wrote: post #3

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…

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…

> I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking.

This is a good point and one I think is missed. Police really do need more training. When departments started phasing out choke holds I think it was a mistake. The hold itself was not the problem, but lack of proper training.

I've read some proposals that want every police officer to be at a minimum a blue belt in BJJ. For perspective, that's a year or so of training. Someone going 3x/week means they will have 20-30 simulated fights PER week. That's how you get someone to stay relaxed in a stressful and physical situation.

Of course, when weapons are involved it's a different situation. But, in unarmed situation a person with a year+ of BJJ training will easily control the other person with little danger to either of them. And the LEO, knowing this, will not reach for their weapon first.

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

#307

Post by sidlls »

caeril wrote: post #146
sidlls wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different view. I saw a lot of friends lose their fathers and mothers to the system thanks to dirty cops. Being white in a poor (understatement) neighborhood was an enlightening experience. The police are very powerful voices in local governments. They have too much power. I consider the number of police officers to be inversely proportional to how civilized a place is.

> the number of police officers to be inversely proportional to how civilized a place is. On a police-per-capita basis, that would make US East Coast urban areas substantially less civilized than either Middle America or the West Coast. https://www.governing.com/archive/police-officers-per-capita...

Yes, and unsurprisingly urban centers (especially impoverished ones) have the most negative interactions with police, exacerbated by the heavy-handed presence.

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

#308

Post by toqy »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #67
nradov wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

this comment is always on threads like this. as if it's supposed to prove like "meh it's not THAT hard of a job" roofers don't have to worry about making a split-second decision about whether or not they have to kill someone before they kill you.

yes they just make arbitrary decisions all day that might kill themselves

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

#309

Post by mensetmanusman »

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #187
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 agree that an effective police force probably needs to see their job as a profession and a career and that investment into officers is important, but also I think cops are already well paid. Cops in my area cross six figures within about 5 years of joining (this is informed by police officers I know but probably far from uniform) and they get some of the best pension benefits available and have to work far less tim…

“ The paper looked at the life expectancy for 2,800 male police officers in Buffalo, N.Y., who spent at least five years on the force between 1950 and 2005. It compared the officers’ life expectancy with that of the overall white male population of the United States. The researchers excluded women and minority officers because they accounted for a small percentage of the potential pool, which would have made it hard to conduct statistically valid comparisons.

According to the study, officers in the study had a "significantly lower" life expectancy than U.S. white men as a whole, with the gap especially large for those at younger ages.

Specifically, the study found that an officer who lived to age 50 could expect to live only 7.8 additional years, while a typical U.S. white man was expected to live an additional 35 years.

Calculations using a different metric known as the years of potential life lost found a similar disparity. The years of potential life lost for police officers aged 40 to 44 was more than 38 times bigger than it was for the population as a whole, and the average for all age groups was 21 times bigger.

Finally, using a third metric, the study found that a male police officer aged 50 to 54 years had "close to a 40% probability of death compared to a 1% probability for males in the general population in that same age category."”

It’s possible that because they live less, one could argue they should be compensated more to account for their more imminent death.

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

#310

Post by threatofrain »

9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #233
bitexploder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people replying to this comment, the point is, policing isn’t as dangerous as you might think. Certainly it isn’t risk free, but people perform many more dangerous jobs. Police deaths are often tragic and a result of human on human violence though, so it tends to spark a stronger reaction than “well, a giant tree fell on Jimmy and he died”. Still tragic but there are no “bad guys” in that scenario for a lumberjac…

When it comes to analysis of job hazards, death is perhaps the penultimate risk, but to ignore the vast breadth of other job hazards that law enforcement officers are exposed to is an analytical failure. Further compounding the issue is that law enforcement is not the job that the police are often tasked with. Some of the job hazards they are exposed to are due to making inappropriate demands of law enforcement offic…

> When it comes to analysis of job hazards, death is perhaps the penultimate risk,

Death is penultimate to... what?

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