Comment by alexpotato
2 days ago
Reminds me of the study that showed that you got very different types of people signing up to be police officers if your town's police recruiting brochure had pictures of a SWAT team versus pictures of a police officer doing community outreach at a school and shaking hands.
I knew a guy who wanted to be a police officer in the LA area.
They gave him a psychological exam.
one of the questions was something along the lines of "you pull over a drunk driver, and it turns out to be your mother. what do you do?"
I asked him what he said.
He said he would call another officer and have him take her home.
I was thinking, wow.
He said if someone answers that they would arrest her, they wouldn't hire that person.
Took me a while to work through it and wrap my mind around all of it.
(Spoilers ahead for the first few minutes of "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse")
After I watch a movie for the first time I like to check out a few YouTube reaction channels to see their take on it. They sometimes catch interesting things I missed.
I've watched a few such reactions to "Across the Spider-Verse" and one interesting thing that stood out is when after a fight Spider-Women, who is wanted for murder, is out of webs and cannot escape when Captain Stacy, who is leading the effort to capture her, arrives. Captain Stacy does not know that Spider-Woman is his daughter. She reveals her identity to him, says she is innocent, and he is clearly conflicted, but finally starts reading her her rights.
The reactors almost uniformly condemn him for this, some quite adamantly. They think he should have let her go.
I would assume that the thinking is that someone that says they would arrest (or have arrested) their own mother, is a liar.
This is very charitable assumption.
...without apparently controlling for the extent to which people _become_ "very different types of people" in agencies who advertise one way or the other.
Either way, it's beyond obvious in 2026 that SWAT teams are no longer necessary and are far, far more trouble than they're worth. Abolish them today.
It's probably indisputable at this point that inviting the citizen gravy seals to deal with real threats will probably result in fewer innocent victims than a professional SWAT force that professionally sometimes rescues hostages while also mostly being used to throw flashbangs at babies and terrorize people at 2am no-knocks over petty crimes.
And it's almost always done for some drug related crime. End the War on Drugs now!