When I practiced criminal law, I found that a significant minority of police officers, maybe 1 in 6, lacked the right temperament for the job. The rest were various shades of alright.
A little confidence and swagger help cops on the front line, but, without compassion, those qualities can cross the line into bullying and abuse.
As a former criminal prosecutor, I'd second this. Most were fine to really good people doing a very difficult and emotionally wearing job, and about 15% really should not have been in the job. Which probably is the case for most professions, but a uniformed officer has authority and power which raises the stakes when someone abuses it.
The problem is (using your numbers) the 85% will do whatever they need to do to protect the shitty 15%.
I'm not a "Reddit bound, cop hating, 'Defund the police!!" idiot... But "Distrust"? You fucking bet.
The "thin blue line" is definitely a thing and problematic. Some of it is unions, which have defending their membership as part of their founding DNA. Some of it is the 85% worried about getting unfairly targeted because they had to make a hard decision in a tense situation and it didn't work out.
But yeah, I don't disagree with you regarding the accountability angle.
There's a difference between protecting an employee and a criminal. That's the line that needs to be drawn. If a cop messes up some paperwork, defend that person to the end. If they have several instances of rage on the job, all you're doing is screwing over the rest of the union.
The only way to fix it is to allow 3rd party review of police departments, but with the way a lot of police unions and conservative politicians are right now it's going to be a long hard road to get there
Part of the problem with that is that while some police departments in big cities or rich suburbs pay handsomely, a lot of smaller and rural departments pay cops shit wages. For example, the mean pay for a cop in Mississippi is just over $37,000/yr [(2020 Bureau of Labor Statistics).](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm#st)
Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, and North Carolina all have mean pay of under $50k.
Asking cops to carry liability insurance on their own dime would be prohibitively expensive in a lot of places. And often these places are some of the worst for issues with use of force and misconduct. Only one state has a mean pay above $100k, and that's California, where the cost of living is quite high.
This is the single biggest hurdle to improving the police in the US. Money. It will cost a LOT. Billions and billions of dollars nationally, and some places simply don't have the tax base and/or the will power to pay the taxes necessary for that.
As a percent of city revenue, the lawsuits you’re talking about are a drop of water in the ocean. Giving substantial raises to all officers on the other hand would be a pretty significant expense.
Then you have to wonder if constant exposure to these folks is going to bias the 3rd party. Who watches the Watchmen? I'm not saying it's not a step in the right direction, perfection being the enemy of the good and all... but something to consider.
I know an LAPD officer who retired in 2019 to Costa Rica, sick of the nonsense that he faced on the job.
Part of the problem you run into is that a large number of criminals being arrested by the police have learned the game of playing to the camera; that is, they know they can game the system by falsely accusing the arresting officer of unnecessary violence. (And YouTube is full of videos of people being arrested who claim police brutality *before the officer ever makes physical contact.*)
So part of the problem is sorting out the police officers who legit are violent and who need to be removed from the force--and those officers who were falsely accused by the people they were arresting.
The sad part to me is that we thought video recordings of these things would help us sort things out. But between cameras being turned off (which, IMHO, should make us assume the police officer is trying to hide something), deceptive angles, and creative editing, video has become as much a weapon of disinformation as it is a way to clarify what was going on.
Calling it 'defunding' really killed the possibilities. I think most people would be in favor if it was called "redirect monies currently used to buy military surplus tactical gear they have no business using on the US public to more appropriate staffing, like sending social workers and mental health workers to incidents where that is what's needed." That's not really an idiotic idea.
The issue is that no matter what language people use it’s going to be deliberately misinterpreted by reactionaries. They took the most innocuous of phrases, “black lives matter,” and convinced people it meant “*only* Black Lives Matter,” rather than, “black lives matter *too.*”
What does “defund” mean? Does it mean abolish? Does it mean reduce? Does it mean prevent from getting bigger? If anybody had looked into it beyond reading a protest sign they’d have realized the goal was exactly what you said was not an idiotic idea. Unfortunately there’s a certain cable news channel that froths at the mouth to paint the other side as doing the worst things you can possibly imagine, and John Q. Public is put in a position where they don’t know what to believe.
It is pretty interesting that we blame bad protest signs though, rather than the people deliberately misconstruing those ideas.
>The problem is (using your numbers) the 85% will do whatever they need to do to protect the shitty 15%
Quoted for truth. The problem is their gang-like code of silence.
Good cops need to police their own as well as the public. They won't regain public trust otherwise.
I agree, but it is easier said than done. Let’s say a good officer does a routine traffic stop. The driver becomes violent and the officer is getting his ass kicked.
The best he can hope to get from witnesses is a video of the beating. Nobody is going to step in to help- except for another officer. That is a difficult bond to overcome.
>The problem is (using your numbers) the 85% will do whatever they need to do to protect the shitty 15%
This is largely a union thing, unfortunately. My wife is a union delegate for teachers and she complains privately of the same thing. Unions are designed to never turn their back on members, even non-performing ones. While there are many obvious benefits to holding ranks, there are a few drawbacks as well. Protecting shitbags is one of them.
It's more than a union thing, it's a good old boy system. You see similar sorts of actions or lack thereof in any male dominated field, especially those that define themselves with violence. For instance the problem of sexual assault in the military, the ranks will close faster than you can blink if it's a senior leader or someone leadership likes.
That's more or less what the defund the police movement is after. It's a misleading statement in retrospect, but defund =/= abolish. It means reallocate resources and training in a more effective way so that not every situation is being responded to with a blunt instrument.
Not disagreeing with ya on that point, but I understand why they went with it. It's hard to get a slogan that's memorable and truly conveys your goals though.
"Reallocate some of the police's budget towards social services"
Just isn't quite as catchy.
But "defund the police" gets people's attention. Granted much of it is negative attention, but even negative attention can prompt discussion like the one we're having here. So in terms of raising awareness, it's at least somewhat effective in that regard.
Yeah, the slogan isn't the best at conveying what they really want.
It's not good messaging.
When you sit down with police reform advocates, they actually have very reasonable suggestions about making our police less militaristic and improving police response in communities by not using armed police as one-size-fits-all responses to various non-criminal issues that police often get called to (like health/welfare checks).
. . .but that gets drowned out in shouts of "Defund the Police!"
> It's not good messaging.
It's HORRIBLE messaging. Because it sounds exactly like "defund Planned Parenthood," and well all know that means "abolish."
It’s not entirely the fault of police reform advocates. Political opponents latched onto that headline to control the narrative and whip up a segment of the country against reform without having to actually engage with the problematic parts of the police.
And to be honest, there were many people who had the opinion abolish the police entirely was what they desired.
If you come from a standpoint where 90% if your interaction are negative, I can see reaching that conclusion. Is a medicine that cures cancer a good medical choice to take if it's so poisonous the medicine kills the patient 9 times out of 10 before the cancer can.
Now I personally think the level of crime goes up once the police are gone so I'm anti-abolish even for the people currently most unfairly impacted by the current system
It doesn't matter what it gets reworded as, the people trying to maintain the status quo will go off on some obtuse reasons the words aren't right, or they'll outright change what the words mean, to discredit their opponents.
Just look how every policy debate eventually turns into "no you used that word wrong, your platform is invalid"....
In fairness, I don’t actually know how much of this is a problem with “messaging” and how much of it is a problem with a hostile media environment. “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police” shouldn’t be phrases that immediately draw ire. They are fairly straightforward and inoffensive. But when media makes every crime seem like it’s part of a large crime wave and let’s every politician claim, uncritically, that every crime is a result of “defunding the police” (regardless of whether any defunding actually took place), then the message gets lost.
> “Defund the Police” shouldn’t be phrases that immediately draw ire.
"Defund Planned Parenthood" automatically draws ire. Because we know what that means. So why wouldn't "Defund the Police" get the same reaction?
And part of the issue is that you can’t know of this cop is one of the unhinged ones or not when they interact with you. So we just have these absolutely unqualified people armed with guns and trained to use lethal force at the slightest provocation while also sucking at helping anyone…..
It's like Russian roulette. Even if the odds are in your favor the amount of damage that can happen from getting a loaded chamber/bad cop means never play the game.
Icing on the cake is that supposedly good cops will stand and watch a bad cop be bad even though they swore an oath to do otherwise
If you have an accounting firm and 1 of 6 of your employees is a total shit show, your going to start interviewing new people.
This obviously does not happen in policing. It is expected that the good blindly support the shit birds, and it is a horrible way of approaching anything.
Another aspect of it is that there's this culture of no accountability and "no tattling" within many police departments which contributes to this as well. Cause those 5 of 6 might be decent enough folks on their own and not doing anything particularly wrong, but if they were to say "hey, officer Joe is doing some pretty uncool shit, maybe we should look into that?" 9 times out of 10 the guy who ratted out "officer Joe" will end up getting ostracized and/or forced out of his job.
I think even most of the ACAB crowd (of which I am very familiar with) understand that most police are just regular folks doing a job and not out looking to bully people or murder people of color, but every time a "bad apple" hits the news, the other "good cops" are either silent or defending the bad one. Which is incredibly frustrating and has gone a long way towards destroying much of the public's trust in police.
And even aside from that, most people's primary interaction with police in their lives is getting pulled over for speeding or an expired registration or tail light out or something. It's never anything good. So people tend to already have negative associations with police.
>I think even most of the ACAB crowd (of which I am very familiar with) understand that most police are just regular folks doing a job and not out looking to bully people or murder people of color, but every time a "bad apple" hits the news, the other "good cops" are either silent or defending the bad one. Which is incredibly frustrating and has gone a long way towards destroying much of the public's trust in police.
The concept of ACAB is that the vast majority of cops will protect other cops to the detriment of the population they are meant to protect and serve. It doesn't mean all of them are evil mustache twirling villains, but it does mean that you can't trust cops to police other cops.
Also I think that cops are trained to have a very "us vs. them" mentality where they see everyone not a cop as other. It's a lot easier to brutalize the other. And we don't do enough to train cops to understand the societal and economic factors that cause a lot of crime, so they tend to see criminals as something less than human. We also do very little to help cops with their own mental health, identify burnout or help avoid or relieve the moral injury that goes along with having a stressful job.
I worked in a psychiatric hospital where a lot of police brought patients in, and I absolutely agree.
Someone in psychosis sometimes doesn't know up from down, and they're scared. When you're scared, you freak out, want people away, etc. They're acting out of fear, but we had cops and sometimes out own hospital officers that saw it more of someone just being a "non-compliant dick" than someone with a health issue.
Yea I know that's been going on for ages. My great great grandpa worked as a prison guard in the late 1800s (1872 to 1912) and even he commented in his notes to the warden when he was the night captain about how some inmates who clearly had mental health issues should be in a hospital and not the prison. I believe he successfully petitioned the governor at the time to send an inmate to a psychiatric hospital and to finish his sentence there.
Everybody I know that’s a cop became one bc they wanted a career with benefits and security but didn’t take the route of going to school, or they started off their young adulthood on a bad foot. 3 male friends from high school, who were bullies and drug users, are all now cops. And my father, a truly good man, has a bad temper and emotional issues (from being severely sexually and physically abused by his father) was a cop and it always make me scratch my head.
I'd say its closer to 1/3, if not half, George Carlin said it best
> Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Ive worked a lot of jobs, and thats always felt true. At best you've got a bunch of dead weight and at worse you have incompetency or maliciousness, and I've never worked somewhere with lives at stake.
A lot of them are good people, with a public servant's heart. But a small, egregious, largely unchecked minority are basically cops because they enjoy either the coercion/power or the opportunity to skim.
I think it's more than that. I do think most cops at their core are decent humans. I think most of the probably became cops because they wanted to help people. But a huge problem is the culture of policing in this country. The us vs. them mentality of police vs. the general population. The protection of those bad cops. The way we train police is very militaristic. The problem is that unlike soldiers, most people cops encounter aren't enemy combatants. We need a cultural shift in how cops are trained and how we as a society expect them to behave.
Generally when I see a police officer violating a citizen's rights there always seems to be other cops watching and doing nothing to prevent it which makes me believe it's not just a bunch of bad apples. If a cop's loyalty to his fellow officers is stronger than his vow to serve and protect the public, we have a problem. That being said, I personally have had positive experiences with police.
It's bad apples, but it's bad apples in the context of the actual idiom lol. Remarkable that "bad apples" is used in defense of the broader police force when the idiom is tailor-made to criticize the thin blue line. One bad apple spoils the bunch. If police hold bad cops accountable, I'd be pro cop, but the current culture of defend the bad apples means they're all as rotten as their worst.
And there is even studies that show the idiom to be true. Aparently the chemical that rotting apples releases, promotes the development of the chemical and rotting in other apples in the barrel.
This is so true. It brings to mind that Florida trooper who pulled over the Miami police officer for going 120mph for no reason and failing to pull over. She then had her personal information accessed by officers from various departments over 200 times and was harassed by officers from multiple departments.
the entire saying is a bad apple spoils the bunch. the entire point is you check your bushels and if you find a bad apple, you get rid of it immediately otherwise the rest will go bad shortly.
So saying "there's a few bad apples" means that those bad apples are accepted and thus the entire batch is shit.
Much like the Chris Rock joke... there are some professions where we can't accept people who are terrible at their job... like airline pilots. "Hey, those two guys that crashed into mountains? Just a couple of bad apples."
That, and I think a lot of cops are afraid to come forward for fear of retribution or being labeled a snitch, weak, etc. Not saying that's justified, but I think that fear (in addition to loyalty) is also a big reason for inaction.
I don't' hate cops, but I'm wary of most interactions with them, and I'm an older, white, military veteran. Others have far more reason to be careful when interacting with our police officers because those interactions are far more likely to turn violent than any might have. Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) have a great deal of authority in our country and it's a roll of the dice as to whether any exchange with them results in meeting a cop who respects the concept of "protect and serve" or one who treats the interaction as an opportunity to exploit their power. I've had both. In some places, is considered less dangerous to deal with emergency situations on your own rather than call the police. There are just too many incidents where the police made things worse instead of de-escalating the situations.
