Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft
3 days ago
This is a shallow piece, if ever there was one. Sure the word "warrior" and its connotations are dangerous, but that barely skims the surface of the problem. Why are police given military ranks? Corporals and sergeants and captains. Hell, some are majors and colonels too. Why are their uniforms styled to look martial at all? Has anyone considered that perhaps they shouldn't be armed like soldiers? There doesn't need to be an assault rifle in the trunk of each squad car (isn't this the point of having SWAT? why bother if everyone is SWAT?). Can we even safely call them officers? We call the command structure of the army and navy "officers", but we also use that term for those who aren't military, so maybe it's safe.
There's an entire book on this topic if you want to read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_Warrior_Cop
to me, the most interesting, actionable police-ology has been reforming two trends:
- modern 911, which rewards reactive, rather than proactive, policing
- the ever expanding mission of police officers. there's only one uniformed police officer class. experts and police all want specialization, just like in the medical field.
from a police chief:
> We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it…. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inqui...
warrior versus guardian isn't really actionable - what are you going to do, pass a law that says that training materials have to say guardian? versus, pass a law that appropriates funding for specialized workforces, that's par for the course in municipalities.
Words indicate intentions, and framing changes mindset.
Starting by changing the names of the ranks to British-style ranks and changing the training materials to the American guardian / British Peelian mindset wouldn't suddenly fix everything, but it would at least be a start.
>what are you going to do, pass a law that says that training materials have to say guardian?
What if you did? You don't think that would have any effect at all?
I'm in a Commonwealth country, so our police ranks derive from the Metropolitan Police of London - there's still a sergeant rank, but otherwise it's constable, inspector etc.
...and those rank titles were deliberately chosen at the formation of the Met to make it expressly look non-military. The Peelian principles are still a good read.
why not? if its a professional force. plenty of other countries people use as models have military and police linked together, imo we're (USA) just missing the punishment part. Need to court martial police more :). Whole point of police is internal force application right. Can't really enforce any laws without use of force.
I think a lot of the questions you pose have some interesting psychology behind them. Other countries don't have this same level of policing, but also have different prison systems.
I think a large amount of the danger American police face is due to how easily a single arrest can ruin your productive life. One facing the loss of their home, pets, job, important documents, sentimental items might not see the difference between losing everything, and losing everything and taking the guy who's taking it from you, with you.
If we had an actual system based on reform rather than punishment, I think the danger police would be in would be greatly reduced.
You also have things like qualified immunity and general protections for police against being sued for an unlawful arrest. An officer can incorrectly arrest you and you could lose everything and be simply shit out of luck.
If there's no repercussions for bad cops, there's no justice. If there's no justice, why would one play nicely with the law, therefore police are in danger.
> I think a large amount of the danger American police face is due to how easily a single arrest can ruin your productive life. One facing the loss of their home, pets, job, important documents, sentimental items might not see the difference between losing everything, and losing everything and taking the guy who's taking it from you, with you.
I don't think it's that complicated. Rather, I think that a lot of cops think they're in more danger than they really are. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to gun them down for a traffic stop or for providing a warning about something. The situations where they're likely to get shot are exceedingly rare. By treating policing as some tremendously dangerous job we're completely ignoring the actual statistics, which show that firefighters and construction workers are far more routinely in physical danger.
The police then get carte blanche to walk around treating everyone like some dangerous creature ready to explode at the slightest provocation when most of us are just trying to get by and are pretty accepting of the benign law enforcement interactions we get.
Isn't it maybe because of the gun use here? in other countries is not like anybody can shoot you, even a civilians here feels like sometimes people get mad and just shoot each other
6 replies →
The biggest danger American police are traffic accidents. Mostly because they spent a lot of time on the streets and accidents happen. They don't get shot at all that much.
What actually happens is that American police is basically unaccountable. It must be really egregious and on multiple camera for them to face any scrutiny. And even then it is easy for them to engineer situation where it is actually ok for them to kill or be violent. Meanwhile, non-cop is supposed to have perfect self control, perfect awareness of situation and be able to follow mutually exclusive instructions yelled at him from multiple cops simultaneously.
Unaccountable groups of people always end up behaving badly. Be it priests, isolated cults or cops.
this right here, our issue is mostly the accountability. Accountable people are much less likely to apply force when not needed. Trying to remember some citations, but there's really interesting data out there on citizen involved shootings v police ones. and I suspect the accountability is key.
I think it is more than a bit circular, though. Police and corrections unions are some of the biggest "tough on crime" lobbyists, to the extent that the latter have never been seen to go on the record for decriminalization of marijuana, for example.
And it's asymmetrical. "You can beat the rap, can't beat the ride" does a lot of heavy lifting: Sure. You might spend a couple of days in jail, though, you might need money for an attorney. And even if charges are dropped, or not even filed, many states make arrest records public regardless. Hell, the state of Florida will send you a bill for your jail time regardless of disposition, and guess what, not paying it is a felony.
And we've gone out of our way to protect police from the consequences of actively negligent or even malicious actions, because those same unions fear monger about cops quitting in droves if they have to face consequences for their actions.