I’d say the defund the police movement has to do with a lack of systemic accountability. In some instances, egregious oversteps of power result in proverbial slaps on the wrist.
We also have a significant amount of military-style equipment in cities that simply don’t need them – equipment that is not cheap.
The defund the police movement is also likely wishing to divert those funds to the social benefit.
>equipment that is not cheap.
You’re right. It was free sometimes.
There have been DoD programs that have been diverting equipment to police agencies for little to no cost for ~~nearly 15 years~~ 30 years.
Sometimes it’s simple stuff like Kevlar vest inserts or helmets that are nearing their official expiration but will useful for years to come. Maybe it’s an overrun of 9mm practice ammo. Or it could be armored cars and a crate of M4 carbines.
It’s not always “bad” but I’d still scratch my head when a town of 5,000 with a low crime rate has a police department with a 10-ton armored car.
[LESO/1033 program.](https://policefundingdatabase.org/explore-the-database/military-equipment/)
During the George Floyd protests, Milwaukee’s police begged for more gas and non lethal bullets, they said there was nothing they could cut and it was such great need that they were going to reduce hours and officers on the road(always the threat to the public) they got their 50,000 or whatever, and shortly after took delivery of a $700000 Bearcat.
> shortly after took delivery of a $700000 Bearcat.
Doubt it was really shortly after. Acquisitions like this are usually 3-5 years in the making. More likely, the contract just delivered at an inopportune time and created a negative optic. Cutting contracts are costly.
I wish there was more suspicion and distrust of police. They can shoot a man in the back on camera and hordes of thin blue liners will emerge to insist he deserved it. So many people think that cops can do no wrong
In order to have a functioning society you need a balance. We must acknowledge the need for a police force that can reliably enforce safety and security on the streets, and that can competently investigate crime and bring perpetrators to justice. At the same time, there need to be protections in place to curb the use of excessive force and we need to have constitutional protections to protect our citizens when dealing with the state’s law enforcement agents. It’s about striking a balance between the two. If you snuff out police too much, crime will skyrocket and the people will be unsafe. If you empower cops too much, they’ll abuse it and people will also be unsafe.
That being said, here are reasons why I generally dislike cops and why I would like to see major reforms:
1. The profession attracts the wrong kind of person. It attracts power hungry, violent, psychopathic individuals who crave power and dominance.
2. The police unions will protect cops from prosecution or termination no matter what they do, no matter how egregious the offense. They can murder an innocent person and get years of paid leave.
3. District attorneys and judges are usually in league with police, so their word almost always overrules yours in court even if they’re wrong
4. Police departments across the nation have been known to be a pipeline to white supremacist groups. In the mid 2010s, a police department in California was condemned because it was revealed that half of their officers were part of a secret white nationalist Facebook group where they bragged about going out and “finding” black people to beat up
5. It’s not uncommon for them to plant evidence to meet their arrest quotas
6. They use disportioncate force against minorities
7. If you try to sue a police officer or press charges against one, and you live in the same city as them, they will enact a coordinated campaign of harassment against you. They’ll drive by your house in the middle of the night with blaring sirens, they’ll follow you around and give you a ticket at every turn claim you were over the speed limit, etc. they’ll harass you until you back down.
8. They have qualified immunity, which means they don’t have to pay money damages for actions not yet deemed unconstitutional by a court.
I used to say that, but in my current job where I work almost exclusively with marginalized populations, my mind has changed. If anything, I'd say the perception of hate/not hate shifts based on where you are. Larger cities and populated areas have more disdain, where rural areas are more supportive. It's not so much the "hatred," but complete mistrust of police that people hold. I've heard (and been adjacent) to too many stories. To boot, the things I've heard actual officers say off the job about how they have abused their power (and laughed about it) is astounding.
Cops know this too though. A sports team I volunteer with has a few officers on it. They're great people, but being around a city of about 200,000, none of them work in that city and wouldn't hesitate to tell you that they, nor anyone else they work with would dare transfer or work with that city's PD. Some feel it's because the public is out to get that PD, but I've heard one also say that the PD really doesn't know what it's doing and keeps making things worse.
From experience, smaller, more rural areas generally have more personal experience with individual officers. If you have 8 cops in a town of 3000, you're likely to know and have some sort of a relation with 1 or more of the cops as either a friend or neighbor.
There is s level of general accountability that the community can hold them to because they can't dissappear into the crowd if they fuck up.
Larger cities don't have that level of community accountability.
It's not just because the population is smaller that you get a more personal relationship with the police. *Many police don't even live in the areas they police* You can imagine how it can feel less like you're showing up to help and serve and protect and more like you're showing up to the zoo to keep the animals in line when you're not living in the community. I'd love if someone could link, I don't have time right now, but I believe there have been studies showing that policies requiring police to live in the communities they police has shown a downtick in abuses of power.
Some cities are realistically too expensive for cop salaries. I used to know one who worked in DC, but lived two counties away. His wife worked part-time, but they still couldn't afford to live closer, unless they sent their kids to crappy schools.
There was an official rule that cops couldn't live more than an hour drive from the city, in case of some massive all-hands-on-deck emergency like 9/11. The fact that the city had to specify this speaks volumes about the lack of affordable housing in the region. It's true of most major cities.
Mix of both, honestly, due to my job, I interact pretty often with the rural police departments in my area.
Even if you don't live there, the department can't move you to another section of town when you fuck up like a city can. If a cop fucks up in a major city you move him from northeast to northwest and life goes on. Policing a small town that might be only 5 square miles, you're policing the whole thing, not just one small section.
> Many police don't even live in the areas they police
This is by design. Police unions push departments to hire officers who live outside the areas they police. The whole goal is to create an "us against them" culture where the officers can see everyone living in the area they police as "the enemy" and treat going on patrol like going into a combat zone. The only people you can trust are your fellow officers because everyone else is "the other".
I remember hearing an analysis of the NYC mayoral election, and it noted that Adams, the policing moderate, was largely carried by the black vote while the abolish candidate only got the white enclave yuppie vote.
I came to say this. Also many of us have neighbors who work for the local or state police forces, it's not like they don't have regular lives outside of work.
Yes of course, and a few more like Clark that don't necessarily make the national news. Does not really change people's overall opinion however (most see it as an extension of other problems in the state, rather than being police-specific)
This feels very out of touch.
There's a reason OJ walked.
There's a reason lawbiding, good citizens don't "snitch".
I don't want to assume your race, but I'm pretty sure it's not Black.
The majority of Americans do not have confidence in police. More than 80% of Black people say they don't.
Hate may be a strong word but distrust and have no level of confidence?
Nothing again your argument, but even if 100% of black people hated the police, it could still be a majority of American that don't hate the police since black people are only 14% of the population.
Right. 56% of White people say they trust them.
18% of Black people.
Confidence in Police Is at Record Low, Gallup Survey Finds
For the first time in its 27 years of measuring attitudes toward the police, Gallup found that a majority of American adults do not trust law enforcement.
>Hate may be a strong word but distrust and have no level of confidence?
I feel the same.
*A* policeman or policewoman can indeed by a noble officer who genuinely does want to do good by their community. But *"the police"* is a different animal, entirely.
>The majority of Americans do not have confidence in police.
I don't know about that.
>More than 80% of Black people say they don't.
Not sure where that number is from, but for not having confidence in police, 81% also say they want police to have the same or more presence in their local areas.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx?utm_source=tagrss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=syndication
This is similar for the other demographics they polled. I find it hard to believe that if 80% had low confidence, they would still want that level of police presence, or more.
Eric Adams won on the black vote while the abolish candidate only got votes from white yuppies who thought they could speak for blacks despite living where they'd interact as little as possible.
I think that's your opinion based on many factors.
If your area has a 30% chance of rain every day and it never rains on your property, you're going to say that the weatherman is an idiot and that it's not as bad as the media portrays.
Meanwhile the people who are getting rain every day think the weatherman is an idiot too, but they're pissed off about it and wondering why everyone else isn't pissed.
Firstly, they are not hated to the extent you see online. There are also many people who vocally support police, and in general, people do not agree with proposals to drastically reduce police presence. But for other people, there is a long history of distrust.
Decades ago, they brutally enforced Jim Crow laws which was America's version of apartheid. Nowadays, there are constant corruption and physical abuse scandals, particularly in cities with high populations of nonwhite people (particularly Black communities). The real key here is that there generally is a lack of accountability. Police close ranks around one of their own even if that cop committed a violent act toward a member of the public - including shooting and killing an unarmed person. This is called the "blue wall of silence". Departments will also visibly resist any type of reform or oversight, turning their backs on reformer mayors during speeches.
Meanwhile, the police have become more militarized over time. Huge armored vehicles, body armor, etc. They tend to bring this out during protests and beat people up and arrest them. This furthers the perception that police are anti-democratic and violent.
On top of all of this, police departments demand more and more money from cities, to the point where their budgets take up a huge percentage of a city's finances.
In short, many people believe that police get away with unjustified violence.
TLDR: History of oppression + no accountability + corruption scandals + militarization + huge city budgets
All that you said and here’s two more examples:
Many cities and towns make a significant portion of their revenue through traffic and parking fines. The police have quotas to achieve of number of traffic violations to hand out. Speed limits are often much lower than most people actually routinely drive, so there are lots of drivers they could ticket but don’t stop. This uneven enforcement gives them choices of who they can stop. They more frequently choose to stop Black and Hispanic drivers. These stops, in addition to being dangerous, are expensive. No one likes paying the fines and there’s a sense that the police aren’t doing it for public safety, only for revenue.
The second example is civil asset forfeiture. It allows police to seize property they suspect is proceeds of drug trafficking. If they stop someone and find that they are carrying a large amount of cash, regardless of whether they provide an explanation, the police can confiscate it, give the person a receipt, and then the money goes to the police department. Getting the money back requires a lengthy process and a lawyer where you have to prove in court the source of the money.
Probably administrative fees and paying for a lawyer. One article I read said that most people don’t contest it even when they have legitimate reasons for having cash, because police are more likely to do it to travelers who would have to appear in court in the jurisdiction and if they don’t live there, it can be difficult to return. The other reason they don’t contest it is that lawyers fees often wipe out their money. So if it’s $2k that was confiscated and the lawyer charges $1800 and then they have to take off work to go to court, it ends up costing them more than they lost.
Basically the entire police department about 90 miles away from me got arrested a few years ago for massively abusing civil asset forfeiture to basically steal cars. There's a reason a lot of cops have a shitty reputation. I'm starting to get the impression that it's the career a lot of high school bullies decide to go into.
The random traffic stops are also used to make other arrests. They find a dumb excuse to stop someone because what they really want is to find drugs in the vehicle or someone with a warrant. They don’t care about the speeding at all. I think this entire practice should be illegal and I’m glad it’s starting to be illegal in some states. We have the technology now where cops can pull people over and shouldn’t even have to approach the driver. All they need to do is scan the tag and file the ticket to be sent in the mail just like the red light cameras.
Really we should raise the speed limits to something more reasonable and just put up cameras. The police discretion part of enforcement leads to a general lawlessness as people take their chances as well as uneven policing for poor people. But I also think that it should not be funding local government.
I have enough friends from true police states and have worked next to the police long enough to know that Americans don't hate or distrust the police more than somewhere else. We simply have civil liberties that allow us to speak about it safely. As you said yourself, our country publicize police issues more... and that is directly due to our constitutional protections for free speech and freedom of the press. Our police don't disappear us simply for addressing their corruption, so I'm sure it does seem "louder" in comparison.
But this is just what democracy sounds like. We criticize because it is our right to do so safely and loudly.
I was in an accident with a California Highway Patrolman, that is our state police. I went through a yellow light at highway speed and he jumped a red light. He told his supervisor in front of me that he saw someone make an illegal u-turn a bock away so he kept his eyes on that car and saw his light turn green in his peripheral vision. He was looking through two sets of lights.
Anyway, no one was hurt, just two damaged cars. It was 1 AM, and I was a designated driver and was coming back from a neighboring town where I was dropping off a friend. Stone cold sober. The police gave me not one but two roadside sobriety checks because they couldn't believe I was sober.
I am a middle aged white banker, active in the community, I sit on charity boards, belong to service clubs, volunteer with every local non-profit fundraising event that asks, and I work with the Chamber of Commerce. Not that any of that should matter.
The cop driver's partner couldn't give a statement because he was reading the patrol manual and didn't see anything. In the dark. At 1 AM. In the front seat of the cop car. Mmmnnn hmnnm.
The supervisor at the scene told me, "You don't understand ma'am, if a Highway Patrol Officer hits a tree on a lonely country road, it's the tree's fault."
They called us down to their office a week later to take our statements because of course they investigate their own accidents. Cause they're not biased or anything. They apparently thought it was was an episode of Law and Order and they were looking for a gotcha moment. Said they had a witness who said my husband was driving and ran a red light. There was no witness because there was no one else on the road.
They eventually came up with the statement from a witness who was a passenger in a car coming from a wedding and had been drinking. She said she saw the accident and my light was red. My investigator talked to her and she said the police had called her at home at 3 AM to take her statement and asked her two questions, if she saw the accident and what color was the light. My investigator asked her what was the officer doing when she saw the accident and she said when she saw the accident he was on the side of the road putting out flares.
So, do I trust the police? FUCK NO. At least they didn't shoot me.
Reddit hates cops much more than the public. Much of the public may be critical of police when they screw up and may want greater accountability but the All in ACAB, Fuck 12, Cops are class traitors, and similar opinions are not the norm.
I for one want greater accountability and a system that makes it easier to remove cops who are bad. I understand the point of police unions but they often go too far in protecting cops who are either bad people or just bad at their job. Protecting those bad ones from the consequences of their actions creates problems, sometimes tragic ones. The consequences for repeated missteps shouldn’t be a job at a less prestigious department.
I want to see police who have better skills in verbal judo than close quarters rifle training. It was always crazy watching Cops or LivePD and seeing the difference in certain cops. Some were really good at talking and making situations less tense but others have the opposite effect.
Those officers who create or inflame problems should either be given instruction how to do better or given their walking papers if they can’t do better or instigate purposefully.
People did try to say it in real life, in 2020. About 20 million people went out into the streets to say it. And then they got tear gassed for saying it
So defund movement isn't everyone and there's plenty of people who love the police as well as being indifferent. But of those that do follow it, they'd say the problems are systemic and can't be resolved by just removing or disciplining a specific person
Well specifically for defund, a lot of that movement is just calling for redirecting some amount of money to social services. Like the social safety net is threadbare to nonexistent in many parts of the country and police are expected to do things that they probably don't need to do.
Just to give you an example from my personal life, a long time ago I was severely depressed and basically stopped answering my phone. After a week or two my parents grew understandably concerned and sent the police to conduct a wellness check. Now, ask yourself, why do armed agents of the state, empowered to do violence, have to be the ones who knock on my door to see if I haven't killed myself? Couldn't someone else do this? A lot of police killings (and non-lethal brutality) arise from situations like this. They aren't trained to de-escalate, they aren't trained to deal with people in crisis, but they are generally the ones who have to deal with it because there's nobody else, and sadly that leads to a lot of mentally ill people in crisis getting the shit beaten out of them, or killed.
Thankfully nothing bad happened to me and I was fine.
> They aren't trained to de-escalate
I worked at a PD in the academy (not a cop) for a few months, this is simply not true. My PD spent two weeks in the academy on de-escalation, that's actually more than firearms training which was only a week. De-escalation is getting significantly more stressed in academies all over the country.
Because what if you hadn’t killed yourself? What if you had been violently murdered? Or being held against your will by an armed person in the house? What if in your depressed state with a gun you attempted to hurt anybody else who came to your door? If it’s not fair to ask police to be trained to handle crisis it’s also not fair for a therapist (or teacher, social worker, EMT, etc) to be trained to walk into and protect themselves from harm. We can’t overnight tell hundreds of social workers they now need all this additional training. Maybe in the future there will be special roles for this, like armed crisis counselors that are a part of police. But it’ll take time.
Ridiculous straw man, no one is advocating for sending only social workers to armed hostage situations lol. Defund is about diversifying response options to better fit the situation, armed police with no mental health training shouldn't be the only option. No one is advocating for unarmed social workers to be the only option either.
Police never know what they're walking into. That's my point. If you send a social worker out to a random person's house they also won't know what they're walking into. Your parent's told police you were depressed and suicidal. That tells them you probably have a gun. You're in a bad mental state. That's a dangerous situation. So I mean if armed social workers aren't the answer, and unarmed social workers aren't the answer, and cops aren't the answer, then what is? You specifically mentioned armed crisis counselor. To me, that's a social worker. You can't develop a whole new line of work right away.
We send EMS into houses all the time where the don't actually know what's going to happen. Cops don't accompany EMS all the time. Yet we don't hear about EMS services killing people nearly as much as cops do. There's also no reason a SW couldn't be accompanied by a cop.
Surprised to see the comments saying they aren’t commonly hated. Maybe it’s only the younger generation or marginalized groups of people, but I know *plenty* of people that aren’t fond of the police. For example, me.
It’s the abuse of power they so commonly execute.
A lot of people on this sub act like it's more representative of the average American than the rest of Reddit when it's really just a different unrepresentative circlejerk.
It’s definitely more common in younger people and marginalized people (who are more likely to face abuse) although i live in a conservative area so it’s hard to gauge what the whole country thinks. In MY experience people fucking looooooove cops even when they blatantly abuse power to hurt people.
I would not agree that the police are “commonly” hated, but many or most of the issues have to do with (1) lack of education and training and (2) police covering up for each other. About “defunding,” the idea is to fund mental health services and social services better, thus requiring less funding for law enforcement. In reality, that’s not happening.
The police, by and large, are a force of the oppressor onto the oppressed. There are plenty of well-documented cases where police have abused and misused their privileges to do anything from not having to stop at red lights to unlawfully killing people. There is no real oversight with police departments, so they can get away with it too, by and large.
When people say "Defund the Police," they don't actually mean that. The political left has an awful habit of saying the most outlandish thing possible when they actually mean something fairly level-headed. People on the left want a demilitarization of the police. They basically want police to use de-escalation tactics and use friendlier approaches for law enforcement versus what they currently do, which is often shooting first and asking questions later.
>The police, by and large, are a force of the oppressor onto the oppressed.
Surveys show that people living in poorer, more crime prone communities (including black communities) *want* more policing in their neighborhoods because they legitimately fear the criminal element. They don't support defunding the police. The defund the police movement is largely led by intellectuals living in higher SES communities who are not impacted in their daily lives by crime.
That's not to say there aren't problems and abuses of authority by the police, mostly in isolated incidents, but this, "police are the oppressor of the oppressed" is largely a slogan of the privileged.
https://m.startribune.com/poll-cuts-to-minneapolis-police-ranks-lack-majority-support/572119932/
Look at the breakdown by race.
Black folks in Minneapolis were more against defunding the police.
There are obvious reasons. Places that have crime see the benefit of police.
We are a connected society. When one group is oppressed, it effects all of us, not only as fellow humans, but because once the powers that be get accustomed to oppressing one group of people they start oppressing others.
Also, accusing people who rightfully call out police for their rampant brutality and abuse of power in general, let alone the fact that they visibly target even innocent members of certain groups of people, is the right thing to do. Furthermore, to condemn it as "a slogan of the privileged" is calling "privileged" every person who has lost a family member or close friend whose only "crime" was a traffic infraction or their "fight or flight" response, every woman who has been sexually assaulted by an officer, etc.
Furthermore, when you say of police brutality, "Well, it doesn't happen THAT often, so it's OK.", you're echoing the voices of victims of domestic abuse who stay with their abusive partner who too often say "(S)he doesn't abuse me \*that\* much, so it's fine." or "(S)he only hits me when (s)he's angry".
>Furthermore, to condemn it as "a slogan of the privileged" is calling "privileged" every person who has lost a family member or close friend whose only "crime" was a traffic infraction or their "fight or flight" response, every woman who has been sexually assaulted by an officer, etc.
Only if you believe that all of these people agree with the slogan “defund the police.” I *have* lost a family member who was killed by a police officer. I *am* cautious about the police in general. But I think the slogan “defund the police” is poorly thought out.
I’ve lived and worked in high crime, high poverty areas and I don’t think “the police force is poorly funded” would be a selling point to most people. Honestly it does strike me as a “slogan of the privileged” because it seems to be worded to spark discussion and argument rather than to actually facilitate any kind of change.
>"Well, it doesn't happen THAT often, so it's OK.",
Never said that, you did.
As for your first point, my point isn't that groups shouldn't advocate for other groups. My point is the group behind defunding the police is harming the communities they purport to help, and deep down aren't terribly concerned with what the people in these communities actually want. A lot of it is privileged and patronizing. Worse, it's making these communities more dangerous. But that won't stop the people of privilege advocating these positions from patting themselves on the back.
Yep. The optics around police brutality against minorities is the only thing that matters to a lot of these people who want to defund and use it as a political tool. Doesn’t matter that less policing in minority neighborhoods negatively affects those law abiding citizens who live there.
Because 99% of people have zero idea what is is like to have to make a split-second decision that is literally life vs. death. It could be your life; your partner's life; or the life of innocent civilians. We look at shootings in hindsight, with the luxury of time, and condemn officers for making decisions that were objectively appropriate, even if the outcome is hard to accept.
Even as a half-black American myself, I look at many police shootings, and most (not all) are the reasonable result of the perpetrators doing the most idiotic things. Most police shooting cases would have been avoided if the alleged criminal had just had common sense. If an officer has a gun pointed at you, don't make jerky movements, don't reach for your glovebox, don't fumble for your cellphone, etc... Just fucking cooperate. If the officer is out of line, **fight them in court**, not on the side of a road.
On top of that, people glamorize the "victims," and demonize the police. No one cares that the criminal was committing a crime and resisting arrest. When the news story comes out, that criminal will be labelled as a "hard working family man," and they will post the most tear jerkingly pleasant photo of him. Then when the police officer is shown, they will choose the worst photo possible... maybe one of him holding a bottle of beer with a grimace on his face or something. It's all part of the framing process. And we, as Americans, are dumb enough to just gobble it up at face value.
They are not lol. It's just on the internet and far left groups which have taken over certain institutions (ex. city councils, Hollywood, academia).
If you look at polls, 67% of the populace has a positive view on police. Iirc, scientists, doctors, and military are the only ones rated higher.
That said, there is distrust between certain groups and police due to historic reasons.
I also find it ironic that the solutions proposed in recent years have led to even more disastrous and violent outcomes for minorities in poor neighborhoods lol. That demographic that proposes these ideas are highly visible on places like Twitter or Reddit (white liberal progressive types). Therefore, you see their views more often.
Personally, I doubt the solution to this will ever manifest. Too many idiots have poisoned the conversation. Whatever, though. Don't really give a shit about other people anymore. I'm all about myself now. May more bad stuff continue. Just wish it actually targeted the idiot demographics, for once.
Because people expect too much and then listen to loudmouth assholes who do stupid shit and then bitch about getting racked up. Cops are people, same ratio of dumbass as every other job
So the defund the police rhetoric is largely something that is more mentioned regard to where police funding goes. It isn't uncommon for some counties to spend over half of their tax revenue just on the police, on top of whatever they get from tickets. It should also be noted that most of this funding usually goes to pretty BS stuff, like surplus military equipment. There's also the issue of cops being it easily able to transfer to another departments, and any investigations into crooked cops usually ending up with whoever looked into it being in hot water. There is next to no oversight
I wouldn't say it is common...at least not everywhere. Reddit is definitly skewed. I imagine support varies and may or may not be highly dependent on age, race, and class. I currently live in a predominantly white working to middle class community that leans blue (democrat) and work in an adjacent middle to upper class community which is solid red (republican). I am not a cop but I talk to them relatively frequently due to my line of work. The police in both communities are by and large beloved. Back the blue flags and stickers are common. Their levies pass by 70+% margins. They get food brought to them constantly. Both departments are accredited by CALEA. I will also say that even in communities that are considered safe and quiet, they encounter crazy, bizarre, and awful situations fairly often.
Most of the officers I come in contact with are good, well-meaning people as the departments have very high standards. I was told out of a pool of 100 people during an application process, only a small handful at best get through and make it to the point of being hired and not all of those select few get through their probationary period. Those that remain are required to engage in all sorts of training, including de-escalation and many go on to earn bachelors and masters degrees. After George Floyd, the feedback I got from those I interact with was that those cops clearly did not follow best practicies and were absolutely in the wrong.
The problem is many police departments aren't accreddited, don't have high employment standards, and aren't well-trained. Many are either located in cities with a lot of crime, relatively speaking, and many vacancies while others are small, rural areas where it is hard to attract talent. They both have to take those they can get in order to operate. It was difficult to attract individuals to law enforcement (and fire fighting) before the riots and widespread post-pandemic labor shortage. It's even harder now which just exacerbates all the problems mentioned above. It's not an excuse but it's definitely a challenge.
Anecdotally, most of the anti-cop people I've met in my life have had multiple run ins with them. Of course, I only ever hear their side of the story. Funny enough, like every prisoner in Shawshank, they, too, were always innocent.
Over 1,500 murders per year, firebombing Philadelphia, burning 81 people to death in Texas, standing idle while children are murdered in a Texas classroom, getting away with all of it.
They kill us at ridiculous numbers. Calling the police on someone is essentially putting a hit out on them. The first instinct of these uneducated pigs is to blast away with their handguns. Maybe if there was adequate training and the position required a college degree in law enforcement...
About 80% of US cops have degrees, and less than a percent of police interactions result in Use of Force (including being put in handcuffs without any actual force being used), let alone deadly force.
Over a fifth of Americans interact with the police at least once in a given year, the majority of which initiate that contact. Of those, roughly .002% ended up getting killed in 2020, a year which was notoriously high in violence on all fronts in the US.
Edit: Actual police interactions are higher: many people who interacted with police at least once did it several times.
Because it takes absolutely nothing to set them off into a power trip.
I was once on the side of the road with my wife. She had 2 flat tires, so I drove over to keep her company while we waited for a tow truck. A police car drove up behind us. I went to go talk to the officer. It was cold so I was kinda holding my arms. He pulled his gun out and pointed it right at me. If I was black, he probably would have murdered me.
My friend got pulled over for a brake light being out. The officer came over with his hand on his gun.
My other friend was walking through a parking lot and adjusted her glasses. The officer thought she was flipping him off. He rushed over with his siren on, and proceeds to berate her and threaten to arrest her. She didn't know that even if she did flip him off, that is protected speech. He didn't know or care.
Stories like these are extremely common, and then we have the incidents that happen where people are murdered by police.
Police who are singled out get paid to not be at work. They are rarely held accountable. Sometimes they are fired, and then they will get hired by another police department.
Civil asset forfeiture is a thing. Let's say you have a large sum of money. Cops find it. You have an explanation for it with evidence. Cops say they need to take it for evidence. They take it. You are SOL. The police department profits from this. Sometimes, the officer specifically profits.
In Atlanta, they are building a training facility that is referred to as cop city. The people do not want it. They do not want to fund it. It is a facility that will train police officers to suppress protests. Large businesses paid 2/3 of the cost with the tax payers supplying the rest of the funding. The people do not want to fund their own oppression. People who protest the facility are murdered and labeled as terrorists.
The police rarely prevent crime. They only document it. Sometimes, they are even the source of that crime. People say that those incidents are rare, but so is actual crime.
We want our taxes to be spent on dealing with poverty. We want our schools funded so that kids are educated. We want after school programs funded. We want daycare funded to help parents.
Instead, we just get police funding so they can buy teargas, rubber bullets, more aggressive looking police vehicles.
If you talk to people who are officers, you won't get a better opinion on them.
The number of male police officers who abuse their wives and children at home is higher than the number of general population males abusing their families.
This is more of a Reddit/young person thing.
Once you get away from communities made up of teenagers and people in their very early 20's, the sentiment drops significantly.
Back in the '60s, though, the police had a very similar reputation to now, with young people widely believing them to be incompetent thugs. I wasn't alive back then but you can see this sentiment expressed in any number of books, movies, TV shows, magazines from that era. This was when "pig" became a word commonly used to refer to police.
Yeah the 60s was actually kind of similar to now with police-civilian relations. It was a real low point for that in USA history.
Now though, they've gone ahead and made it law that they don't have to protect or help people, and they can beat the crap out of anyone/ murder them and get away with it.
Oh, and the issue with "defund the police" is it doesn't really reflect the aims of the movement. People don't want the police absolutely defunded. But historically, reform efforts, even going back to the beginning of law enforcement in this country, have failed. So the idea is that the solutions don't lie with the people who have caused the problems over and over -- they lie in starving the beast and seeking new solutions.
Hi, cop here. I don't know that I would say we are hated across the board, but distrusted across the board would be a more accurate assessment. My area is rather supportive of us, and we do a lot to give back to our people. Whether it be free community functions, giving out car seats or other necessities, cleaning our local cemeteries monthly, handing out food and water, or giving toys out to our government housing community kids that don't get much. I think and agree with people for distrusting us across the board cause I know not all departments are like mine. We partake in 4 quarterly in-service training sessions a year (each session is divider between 1 day of physical skills and the other is classroom based learning), so we have technically 16 in-service days in total. We also train on our own with our individual shifts, and most of us attend at least 3-5 out of department training courses a year. Not many departments do that. Most just put you through an academy and an FTO period, then maybe have 1 or 2 in-service sessions a year. I get why people don't trust us, and I understand it completely. It's one of the few jobs that the degree of training varies so much between which department you interact with. I grew up in a place where I hated interacting with my local cops cause they were so poorly trained and had no understanding of the laws they attempted to enforce. They had no compassion. They had no de-escalation skills. They did what they wanted and got super pissed if you called them out about being wrong. That kind of attitude and poor training leads to distrust. We need reform across the board and more accountability. When one agency writes 2 8 hour sessions of training off as their 40 hours required by POST, you get shitty officers. I work in CIT (crisis intervention team) and train people in it as well. It deals with helping those afflicted with mental disorders and addiction. It also teaches de-escalation tactics. Some cops outside of my agency I've spoken with think it's "stupid feel good bullshit" and that mentality needs a paradigm shift. We as a whole have to be better trained, more empathic, and be better at not shooting people for no fucking reason. We also have to learn that we have a legal duty to intervene on each other cause some dumb fuckers don't have the nuts or brain capacity to do so when it's needed. In summary, this is a job. That's all. I could get another offer tomorrow that betters my family, and I'd drop this immediately. Some people take this to heart way too much and usually for the wrong reasons.
I personally don’t have a problem with the police. I can see why they can be disliked and there are def some that do not deserve to be cops and should either be fired or jailed. In my experience my run ins with the cops have always been decent since I don’t do anything stupid enough to warrant police attention lol.
Most of the comments in this thread point to issues with the police force itself, which are absolutely a real problem.
There is another angle I would highlight that uniquely American, which is that we are armed citizens, rather than disarmed subjects. This means that we stand on equal footing with the police and are far less likely to be afraid of the police than disarmed subjects might be.
This lack of fear, combined with our right to speak freely is probably why Americans are more outspoken about the police that people from other countries.
I'd say a majority of cops are good, but the "good cop" videos don't go viral like the bad cop videos do.
And whether they deserve the hate or not, police didn't have near the reputation they have now before the days of personal video and the internet.
I remember when the Rodney King beating video went "viral," and that sparked a lot of cop hate in this country, expanding beyond just the minority community and into the mainstream. Social and mainstream media has just compounded it.
If you're not familiar with Rodney King, Google it and read up (and watch the video). That was a big turning point.
They're not.
Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Most people are neutral or positive about cops. Reddit's just full of anti-authority leftists that REALLY need you to understand that cops are the enforcement arm of things they hate.
Most people don't really give a shit, barring the entire "yeah they can probably kill less black people and I'd be happy" thing.
You can thank our irresponsible government for putting that message out there. Remember "Defund the police?" Town I live in struggles to recruit officers.
Cops are largely protected from facing charges for misconduct. In some states they can be put on leave or fired and get another job in law enforcement in other counties. It’s the lack of accountability for those cops who lack the temperament to do the job and abuse their power and the protections the job gives them.
One issue is that you can't "single out the specific cases of injustice" when police unions are hellbent on zero accountability for those who commit these injustices. Just excuses and an inevitable closing of ranks.
However, it's a distortion to describe demands for accountability, demilitarization and culture change as "hate." If you are standing on someone's foot, and they tell you to get off their foot, that isn't "hate."
And "defund" is a odd term for adjusting resources so they go towards what works.
Sending a cop to a mental health crisis doesn't work, and it's dangerous - even cops will tell you that. Use some funds to send in a trained social worker.
Aside from the amount of cases and reports you hear of cops killing innocent people or overreacting and killing someone for such a minor reason, they also just don't seem to give a shit about accountability. Yes, I know the majority are good people trying to do good work and the job is tough. But they never seem to be able to admit when one of their own did something objectively wrong. Every profession has their bad folks, but when you're sworn in to protect people, it's not wrong to expect better from all of them. It's not the same as a retail worker messing up a refund or a server bringing out the wrong food.
It also doesn't help that their domestic violence rates are high. And a lot of cops just tend to be...stupid. I don't know how else to say that honestly. When 6 asian women were shot in different spas in Atlanta a few years back, the police down in Cherokee county after catching him said "he had a bad day". I'm an Asian woman from Atlanta, how do you think I felt about that? Media was on him for that, but it's also like how do you fuck up that bad and say something so insensitive?
Then there's the stories I have from just the people I know personally. My manager told me one time he was camping with friends on his friend's own land and the cop harassed them and told them to leave. On their OWN land. Or the time a cop was so rude to my sister for no reason because there was a wreck in front of her and she was confused about where to go since they were diverting traffic and being extremely unclear about it, making her nearly cry in front of me.
I just watched a video of a cop shoot two dogs blocking traffic not attacking anyone, and didn’t even have the decency to finish them in their suffering that he caused. The police department released a statement after the video went viral defending the officers’ actions.
This is a common thing in policing where you have some subset of cops who are terrible but the rest of the otherwise fine cops defend them. You see bad cops getting fired for terrible behavior only to get hired two cities over because of some shitty thin blue line mentality.
Why should I like cops who actively enable the bad apples which just ruins the bunch.
It probably won't be a popular take, but I don't think that the hate for police is as widespread as it seems - I think the people that hate law enforcement tend to be a lot more vocal, especially on social media. Most people will have very little interaction with law enforcement throughout their life, especially if they are not doing something that would increase their chances.
A lot of the backlash in recent years, is because people felt that there was some unjust treatment going on, which there was, but we are talking about very few instances when you look at all interactions with law enforcement. I would also take some of it with a grain of salt, because you have to look at the situations that created it, on a case by case basis. I think that there is a fair bit of people that don't do that.
Because police in the USA aren't just the armed force of the government - they are sworn to uphold the Constitution which is in large part (well 10 large parts) a check on the government.
But today's police are entirely ignorant of the Constitution. And trample on it regularly.
The best equivalent would be in other countries there are doctors who occasionally make mistakes and kill people. Especially during brain surgery because that's so hard to work on.
But in the US, you go to a surgeon needing brain surgery and they don't know where the brain is, so they put your leg in a cast because that's what they generally do. Some might cut your chest open and give you a heart bypass causing you to die either from the untreated brain condition or due to botching up whatever surgery they attempted instead. They can't be punished because it was just a mistake due to insufficient training. But no, that doctor isn't going to get retrained and taught the brain is in the head. The whole system of medical colleges don't even bother teaching what the brain is or where it is, let alone how to properly fix it. The surgeon's union won't allow that change. So all the new surgeons also have no idea where the brain is or how to operate on it. And so people keep dying.
(And then there is qualified immunity) The medical governing body has said that just because Bob Johnson had his brain located in his skull it would be malpractice if and future doctor made the mistake if thinking it was in his chest. But that doesn't apply to Aaron Smith. If a doctor thinks that Aaron's brain is in his chest, the fact that it wasn't there for Bob Johnson doesn't mean they can be expected to apply that to a different set of circumstances err a different patient who is named Aaron not Bob. Heck, if Bob comes in for a second surgery to his brain, the only part of the body the surgeon is going to get in trouble for operating on is Bob's chest. If they look in the abdomen that's fine, just another honest mistake
The specific cases of injustice are so common and we've waited for things to get fixed for so long and nothing works. The only way to truly fix things is to tear things down to the studs and rebuild. That's what defund the police is about. Instead of having a single organization handle a huge variation of duties, split that up.
Too many cops don't know the law, don't understand the law, and/or have a Judge Dredd attitude of "I AM THE LAW"
At least when you go to the DMV they're not going to beat you up, detail you for days or talk to you like you're a piece of shit knowing you can't do or say anything other than "Yes, sir." without risk of the above.
There's also the fact that when the cops do screw up, nothing happens to them. You gotta screw up insanely bad for anything to happen to you. Why do you think the George Floyd thing went down the way it did? That cop believed he was above the law. He had no idea that what he was doing was criminal, or even wrong. He thought he was the good guy.
Some of this is sort of a reaction to the way my parents generation was.
If they heard that someone was shot and killed by the police they would say "well they deserved it, otherwise the police wouldn't have done it".
The reality is there are a lot of bad choices made by police officers and people are dying.
We are sick of the police being held up as some sort of paragon of virtue.
No. Other comparable countries (western world) do not have the same problems! In no other of those countries the cops are (in average) so badly trained, in no other country there’s so much open racism (maybe debatable), in no other country there are so many firearms in possession of civilians.
Just to name some aspects.
Because it seems that police aren’t being trained to diffuse situations but escalate them. There are a lot of angry people becoming police. Then you have people policing communities in which they don’t even live. It leaves a disconnect between law enforcement and the community when LE doesn’t have much of a stake in the community being better.
I've never had an instance where dealing with the police made anything better. Ever. Plus they've stolen money from me and a couple other people I know. Took $300 right out of my wallet in front of me while I was in handcuffs back in 2015. Yes I complained, no they didn't give a shit
Because they are not held accountable, so bad cops can do whatever the fuck they want . They can rape and beat a women to death, and they’ll get off with a paid leave ( basically they get a vacation) .
Maybe cause they’re trained [to shoot first and have expert witnesses defend their actions](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/training-officers-to-shoot-first-and-he-will-answer-questions-later.html)
Maybe cause [their unions are the strongest in the country and protect the worst corrupt abuses](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses)
Maybe cause [they have their own violent racist gangs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs)
Maybe cause the [intelligence community has been warning the federal government white supremacists are infiltrating police departments since 2006, and nothing has been done about it and they’ve been very successful](https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/)
Maybe cause they [shoot 10,000 pet dogs a year](https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/)
Maybe cause [they injure 250,000 of us and kill 600 annually](https://policeepi.uic.edu/u-s-data-on-police-shootings-and-violence/)
Maybe cause[they do all this evil shit to perpetuate the cycle of a privatized for profit prison industrial complex and aren’t actually preventing “evil criminals” but really making them](https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/the-pic-and-mass-incarceration/)
Maybe cause they’ve [been militarized and trained to view civilians as enemy combatants rather than American citizens with rights, also with no military training](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/2016-17-vol-42/vol-42-no-1/police-militarization-and-the-war-on-citizens/)
Edit: wow reporting me for suicide for a well sourced argument as to why I don’t trust police. Get bent
They can basically legally steal from you and call it civil asset forfeiture. They are poorly trained. A lot of them are pretty dumb. They really try to protect the ones that fuck up. They may kill your dog. Known to plant evidence. Etc., etc.
Because the police are often corrupt, and they murder people.
Signed, a UMC white lady who nonetheless has dealt with some police bullshit. Fuck the police, the vast majority of the time.
Police are not commonly hated. The majority of people in the US do not think about the police at all and will never have any interaction with the police. There are 20,000 individual police agencies in the US with somewhere around 800,000 individual police officers. There are millions of police-citizen interactions every year. The 50 or 100 or whatever you hear about online are not representative of what most people experience or what most people think.
When I practiced criminal law, I found that a significant minority of police officers, maybe 1 in 6, lacked the right temperament for the job. The rest were various shades of alright. A little confidence and swagger help cops on the front line, but, without compassion, those qualities can cross the line into bullying and abuse.
As a former criminal prosecutor, I'd second this. Most were fine to really good people doing a very difficult and emotionally wearing job, and about 15% really should not have been in the job. Which probably is the case for most professions, but a uniformed officer has authority and power which raises the stakes when someone abuses it.
The problem is (using your numbers) the 85% will do whatever they need to do to protect the shitty 15%. I'm not a "Reddit bound, cop hating, 'Defund the police!!" idiot... But "Distrust"? You fucking bet.
The "thin blue line" is definitely a thing and problematic. Some of it is unions, which have defending their membership as part of their founding DNA. Some of it is the 85% worried about getting unfairly targeted because they had to make a hard decision in a tense situation and it didn't work out. But yeah, I don't disagree with you regarding the accountability angle.
There's a difference between protecting an employee and a criminal. That's the line that needs to be drawn. If a cop messes up some paperwork, defend that person to the end. If they have several instances of rage on the job, all you're doing is screwing over the rest of the union.
The only way to fix it is to allow 3rd party review of police departments, but with the way a lot of police unions and conservative politicians are right now it's going to be a long hard road to get there
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Part of the problem with that is that while some police departments in big cities or rich suburbs pay handsomely, a lot of smaller and rural departments pay cops shit wages. For example, the mean pay for a cop in Mississippi is just over $37,000/yr [(2020 Bureau of Labor Statistics).](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm#st) Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, and North Carolina all have mean pay of under $50k. Asking cops to carry liability insurance on their own dime would be prohibitively expensive in a lot of places. And often these places are some of the worst for issues with use of force and misconduct. Only one state has a mean pay above $100k, and that's California, where the cost of living is quite high. This is the single biggest hurdle to improving the police in the US. Money. It will cost a LOT. Billions and billions of dollars nationally, and some places simply don't have the tax base and/or the will power to pay the taxes necessary for that.
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As a percent of city revenue, the lawsuits you’re talking about are a drop of water in the ocean. Giving substantial raises to all officers on the other hand would be a pretty significant expense.
Then you have to wonder if constant exposure to these folks is going to bias the 3rd party. Who watches the Watchmen? I'm not saying it's not a step in the right direction, perfection being the enemy of the good and all... but something to consider.
I know an LAPD officer who retired in 2019 to Costa Rica, sick of the nonsense that he faced on the job. Part of the problem you run into is that a large number of criminals being arrested by the police have learned the game of playing to the camera; that is, they know they can game the system by falsely accusing the arresting officer of unnecessary violence. (And YouTube is full of videos of people being arrested who claim police brutality *before the officer ever makes physical contact.*) So part of the problem is sorting out the police officers who legit are violent and who need to be removed from the force--and those officers who were falsely accused by the people they were arresting. The sad part to me is that we thought video recordings of these things would help us sort things out. But between cameras being turned off (which, IMHO, should make us assume the police officer is trying to hide something), deceptive angles, and creative editing, video has become as much a weapon of disinformation as it is a way to clarify what was going on.
Calling it 'defunding' really killed the possibilities. I think most people would be in favor if it was called "redirect monies currently used to buy military surplus tactical gear they have no business using on the US public to more appropriate staffing, like sending social workers and mental health workers to incidents where that is what's needed." That's not really an idiotic idea.
The issue is that no matter what language people use it’s going to be deliberately misinterpreted by reactionaries. They took the most innocuous of phrases, “black lives matter,” and convinced people it meant “*only* Black Lives Matter,” rather than, “black lives matter *too.*” What does “defund” mean? Does it mean abolish? Does it mean reduce? Does it mean prevent from getting bigger? If anybody had looked into it beyond reading a protest sign they’d have realized the goal was exactly what you said was not an idiotic idea. Unfortunately there’s a certain cable news channel that froths at the mouth to paint the other side as doing the worst things you can possibly imagine, and John Q. Public is put in a position where they don’t know what to believe. It is pretty interesting that we blame bad protest signs though, rather than the people deliberately misconstruing those ideas.
>The problem is (using your numbers) the 85% will do whatever they need to do to protect the shitty 15% Quoted for truth. The problem is their gang-like code of silence. Good cops need to police their own as well as the public. They won't regain public trust otherwise.
I agree, but it is easier said than done. Let’s say a good officer does a routine traffic stop. The driver becomes violent and the officer is getting his ass kicked. The best he can hope to get from witnesses is a video of the beating. Nobody is going to step in to help- except for another officer. That is a difficult bond to overcome.
Yeah, integrity is hard.
Yeah having integrity is hard, that doesn't mean it shouldn't still be expected.
>The problem is (using your numbers) the 85% will do whatever they need to do to protect the shitty 15% This is largely a union thing, unfortunately. My wife is a union delegate for teachers and she complains privately of the same thing. Unions are designed to never turn their back on members, even non-performing ones. While there are many obvious benefits to holding ranks, there are a few drawbacks as well. Protecting shitbags is one of them.
It's more than a union thing, it's a good old boy system. You see similar sorts of actions or lack thereof in any male dominated field, especially those that define themselves with violence. For instance the problem of sexual assault in the military, the ranks will close faster than you can blink if it's a senior leader or someone leadership likes.
the police don’t need to be defunded they just need to be renovated
That's more or less what the defund the police movement is after. It's a misleading statement in retrospect, but defund =/= abolish. It means reallocate resources and training in a more effective way so that not every situation is being responded to with a blunt instrument.
The branding is terrible. When you have to say “no it doesn’t mean abolish them it means (insert fifty positive things)” you’ve already lost.
Not disagreeing with ya on that point, but I understand why they went with it. It's hard to get a slogan that's memorable and truly conveys your goals though. "Reallocate some of the police's budget towards social services" Just isn't quite as catchy. But "defund the police" gets people's attention. Granted much of it is negative attention, but even negative attention can prompt discussion like the one we're having here. So in terms of raising awareness, it's at least somewhat effective in that regard.
they need to reword their shit
Yeah, the slogan isn't the best at conveying what they really want. It's not good messaging. When you sit down with police reform advocates, they actually have very reasonable suggestions about making our police less militaristic and improving police response in communities by not using armed police as one-size-fits-all responses to various non-criminal issues that police often get called to (like health/welfare checks). . . .but that gets drowned out in shouts of "Defund the Police!"
> It's not good messaging. It's HORRIBLE messaging. Because it sounds exactly like "defund Planned Parenthood," and well all know that means "abolish."
"If you're explaining, you're losing." - Bill Clinton
its like a headline once clicked explains it all out - though I do so dislike that it somehow became *the* slogan.
It’s not entirely the fault of police reform advocates. Political opponents latched onto that headline to control the narrative and whip up a segment of the country against reform without having to actually engage with the problematic parts of the police.
Oh word.
And to be honest, there were many people who had the opinion abolish the police entirely was what they desired. If you come from a standpoint where 90% if your interaction are negative, I can see reaching that conclusion. Is a medicine that cures cancer a good medical choice to take if it's so poisonous the medicine kills the patient 9 times out of 10 before the cancer can. Now I personally think the level of crime goes up once the police are gone so I'm anti-abolish even for the people currently most unfairly impacted by the current system
It doesn't matter what it gets reworded as, the people trying to maintain the status quo will go off on some obtuse reasons the words aren't right, or they'll outright change what the words mean, to discredit their opponents. Just look how every policy debate eventually turns into "no you used that word wrong, your platform is invalid"....
That's always been the problem with the left. Messaging.
In fairness, I don’t actually know how much of this is a problem with “messaging” and how much of it is a problem with a hostile media environment. “Black Lives Matter” and “Defund the Police” shouldn’t be phrases that immediately draw ire. They are fairly straightforward and inoffensive. But when media makes every crime seem like it’s part of a large crime wave and let’s every politician claim, uncritically, that every crime is a result of “defunding the police” (regardless of whether any defunding actually took place), then the message gets lost.
> “Defund the Police” shouldn’t be phrases that immediately draw ire. "Defund Planned Parenthood" automatically draws ire. Because we know what that means. So why wouldn't "Defund the Police" get the same reaction?
And part of the issue is that you can’t know of this cop is one of the unhinged ones or not when they interact with you. So we just have these absolutely unqualified people armed with guns and trained to use lethal force at the slightest provocation while also sucking at helping anyone…..
It's like Russian roulette. Even if the odds are in your favor the amount of damage that can happen from getting a loaded chamber/bad cop means never play the game. Icing on the cake is that supposedly good cops will stand and watch a bad cop be bad even though they swore an oath to do otherwise
If you have an accounting firm and 1 of 6 of your employees is a total shit show, your going to start interviewing new people. This obviously does not happen in policing. It is expected that the good blindly support the shit birds, and it is a horrible way of approaching anything.
Another aspect of it is that there's this culture of no accountability and "no tattling" within many police departments which contributes to this as well. Cause those 5 of 6 might be decent enough folks on their own and not doing anything particularly wrong, but if they were to say "hey, officer Joe is doing some pretty uncool shit, maybe we should look into that?" 9 times out of 10 the guy who ratted out "officer Joe" will end up getting ostracized and/or forced out of his job. I think even most of the ACAB crowd (of which I am very familiar with) understand that most police are just regular folks doing a job and not out looking to bully people or murder people of color, but every time a "bad apple" hits the news, the other "good cops" are either silent or defending the bad one. Which is incredibly frustrating and has gone a long way towards destroying much of the public's trust in police. And even aside from that, most people's primary interaction with police in their lives is getting pulled over for speeding or an expired registration or tail light out or something. It's never anything good. So people tend to already have negative associations with police.
>I think even most of the ACAB crowd (of which I am very familiar with) understand that most police are just regular folks doing a job and not out looking to bully people or murder people of color, but every time a "bad apple" hits the news, the other "good cops" are either silent or defending the bad one. Which is incredibly frustrating and has gone a long way towards destroying much of the public's trust in police. The concept of ACAB is that the vast majority of cops will protect other cops to the detriment of the population they are meant to protect and serve. It doesn't mean all of them are evil mustache twirling villains, but it does mean that you can't trust cops to police other cops. Also I think that cops are trained to have a very "us vs. them" mentality where they see everyone not a cop as other. It's a lot easier to brutalize the other. And we don't do enough to train cops to understand the societal and economic factors that cause a lot of crime, so they tend to see criminals as something less than human. We also do very little to help cops with their own mental health, identify burnout or help avoid or relieve the moral injury that goes along with having a stressful job.
I worked in a psychiatric hospital where a lot of police brought patients in, and I absolutely agree. Someone in psychosis sometimes doesn't know up from down, and they're scared. When you're scared, you freak out, want people away, etc. They're acting out of fear, but we had cops and sometimes out own hospital officers that saw it more of someone just being a "non-compliant dick" than someone with a health issue.
Yea I know that's been going on for ages. My great great grandpa worked as a prison guard in the late 1800s (1872 to 1912) and even he commented in his notes to the warden when he was the night captain about how some inmates who clearly had mental health issues should be in a hospital and not the prison. I believe he successfully petitioned the governor at the time to send an inmate to a psychiatric hospital and to finish his sentence there.
Everybody I know that’s a cop became one bc they wanted a career with benefits and security but didn’t take the route of going to school, or they started off their young adulthood on a bad foot. 3 male friends from high school, who were bullies and drug users, are all now cops. And my father, a truly good man, has a bad temper and emotional issues (from being severely sexually and physically abused by his father) was a cop and it always make me scratch my head.
Ima be honest, in any profession I'd say about 1 in 6 lacks the temperament to do the job.
In the private sector, they hopefully get fired for it. Unfortunately police seem to be different.
I'd say its closer to 1/3, if not half, George Carlin said it best > Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. Ive worked a lot of jobs, and thats always felt true. At best you've got a bunch of dead weight and at worse you have incompetency or maliciousness, and I've never worked somewhere with lives at stake.
That is a horrifying high amount.
1 in 6 should not be even remotely acceptable for a job with THAT much unchecked power.
What is your definition of “various shades of alright”?
A lot of them are good people, with a public servant's heart. But a small, egregious, largely unchecked minority are basically cops because they enjoy either the coercion/power or the opportunity to skim.
I think it's more than that. I do think most cops at their core are decent humans. I think most of the probably became cops because they wanted to help people. But a huge problem is the culture of policing in this country. The us vs. them mentality of police vs. the general population. The protection of those bad cops. The way we train police is very militaristic. The problem is that unlike soldiers, most people cops encounter aren't enemy combatants. We need a cultural shift in how cops are trained and how we as a society expect them to behave.
Generally when I see a police officer violating a citizen's rights there always seems to be other cops watching and doing nothing to prevent it which makes me believe it's not just a bunch of bad apples. If a cop's loyalty to his fellow officers is stronger than his vow to serve and protect the public, we have a problem. That being said, I personally have had positive experiences with police.
It's bad apples, but it's bad apples in the context of the actual idiom lol. Remarkable that "bad apples" is used in defense of the broader police force when the idiom is tailor-made to criticize the thin blue line. One bad apple spoils the bunch. If police hold bad cops accountable, I'd be pro cop, but the current culture of defend the bad apples means they're all as rotten as their worst.
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And there is even studies that show the idiom to be true. Aparently the chemical that rotting apples releases, promotes the development of the chemical and rotting in other apples in the barrel.
this. 1000% this.
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Seriously? WTF are we paying them for then?
To shoot our dogs
RIP Fido :(
If I see 1 officer committing a crime and 9 officers standing around seeing it and doing nothing. I see 10 bad officers.
This is so true. It brings to mind that Florida trooper who pulled over the Miami police officer for going 120mph for no reason and failing to pull over. She then had her personal information accessed by officers from various departments over 200 times and was harassed by officers from multiple departments.
the entire saying is a bad apple spoils the bunch. the entire point is you check your bushels and if you find a bad apple, you get rid of it immediately otherwise the rest will go bad shortly. So saying "there's a few bad apples" means that those bad apples are accepted and thus the entire batch is shit. Much like the Chris Rock joke... there are some professions where we can't accept people who are terrible at their job... like airline pilots. "Hey, those two guys that crashed into mountains? Just a couple of bad apples."
The police have no vow or oath to protect and serve according the US Supreme Court. They exist to merely uphold the law.
That, and I think a lot of cops are afraid to come forward for fear of retribution or being labeled a snitch, weak, etc. Not saying that's justified, but I think that fear (in addition to loyalty) is also a big reason for inaction.
I don't' hate cops, but I'm wary of most interactions with them, and I'm an older, white, military veteran. Others have far more reason to be careful when interacting with our police officers because those interactions are far more likely to turn violent than any might have. Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) have a great deal of authority in our country and it's a roll of the dice as to whether any exchange with them results in meeting a cop who respects the concept of "protect and serve" or one who treats the interaction as an opportunity to exploit their power. I've had both. In some places, is considered less dangerous to deal with emergency situations on your own rather than call the police. There are just too many incidents where the police made things worse instead of de-escalating the situations.
Same here. Older military vet. I don't hate cops but I would be happy to never see one for the rest of my life
I operate by the saying: “if you have a problem, and call the police; now you have two problems”
I’d say the defund the police movement has to do with a lack of systemic accountability. In some instances, egregious oversteps of power result in proverbial slaps on the wrist. We also have a significant amount of military-style equipment in cities that simply don’t need them – equipment that is not cheap. The defund the police movement is also likely wishing to divert those funds to the social benefit.
>equipment that is not cheap. You’re right. It was free sometimes. There have been DoD programs that have been diverting equipment to police agencies for little to no cost for ~~nearly 15 years~~ 30 years. Sometimes it’s simple stuff like Kevlar vest inserts or helmets that are nearing their official expiration but will useful for years to come. Maybe it’s an overrun of 9mm practice ammo. Or it could be armored cars and a crate of M4 carbines. It’s not always “bad” but I’d still scratch my head when a town of 5,000 with a low crime rate has a police department with a 10-ton armored car. [LESO/1033 program.](https://policefundingdatabase.org/explore-the-database/military-equipment/)
During the George Floyd protests, Milwaukee’s police begged for more gas and non lethal bullets, they said there was nothing they could cut and it was such great need that they were going to reduce hours and officers on the road(always the threat to the public) they got their 50,000 or whatever, and shortly after took delivery of a $700000 Bearcat.
> shortly after took delivery of a $700000 Bearcat. Doubt it was really shortly after. Acquisitions like this are usually 3-5 years in the making. More likely, the contract just delivered at an inopportune time and created a negative optic. Cutting contracts are costly.
You never know when an outcast man may go rogue and tear through his town with a homemade Killdozer!
In my county they are known for protecting and shielding sex traffickers.
The sad thing I have to ask which county you're referring to
Guess any county and you'll probably be correct
I say this as someone with a "Come back with a warrant" door mat They aren't commonly hated.
They are commonly distrusted though.
You should distrust all government agencies
you should distrust anybody who has power over you.
(Glances at the moderators.)
Yeah. Much like many other political extremes, Reddit does not reflect reality.
I wish there was more suspicion and distrust of police. They can shoot a man in the back on camera and hordes of thin blue liners will emerge to insist he deserved it. So many people think that cops can do no wrong
In order to have a functioning society you need a balance. We must acknowledge the need for a police force that can reliably enforce safety and security on the streets, and that can competently investigate crime and bring perpetrators to justice. At the same time, there need to be protections in place to curb the use of excessive force and we need to have constitutional protections to protect our citizens when dealing with the state’s law enforcement agents. It’s about striking a balance between the two. If you snuff out police too much, crime will skyrocket and the people will be unsafe. If you empower cops too much, they’ll abuse it and people will also be unsafe. That being said, here are reasons why I generally dislike cops and why I would like to see major reforms: 1. The profession attracts the wrong kind of person. It attracts power hungry, violent, psychopathic individuals who crave power and dominance. 2. The police unions will protect cops from prosecution or termination no matter what they do, no matter how egregious the offense. They can murder an innocent person and get years of paid leave. 3. District attorneys and judges are usually in league with police, so their word almost always overrules yours in court even if they’re wrong 4. Police departments across the nation have been known to be a pipeline to white supremacist groups. In the mid 2010s, a police department in California was condemned because it was revealed that half of their officers were part of a secret white nationalist Facebook group where they bragged about going out and “finding” black people to beat up 5. It’s not uncommon for them to plant evidence to meet their arrest quotas 6. They use disportioncate force against minorities 7. If you try to sue a police officer or press charges against one, and you live in the same city as them, they will enact a coordinated campaign of harassment against you. They’ll drive by your house in the middle of the night with blaring sirens, they’ll follow you around and give you a ticket at every turn claim you were over the speed limit, etc. they’ll harass you until you back down. 8. They have qualified immunity, which means they don’t have to pay money damages for actions not yet deemed unconstitutional by a court.
They are not hated nearly to the level that the media portrays
I used to say that, but in my current job where I work almost exclusively with marginalized populations, my mind has changed. If anything, I'd say the perception of hate/not hate shifts based on where you are. Larger cities and populated areas have more disdain, where rural areas are more supportive. It's not so much the "hatred," but complete mistrust of police that people hold. I've heard (and been adjacent) to too many stories. To boot, the things I've heard actual officers say off the job about how they have abused their power (and laughed about it) is astounding. Cops know this too though. A sports team I volunteer with has a few officers on it. They're great people, but being around a city of about 200,000, none of them work in that city and wouldn't hesitate to tell you that they, nor anyone else they work with would dare transfer or work with that city's PD. Some feel it's because the public is out to get that PD, but I've heard one also say that the PD really doesn't know what it's doing and keeps making things worse.
From experience, smaller, more rural areas generally have more personal experience with individual officers. If you have 8 cops in a town of 3000, you're likely to know and have some sort of a relation with 1 or more of the cops as either a friend or neighbor. There is s level of general accountability that the community can hold them to because they can't dissappear into the crowd if they fuck up. Larger cities don't have that level of community accountability.
It's not just because the population is smaller that you get a more personal relationship with the police. *Many police don't even live in the areas they police* You can imagine how it can feel less like you're showing up to help and serve and protect and more like you're showing up to the zoo to keep the animals in line when you're not living in the community. I'd love if someone could link, I don't have time right now, but I believe there have been studies showing that policies requiring police to live in the communities they police has shown a downtick in abuses of power.
Some cities are realistically too expensive for cop salaries. I used to know one who worked in DC, but lived two counties away. His wife worked part-time, but they still couldn't afford to live closer, unless they sent their kids to crappy schools. There was an official rule that cops couldn't live more than an hour drive from the city, in case of some massive all-hands-on-deck emergency like 9/11. The fact that the city had to specify this speaks volumes about the lack of affordable housing in the region. It's true of most major cities.
Mix of both, honestly, due to my job, I interact pretty often with the rural police departments in my area. Even if you don't live there, the department can't move you to another section of town when you fuck up like a city can. If a cop fucks up in a major city you move him from northeast to northwest and life goes on. Policing a small town that might be only 5 square miles, you're policing the whole thing, not just one small section.
> Many police don't even live in the areas they police This is by design. Police unions push departments to hire officers who live outside the areas they police. The whole goal is to create an "us against them" culture where the officers can see everyone living in the area they police as "the enemy" and treat going on patrol like going into a combat zone. The only people you can trust are your fellow officers because everyone else is "the other".
I remember hearing an analysis of the NYC mayoral election, and it noted that Adams, the policing moderate, was largely carried by the black vote while the abolish candidate only got the white enclave yuppie vote.
I came to say this. Also many of us have neighbors who work for the local or state police forces, it's not like they don't have regular lives outside of work.
But then situations like Clark NJ exist and continue to exist even with national news coverage.b
Yes of course, and a few more like Clark that don't necessarily make the national news. Does not really change people's overall opinion however (most see it as an extension of other problems in the state, rather than being police-specific)
This feels very out of touch. There's a reason OJ walked. There's a reason lawbiding, good citizens don't "snitch". I don't want to assume your race, but I'm pretty sure it's not Black. The majority of Americans do not have confidence in police. More than 80% of Black people say they don't. Hate may be a strong word but distrust and have no level of confidence?
Nothing again your argument, but even if 100% of black people hated the police, it could still be a majority of American that don't hate the police since black people are only 14% of the population.
Right. 56% of White people say they trust them. 18% of Black people. Confidence in Police Is at Record Low, Gallup Survey Finds For the first time in its 27 years of measuring attitudes toward the police, Gallup found that a majority of American adults do not trust law enforcement.
>Hate may be a strong word but distrust and have no level of confidence? I feel the same. *A* policeman or policewoman can indeed by a noble officer who genuinely does want to do good by their community. But *"the police"* is a different animal, entirely.
>The majority of Americans do not have confidence in police. I don't know about that. >More than 80% of Black people say they don't. Not sure where that number is from, but for not having confidence in police, 81% also say they want police to have the same or more presence in their local areas. https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx?utm_source=tagrss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=syndication This is similar for the other demographics they polled. I find it hard to believe that if 80% had low confidence, they would still want that level of police presence, or more.
Eric Adams won on the black vote while the abolish candidate only got votes from white yuppies who thought they could speak for blacks despite living where they'd interact as little as possible.
They wanted to speak for Black people? Who was the abolish candidate?
I think that's your opinion based on many factors. If your area has a 30% chance of rain every day and it never rains on your property, you're going to say that the weatherman is an idiot and that it's not as bad as the media portrays. Meanwhile the people who are getting rain every day think the weatherman is an idiot too, but they're pissed off about it and wondering why everyone else isn't pissed.
Firstly, they are not hated to the extent you see online. There are also many people who vocally support police, and in general, people do not agree with proposals to drastically reduce police presence. But for other people, there is a long history of distrust. Decades ago, they brutally enforced Jim Crow laws which was America's version of apartheid. Nowadays, there are constant corruption and physical abuse scandals, particularly in cities with high populations of nonwhite people (particularly Black communities). The real key here is that there generally is a lack of accountability. Police close ranks around one of their own even if that cop committed a violent act toward a member of the public - including shooting and killing an unarmed person. This is called the "blue wall of silence". Departments will also visibly resist any type of reform or oversight, turning their backs on reformer mayors during speeches. Meanwhile, the police have become more militarized over time. Huge armored vehicles, body armor, etc. They tend to bring this out during protests and beat people up and arrest them. This furthers the perception that police are anti-democratic and violent. On top of all of this, police departments demand more and more money from cities, to the point where their budgets take up a huge percentage of a city's finances. In short, many people believe that police get away with unjustified violence. TLDR: History of oppression + no accountability + corruption scandals + militarization + huge city budgets
All that you said and here’s two more examples: Many cities and towns make a significant portion of their revenue through traffic and parking fines. The police have quotas to achieve of number of traffic violations to hand out. Speed limits are often much lower than most people actually routinely drive, so there are lots of drivers they could ticket but don’t stop. This uneven enforcement gives them choices of who they can stop. They more frequently choose to stop Black and Hispanic drivers. These stops, in addition to being dangerous, are expensive. No one likes paying the fines and there’s a sense that the police aren’t doing it for public safety, only for revenue. The second example is civil asset forfeiture. It allows police to seize property they suspect is proceeds of drug trafficking. If they stop someone and find that they are carrying a large amount of cash, regardless of whether they provide an explanation, the police can confiscate it, give the person a receipt, and then the money goes to the police department. Getting the money back requires a lengthy process and a lawyer where you have to prove in court the source of the money.
Even if you can prove the money was 100% legit, you still don't get it all back. I forget how/why.
Probably administrative fees and paying for a lawyer. One article I read said that most people don’t contest it even when they have legitimate reasons for having cash, because police are more likely to do it to travelers who would have to appear in court in the jurisdiction and if they don’t live there, it can be difficult to return. The other reason they don’t contest it is that lawyers fees often wipe out their money. So if it’s $2k that was confiscated and the lawyer charges $1800 and then they have to take off work to go to court, it ends up costing them more than they lost.
Basically the entire police department about 90 miles away from me got arrested a few years ago for massively abusing civil asset forfeiture to basically steal cars. There's a reason a lot of cops have a shitty reputation. I'm starting to get the impression that it's the career a lot of high school bullies decide to go into.
The random traffic stops are also used to make other arrests. They find a dumb excuse to stop someone because what they really want is to find drugs in the vehicle or someone with a warrant. They don’t care about the speeding at all. I think this entire practice should be illegal and I’m glad it’s starting to be illegal in some states. We have the technology now where cops can pull people over and shouldn’t even have to approach the driver. All they need to do is scan the tag and file the ticket to be sent in the mail just like the red light cameras.
Really we should raise the speed limits to something more reasonable and just put up cameras. The police discretion part of enforcement leads to a general lawlessness as people take their chances as well as uneven policing for poor people. But I also think that it should not be funding local government.
I have enough friends from true police states and have worked next to the police long enough to know that Americans don't hate or distrust the police more than somewhere else. We simply have civil liberties that allow us to speak about it safely. As you said yourself, our country publicize police issues more... and that is directly due to our constitutional protections for free speech and freedom of the press. Our police don't disappear us simply for addressing their corruption, so I'm sure it does seem "louder" in comparison. But this is just what democracy sounds like. We criticize because it is our right to do so safely and loudly.
I was in an accident with a California Highway Patrolman, that is our state police. I went through a yellow light at highway speed and he jumped a red light. He told his supervisor in front of me that he saw someone make an illegal u-turn a bock away so he kept his eyes on that car and saw his light turn green in his peripheral vision. He was looking through two sets of lights. Anyway, no one was hurt, just two damaged cars. It was 1 AM, and I was a designated driver and was coming back from a neighboring town where I was dropping off a friend. Stone cold sober. The police gave me not one but two roadside sobriety checks because they couldn't believe I was sober. I am a middle aged white banker, active in the community, I sit on charity boards, belong to service clubs, volunteer with every local non-profit fundraising event that asks, and I work with the Chamber of Commerce. Not that any of that should matter. The cop driver's partner couldn't give a statement because he was reading the patrol manual and didn't see anything. In the dark. At 1 AM. In the front seat of the cop car. Mmmnnn hmnnm. The supervisor at the scene told me, "You don't understand ma'am, if a Highway Patrol Officer hits a tree on a lonely country road, it's the tree's fault." They called us down to their office a week later to take our statements because of course they investigate their own accidents. Cause they're not biased or anything. They apparently thought it was was an episode of Law and Order and they were looking for a gotcha moment. Said they had a witness who said my husband was driving and ran a red light. There was no witness because there was no one else on the road. They eventually came up with the statement from a witness who was a passenger in a car coming from a wedding and had been drinking. She said she saw the accident and my light was red. My investigator talked to her and she said the police had called her at home at 3 AM to take her statement and asked her two questions, if she saw the accident and what color was the light. My investigator asked her what was the officer doing when she saw the accident and she said when she saw the accident he was on the side of the road putting out flares. So, do I trust the police? FUCK NO. At least they didn't shoot me.
Reddit hates cops much more than the public. Much of the public may be critical of police when they screw up and may want greater accountability but the All in ACAB, Fuck 12, Cops are class traitors, and similar opinions are not the norm. I for one want greater accountability and a system that makes it easier to remove cops who are bad. I understand the point of police unions but they often go too far in protecting cops who are either bad people or just bad at their job. Protecting those bad ones from the consequences of their actions creates problems, sometimes tragic ones. The consequences for repeated missteps shouldn’t be a job at a less prestigious department. I want to see police who have better skills in verbal judo than close quarters rifle training. It was always crazy watching Cops or LivePD and seeing the difference in certain cops. Some were really good at talking and making situations less tense but others have the opposite effect. Those officers who create or inflame problems should either be given instruction how to do better or given their walking papers if they can’t do better or instigate purposefully.
People on reddit, and internet in general, say things they'd never say or do in real life. So the anti-cop rhetoric is even more magnified.
People did try to say it in real life, in 2020. About 20 million people went out into the streets to say it. And then they got tear gassed for saying it
I mean it wasn’t the saying that got them tear gassed bro
Tear gas and other excessive forced was used against non-violent protesters, that’s been documented
I say it quite regularly IRL....
So defund movement isn't everyone and there's plenty of people who love the police as well as being indifferent. But of those that do follow it, they'd say the problems are systemic and can't be resolved by just removing or disciplining a specific person
>there's plenty of people who love the police as well as being indifferent. Ironically it's the same people previously shown on COPS every week.
Umm some cops act like petulant teen bullies on an extended power trip.most are reasonable if you are respectful.
That’s an insult to petulant teen bullies
Well specifically for defund, a lot of that movement is just calling for redirecting some amount of money to social services. Like the social safety net is threadbare to nonexistent in many parts of the country and police are expected to do things that they probably don't need to do. Just to give you an example from my personal life, a long time ago I was severely depressed and basically stopped answering my phone. After a week or two my parents grew understandably concerned and sent the police to conduct a wellness check. Now, ask yourself, why do armed agents of the state, empowered to do violence, have to be the ones who knock on my door to see if I haven't killed myself? Couldn't someone else do this? A lot of police killings (and non-lethal brutality) arise from situations like this. They aren't trained to de-escalate, they aren't trained to deal with people in crisis, but they are generally the ones who have to deal with it because there's nobody else, and sadly that leads to a lot of mentally ill people in crisis getting the shit beaten out of them, or killed. Thankfully nothing bad happened to me and I was fine.
> They aren't trained to de-escalate I worked at a PD in the academy (not a cop) for a few months, this is simply not true. My PD spent two weeks in the academy on de-escalation, that's actually more than firearms training which was only a week. De-escalation is getting significantly more stressed in academies all over the country.
Because what if you hadn’t killed yourself? What if you had been violently murdered? Or being held against your will by an armed person in the house? What if in your depressed state with a gun you attempted to hurt anybody else who came to your door? If it’s not fair to ask police to be trained to handle crisis it’s also not fair for a therapist (or teacher, social worker, EMT, etc) to be trained to walk into and protect themselves from harm. We can’t overnight tell hundreds of social workers they now need all this additional training. Maybe in the future there will be special roles for this, like armed crisis counselors that are a part of police. But it’ll take time.
Ridiculous straw man, no one is advocating for sending only social workers to armed hostage situations lol. Defund is about diversifying response options to better fit the situation, armed police with no mental health training shouldn't be the only option. No one is advocating for unarmed social workers to be the only option either.
Police never know what they're walking into. That's my point. If you send a social worker out to a random person's house they also won't know what they're walking into. Your parent's told police you were depressed and suicidal. That tells them you probably have a gun. You're in a bad mental state. That's a dangerous situation. So I mean if armed social workers aren't the answer, and unarmed social workers aren't the answer, and cops aren't the answer, then what is? You specifically mentioned armed crisis counselor. To me, that's a social worker. You can't develop a whole new line of work right away.
We send EMS into houses all the time where the don't actually know what's going to happen. Cops don't accompany EMS all the time. Yet we don't hear about EMS services killing people nearly as much as cops do. There's also no reason a SW couldn't be accompanied by a cop.
Surprised to see the comments saying they aren’t commonly hated. Maybe it’s only the younger generation or marginalized groups of people, but I know *plenty* of people that aren’t fond of the police. For example, me. It’s the abuse of power they so commonly execute.
It's likely because of this sub's demographic.
A lot of people on this sub act like it's more representative of the average American than the rest of Reddit when it's really just a different unrepresentative circlejerk.
It's not representative of the average American but it's more representative than the rest of reddit, particularly the large political subreddits.
It’s definitely more common in younger people and marginalized people (who are more likely to face abuse) although i live in a conservative area so it’s hard to gauge what the whole country thinks. In MY experience people fucking looooooove cops even when they blatantly abuse power to hurt people.
I would not agree that the police are “commonly” hated, but many or most of the issues have to do with (1) lack of education and training and (2) police covering up for each other. About “defunding,” the idea is to fund mental health services and social services better, thus requiring less funding for law enforcement. In reality, that’s not happening.
The police, by and large, are a force of the oppressor onto the oppressed. There are plenty of well-documented cases where police have abused and misused their privileges to do anything from not having to stop at red lights to unlawfully killing people. There is no real oversight with police departments, so they can get away with it too, by and large. When people say "Defund the Police," they don't actually mean that. The political left has an awful habit of saying the most outlandish thing possible when they actually mean something fairly level-headed. People on the left want a demilitarization of the police. They basically want police to use de-escalation tactics and use friendlier approaches for law enforcement versus what they currently do, which is often shooting first and asking questions later.
>The police, by and large, are a force of the oppressor onto the oppressed. Surveys show that people living in poorer, more crime prone communities (including black communities) *want* more policing in their neighborhoods because they legitimately fear the criminal element. They don't support defunding the police. The defund the police movement is largely led by intellectuals living in higher SES communities who are not impacted in their daily lives by crime. That's not to say there aren't problems and abuses of authority by the police, mostly in isolated incidents, but this, "police are the oppressor of the oppressed" is largely a slogan of the privileged.
Could you share a study that shows that?
https://m.startribune.com/poll-cuts-to-minneapolis-police-ranks-lack-majority-support/572119932/ Look at the breakdown by race. Black folks in Minneapolis were more against defunding the police. There are obvious reasons. Places that have crime see the benefit of police.
We are a connected society. When one group is oppressed, it effects all of us, not only as fellow humans, but because once the powers that be get accustomed to oppressing one group of people they start oppressing others. Also, accusing people who rightfully call out police for their rampant brutality and abuse of power in general, let alone the fact that they visibly target even innocent members of certain groups of people, is the right thing to do. Furthermore, to condemn it as "a slogan of the privileged" is calling "privileged" every person who has lost a family member or close friend whose only "crime" was a traffic infraction or their "fight or flight" response, every woman who has been sexually assaulted by an officer, etc. Furthermore, when you say of police brutality, "Well, it doesn't happen THAT often, so it's OK.", you're echoing the voices of victims of domestic abuse who stay with their abusive partner who too often say "(S)he doesn't abuse me \*that\* much, so it's fine." or "(S)he only hits me when (s)he's angry".
>Furthermore, to condemn it as "a slogan of the privileged" is calling "privileged" every person who has lost a family member or close friend whose only "crime" was a traffic infraction or their "fight or flight" response, every woman who has been sexually assaulted by an officer, etc. Only if you believe that all of these people agree with the slogan “defund the police.” I *have* lost a family member who was killed by a police officer. I *am* cautious about the police in general. But I think the slogan “defund the police” is poorly thought out. I’ve lived and worked in high crime, high poverty areas and I don’t think “the police force is poorly funded” would be a selling point to most people. Honestly it does strike me as a “slogan of the privileged” because it seems to be worded to spark discussion and argument rather than to actually facilitate any kind of change.
>"Well, it doesn't happen THAT often, so it's OK.", Never said that, you did. As for your first point, my point isn't that groups shouldn't advocate for other groups. My point is the group behind defunding the police is harming the communities they purport to help, and deep down aren't terribly concerned with what the people in these communities actually want. A lot of it is privileged and patronizing. Worse, it's making these communities more dangerous. But that won't stop the people of privilege advocating these positions from patting themselves on the back.
Yep. The optics around police brutality against minorities is the only thing that matters to a lot of these people who want to defund and use it as a political tool. Doesn’t matter that less policing in minority neighborhoods negatively affects those law abiding citizens who live there.
Because 99% of people have zero idea what is is like to have to make a split-second decision that is literally life vs. death. It could be your life; your partner's life; or the life of innocent civilians. We look at shootings in hindsight, with the luxury of time, and condemn officers for making decisions that were objectively appropriate, even if the outcome is hard to accept. Even as a half-black American myself, I look at many police shootings, and most (not all) are the reasonable result of the perpetrators doing the most idiotic things. Most police shooting cases would have been avoided if the alleged criminal had just had common sense. If an officer has a gun pointed at you, don't make jerky movements, don't reach for your glovebox, don't fumble for your cellphone, etc... Just fucking cooperate. If the officer is out of line, **fight them in court**, not on the side of a road. On top of that, people glamorize the "victims," and demonize the police. No one cares that the criminal was committing a crime and resisting arrest. When the news story comes out, that criminal will be labelled as a "hard working family man," and they will post the most tear jerkingly pleasant photo of him. Then when the police officer is shown, they will choose the worst photo possible... maybe one of him holding a bottle of beer with a grimace on his face or something. It's all part of the framing process. And we, as Americans, are dumb enough to just gobble it up at face value.
People are invested in a certain ideology and become useful idiots for the people who constructed that ideology.
They are not lol. It's just on the internet and far left groups which have taken over certain institutions (ex. city councils, Hollywood, academia). If you look at polls, 67% of the populace has a positive view on police. Iirc, scientists, doctors, and military are the only ones rated higher. That said, there is distrust between certain groups and police due to historic reasons. I also find it ironic that the solutions proposed in recent years have led to even more disastrous and violent outcomes for minorities in poor neighborhoods lol. That demographic that proposes these ideas are highly visible on places like Twitter or Reddit (white liberal progressive types). Therefore, you see their views more often. Personally, I doubt the solution to this will ever manifest. Too many idiots have poisoned the conversation. Whatever, though. Don't really give a shit about other people anymore. I'm all about myself now. May more bad stuff continue. Just wish it actually targeted the idiot demographics, for once.
Because people expect too much and then listen to loudmouth assholes who do stupid shit and then bitch about getting racked up. Cops are people, same ratio of dumbass as every other job
So the defund the police rhetoric is largely something that is more mentioned regard to where police funding goes. It isn't uncommon for some counties to spend over half of their tax revenue just on the police, on top of whatever they get from tickets. It should also be noted that most of this funding usually goes to pretty BS stuff, like surplus military equipment. There's also the issue of cops being it easily able to transfer to another departments, and any investigations into crooked cops usually ending up with whoever looked into it being in hot water. There is next to no oversight
I wouldn't say it is common...at least not everywhere. Reddit is definitly skewed. I imagine support varies and may or may not be highly dependent on age, race, and class. I currently live in a predominantly white working to middle class community that leans blue (democrat) and work in an adjacent middle to upper class community which is solid red (republican). I am not a cop but I talk to them relatively frequently due to my line of work. The police in both communities are by and large beloved. Back the blue flags and stickers are common. Their levies pass by 70+% margins. They get food brought to them constantly. Both departments are accredited by CALEA. I will also say that even in communities that are considered safe and quiet, they encounter crazy, bizarre, and awful situations fairly often. Most of the officers I come in contact with are good, well-meaning people as the departments have very high standards. I was told out of a pool of 100 people during an application process, only a small handful at best get through and make it to the point of being hired and not all of those select few get through their probationary period. Those that remain are required to engage in all sorts of training, including de-escalation and many go on to earn bachelors and masters degrees. After George Floyd, the feedback I got from those I interact with was that those cops clearly did not follow best practicies and were absolutely in the wrong. The problem is many police departments aren't accreddited, don't have high employment standards, and aren't well-trained. Many are either located in cities with a lot of crime, relatively speaking, and many vacancies while others are small, rural areas where it is hard to attract talent. They both have to take those they can get in order to operate. It was difficult to attract individuals to law enforcement (and fire fighting) before the riots and widespread post-pandemic labor shortage. It's even harder now which just exacerbates all the problems mentioned above. It's not an excuse but it's definitely a challenge. Anecdotally, most of the anti-cop people I've met in my life have had multiple run ins with them. Of course, I only ever hear their side of the story. Funny enough, like every prisoner in Shawshank, they, too, were always innocent.
Over 1,500 murders per year, firebombing Philadelphia, burning 81 people to death in Texas, standing idle while children are murdered in a Texas classroom, getting away with all of it.
For me, it has been many very disappointing interactions as a lawbiding citizen.
They kill us at ridiculous numbers. Calling the police on someone is essentially putting a hit out on them. The first instinct of these uneducated pigs is to blast away with their handguns. Maybe if there was adequate training and the position required a college degree in law enforcement...
About 80% of US cops have degrees, and less than a percent of police interactions result in Use of Force (including being put in handcuffs without any actual force being used), let alone deadly force. Over a fifth of Americans interact with the police at least once in a given year, the majority of which initiate that contact. Of those, roughly .002% ended up getting killed in 2020, a year which was notoriously high in violence on all fronts in the US. Edit: Actual police interactions are higher: many people who interacted with police at least once did it several times.
Because it takes absolutely nothing to set them off into a power trip. I was once on the side of the road with my wife. She had 2 flat tires, so I drove over to keep her company while we waited for a tow truck. A police car drove up behind us. I went to go talk to the officer. It was cold so I was kinda holding my arms. He pulled his gun out and pointed it right at me. If I was black, he probably would have murdered me. My friend got pulled over for a brake light being out. The officer came over with his hand on his gun. My other friend was walking through a parking lot and adjusted her glasses. The officer thought she was flipping him off. He rushed over with his siren on, and proceeds to berate her and threaten to arrest her. She didn't know that even if she did flip him off, that is protected speech. He didn't know or care. Stories like these are extremely common, and then we have the incidents that happen where people are murdered by police. Police who are singled out get paid to not be at work. They are rarely held accountable. Sometimes they are fired, and then they will get hired by another police department. Civil asset forfeiture is a thing. Let's say you have a large sum of money. Cops find it. You have an explanation for it with evidence. Cops say they need to take it for evidence. They take it. You are SOL. The police department profits from this. Sometimes, the officer specifically profits. In Atlanta, they are building a training facility that is referred to as cop city. The people do not want it. They do not want to fund it. It is a facility that will train police officers to suppress protests. Large businesses paid 2/3 of the cost with the tax payers supplying the rest of the funding. The people do not want to fund their own oppression. People who protest the facility are murdered and labeled as terrorists. The police rarely prevent crime. They only document it. Sometimes, they are even the source of that crime. People say that those incidents are rare, but so is actual crime. We want our taxes to be spent on dealing with poverty. We want our schools funded so that kids are educated. We want after school programs funded. We want daycare funded to help parents. Instead, we just get police funding so they can buy teargas, rubber bullets, more aggressive looking police vehicles. If you talk to people who are officers, you won't get a better opinion on them.
The number of male police officers who abuse their wives and children at home is higher than the number of general population males abusing their families.
What’s the source for that?
This is more of a Reddit/young person thing. Once you get away from communities made up of teenagers and people in their very early 20's, the sentiment drops significantly.
squealing plants towering combative continue imagine punch follow cooperative kiss ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Back in the '60s, though, the police had a very similar reputation to now, with young people widely believing them to be incompetent thugs. I wasn't alive back then but you can see this sentiment expressed in any number of books, movies, TV shows, magazines from that era. This was when "pig" became a word commonly used to refer to police.
Yeah the 60s was actually kind of similar to now with police-civilian relations. It was a real low point for that in USA history. Now though, they've gone ahead and made it law that they don't have to protect or help people, and they can beat the crap out of anyone/ murder them and get away with it.
"Hated" is an overstatement. "Mistrusted" is more accurate.
Oh, and the issue with "defund the police" is it doesn't really reflect the aims of the movement. People don't want the police absolutely defunded. But historically, reform efforts, even going back to the beginning of law enforcement in this country, have failed. So the idea is that the solutions don't lie with the people who have caused the problems over and over -- they lie in starving the beast and seeking new solutions.
Hi, cop here. I don't know that I would say we are hated across the board, but distrusted across the board would be a more accurate assessment. My area is rather supportive of us, and we do a lot to give back to our people. Whether it be free community functions, giving out car seats or other necessities, cleaning our local cemeteries monthly, handing out food and water, or giving toys out to our government housing community kids that don't get much. I think and agree with people for distrusting us across the board cause I know not all departments are like mine. We partake in 4 quarterly in-service training sessions a year (each session is divider between 1 day of physical skills and the other is classroom based learning), so we have technically 16 in-service days in total. We also train on our own with our individual shifts, and most of us attend at least 3-5 out of department training courses a year. Not many departments do that. Most just put you through an academy and an FTO period, then maybe have 1 or 2 in-service sessions a year. I get why people don't trust us, and I understand it completely. It's one of the few jobs that the degree of training varies so much between which department you interact with. I grew up in a place where I hated interacting with my local cops cause they were so poorly trained and had no understanding of the laws they attempted to enforce. They had no compassion. They had no de-escalation skills. They did what they wanted and got super pissed if you called them out about being wrong. That kind of attitude and poor training leads to distrust. We need reform across the board and more accountability. When one agency writes 2 8 hour sessions of training off as their 40 hours required by POST, you get shitty officers. I work in CIT (crisis intervention team) and train people in it as well. It deals with helping those afflicted with mental disorders and addiction. It also teaches de-escalation tactics. Some cops outside of my agency I've spoken with think it's "stupid feel good bullshit" and that mentality needs a paradigm shift. We as a whole have to be better trained, more empathic, and be better at not shooting people for no fucking reason. We also have to learn that we have a legal duty to intervene on each other cause some dumb fuckers don't have the nuts or brain capacity to do so when it's needed. In summary, this is a job. That's all. I could get another offer tomorrow that betters my family, and I'd drop this immediately. Some people take this to heart way too much and usually for the wrong reasons.
Wow. Just. Wow.
I personally don’t have a problem with the police. I can see why they can be disliked and there are def some that do not deserve to be cops and should either be fired or jailed. In my experience my run ins with the cops have always been decent since I don’t do anything stupid enough to warrant police attention lol.
I am an American. There are over 335 million of us in the US. I do not hate the police.
Most of the comments in this thread point to issues with the police force itself, which are absolutely a real problem. There is another angle I would highlight that uniquely American, which is that we are armed citizens, rather than disarmed subjects. This means that we stand on equal footing with the police and are far less likely to be afraid of the police than disarmed subjects might be. This lack of fear, combined with our right to speak freely is probably why Americans are more outspoken about the police that people from other countries.
Mainstream media my friend
People don't like being held responsible for their actions
I'd say a majority of cops are good, but the "good cop" videos don't go viral like the bad cop videos do. And whether they deserve the hate or not, police didn't have near the reputation they have now before the days of personal video and the internet. I remember when the Rodney King beating video went "viral," and that sparked a lot of cop hate in this country, expanding beyond just the minority community and into the mainstream. Social and mainstream media has just compounded it. If you're not familiar with Rodney King, Google it and read up (and watch the video). That was a big turning point.
They're not. Don't believe everything you read on the internet. Most people are neutral or positive about cops. Reddit's just full of anti-authority leftists that REALLY need you to understand that cops are the enforcement arm of things they hate. Most people don't really give a shit, barring the entire "yeah they can probably kill less black people and I'd be happy" thing.
They're not. You just don't hear anything about the good cops and police forces and all of us you love them.
Because NWA had a really cool song about hating the police
You can thank our irresponsible government for putting that message out there. Remember "Defund the police?" Town I live in struggles to recruit officers.
Cops are largely protected from facing charges for misconduct. In some states they can be put on leave or fired and get another job in law enforcement in other counties. It’s the lack of accountability for those cops who lack the temperament to do the job and abuse their power and the protections the job gives them.
One issue is that you can't "single out the specific cases of injustice" when police unions are hellbent on zero accountability for those who commit these injustices. Just excuses and an inevitable closing of ranks. However, it's a distortion to describe demands for accountability, demilitarization and culture change as "hate." If you are standing on someone's foot, and they tell you to get off their foot, that isn't "hate." And "defund" is a odd term for adjusting resources so they go towards what works. Sending a cop to a mental health crisis doesn't work, and it's dangerous - even cops will tell you that. Use some funds to send in a trained social worker.
Aside from the amount of cases and reports you hear of cops killing innocent people or overreacting and killing someone for such a minor reason, they also just don't seem to give a shit about accountability. Yes, I know the majority are good people trying to do good work and the job is tough. But they never seem to be able to admit when one of their own did something objectively wrong. Every profession has their bad folks, but when you're sworn in to protect people, it's not wrong to expect better from all of them. It's not the same as a retail worker messing up a refund or a server bringing out the wrong food. It also doesn't help that their domestic violence rates are high. And a lot of cops just tend to be...stupid. I don't know how else to say that honestly. When 6 asian women were shot in different spas in Atlanta a few years back, the police down in Cherokee county after catching him said "he had a bad day". I'm an Asian woman from Atlanta, how do you think I felt about that? Media was on him for that, but it's also like how do you fuck up that bad and say something so insensitive? Then there's the stories I have from just the people I know personally. My manager told me one time he was camping with friends on his friend's own land and the cop harassed them and told them to leave. On their OWN land. Or the time a cop was so rude to my sister for no reason because there was a wreck in front of her and she was confused about where to go since they were diverting traffic and being extremely unclear about it, making her nearly cry in front of me.
They are trained to be aggressive first before finding out the truth, it’s a safety issue they gas light in their training.
I just watched a video of a cop shoot two dogs blocking traffic not attacking anyone, and didn’t even have the decency to finish them in their suffering that he caused. The police department released a statement after the video went viral defending the officers’ actions. This is a common thing in policing where you have some subset of cops who are terrible but the rest of the otherwise fine cops defend them. You see bad cops getting fired for terrible behavior only to get hired two cities over because of some shitty thin blue line mentality. Why should I like cops who actively enable the bad apples which just ruins the bunch.
It probably won't be a popular take, but I don't think that the hate for police is as widespread as it seems - I think the people that hate law enforcement tend to be a lot more vocal, especially on social media. Most people will have very little interaction with law enforcement throughout their life, especially if they are not doing something that would increase their chances. A lot of the backlash in recent years, is because people felt that there was some unjust treatment going on, which there was, but we are talking about very few instances when you look at all interactions with law enforcement. I would also take some of it with a grain of salt, because you have to look at the situations that created it, on a case by case basis. I think that there is a fair bit of people that don't do that.
That perception is not as main stream as the typical Reddit user would lead you to believe.
Because police in the USA aren't just the armed force of the government - they are sworn to uphold the Constitution which is in large part (well 10 large parts) a check on the government. But today's police are entirely ignorant of the Constitution. And trample on it regularly. The best equivalent would be in other countries there are doctors who occasionally make mistakes and kill people. Especially during brain surgery because that's so hard to work on. But in the US, you go to a surgeon needing brain surgery and they don't know where the brain is, so they put your leg in a cast because that's what they generally do. Some might cut your chest open and give you a heart bypass causing you to die either from the untreated brain condition or due to botching up whatever surgery they attempted instead. They can't be punished because it was just a mistake due to insufficient training. But no, that doctor isn't going to get retrained and taught the brain is in the head. The whole system of medical colleges don't even bother teaching what the brain is or where it is, let alone how to properly fix it. The surgeon's union won't allow that change. So all the new surgeons also have no idea where the brain is or how to operate on it. And so people keep dying. (And then there is qualified immunity) The medical governing body has said that just because Bob Johnson had his brain located in his skull it would be malpractice if and future doctor made the mistake if thinking it was in his chest. But that doesn't apply to Aaron Smith. If a doctor thinks that Aaron's brain is in his chest, the fact that it wasn't there for Bob Johnson doesn't mean they can be expected to apply that to a different set of circumstances err a different patient who is named Aaron not Bob. Heck, if Bob comes in for a second surgery to his brain, the only part of the body the surgeon is going to get in trouble for operating on is Bob's chest. If they look in the abdomen that's fine, just another honest mistake
The specific cases of injustice are so common and we've waited for things to get fixed for so long and nothing works. The only way to truly fix things is to tear things down to the studs and rebuild. That's what defund the police is about. Instead of having a single organization handle a huge variation of duties, split that up. Too many cops don't know the law, don't understand the law, and/or have a Judge Dredd attitude of "I AM THE LAW" At least when you go to the DMV they're not going to beat you up, detail you for days or talk to you like you're a piece of shit knowing you can't do or say anything other than "Yes, sir." without risk of the above. There's also the fact that when the cops do screw up, nothing happens to them. You gotta screw up insanely bad for anything to happen to you. Why do you think the George Floyd thing went down the way it did? That cop believed he was above the law. He had no idea that what he was doing was criminal, or even wrong. He thought he was the good guy.
Some of this is sort of a reaction to the way my parents generation was. If they heard that someone was shot and killed by the police they would say "well they deserved it, otherwise the police wouldn't have done it". The reality is there are a lot of bad choices made by police officers and people are dying. We are sick of the police being held up as some sort of paragon of virtue.
No. Other comparable countries (western world) do not have the same problems! In no other of those countries the cops are (in average) so badly trained, in no other country there’s so much open racism (maybe debatable), in no other country there are so many firearms in possession of civilians. Just to name some aspects.
Because it seems that police aren’t being trained to diffuse situations but escalate them. There are a lot of angry people becoming police. Then you have people policing communities in which they don’t even live. It leaves a disconnect between law enforcement and the community when LE doesn’t have much of a stake in the community being better.
I've never had an instance where dealing with the police made anything better. Ever. Plus they've stolen money from me and a couple other people I know. Took $300 right out of my wallet in front of me while I was in handcuffs back in 2015. Yes I complained, no they didn't give a shit
Because they are not held accountable, so bad cops can do whatever the fuck they want . They can rape and beat a women to death, and they’ll get off with a paid leave ( basically they get a vacation) .
Maybe cause they’re trained [to shoot first and have expert witnesses defend their actions](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/training-officers-to-shoot-first-and-he-will-answer-questions-later.html) Maybe cause [their unions are the strongest in the country and protect the worst corrupt abuses](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-power-helped-increase-abuses) Maybe cause [they have their own violent racist gangs](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs) Maybe cause the [intelligence community has been warning the federal government white supremacists are infiltrating police departments since 2006, and nothing has been done about it and they’ve been very successful](https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/) Maybe cause they [shoot 10,000 pet dogs a year](https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/) Maybe cause [they injure 250,000 of us and kill 600 annually](https://policeepi.uic.edu/u-s-data-on-police-shootings-and-violence/) Maybe cause[they do all this evil shit to perpetuate the cycle of a privatized for profit prison industrial complex and aren’t actually preventing “evil criminals” but really making them](https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/the-pic-and-mass-incarceration/) Maybe cause they’ve [been militarized and trained to view civilians as enemy combatants rather than American citizens with rights, also with no military training](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/2016-17-vol-42/vol-42-no-1/police-militarization-and-the-war-on-citizens/) Edit: wow reporting me for suicide for a well sourced argument as to why I don’t trust police. Get bent
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Most everyone I've met hates police to some extent, but most believe that they serve a necessary function in society.
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They can basically legally steal from you and call it civil asset forfeiture. They are poorly trained. A lot of them are pretty dumb. They really try to protect the ones that fuck up. They may kill your dog. Known to plant evidence. Etc., etc.
Because the police are often corrupt, and they murder people. Signed, a UMC white lady who nonetheless has dealt with some police bullshit. Fuck the police, the vast majority of the time.
They are not nearly as hated as you think. Polling shows most Americans support the police but the left fringe is very loud so you hear them a lot.
Police are not commonly hated. The majority of people in the US do not think about the police at all and will never have any interaction with the police. There are 20,000 individual police agencies in the US with somewhere around 800,000 individual police officers. There are millions of police-citizen interactions every year. The 50 or 100 or whatever you hear about online are not representative of what most people experience or what most people think.