If You Are Mentally Ill, American Police Will Kill You

[Alyrium Denryle]

It looks like disarming a nation, in conjunction with increasing the size and scope of the social safety net, does actually make it safer then, far from what people whined loudly when I suggested that we disarm the citizens on the United States in the last gun crime thread.

Disarming the US population would not work.

1. It is illegal. Just. Flat. Out. Illegal. It is really hard to amend our constitution, and trying on that issue would be political suicide for anyone who tried. Not gonna happen, even if the policy could work.

2. The policy wont work. The gun-owning population is too large, we dont have national gun registration (so dont know who has guns) and any registration scheme would be political suicide for anyone who tried to get it passed.

3. Disarming the majority of the population will do nothing to stop those who are responsible for shooting at police. Those people tend to be criminals of the more dedicated variety. Gang members, drug smugglers, crazies with fortified compounds etc. While the average joe schmoe wont know where to get a black market gun (which is why gun control works to reduce gun homicide because most regular murders are done by Joe Schmoe who wants to commit insurance fraud by killing his wife/gets really pissed off and shoots his wife etc), the dedicated criminal element does. An Island is relatively easy to police. Smuggling guns into british ports is more difficult that sneaking a car load of guns across our extremely porous southern border. So in addition to the right wing nuts who wont turn over their guns, getting new smuggled guns in would be trivially easy. Like getting cocaine into the US easy.

In the UK, police are mostly unarmed. Which means they have to use other strategies to de-escalate a potentially lethal situation. That is good for them. Hell, it might work in the US, but the overall crime rate has to be brought down first, and that is going to take at least a generation after significant improvements to our social safety net.

So US police are fearful of 1-in-15,000 odds of being killed and this makes them over react?

That is per year, and their injury rate is a few orders of magnitude higher.

There is a feedback loop in action here. It is sort of like walking in the african savannah. If you hear a twig snap behind you, you might assume it is some harmless animal walking around like a gazelle or something, or you might assume it is a lion. If it is a gazelle and you react as if it is a lion, you might run and sprain your ankle, or freak out and embarass yourself, but you wont get mauled or killed. If you make the opposite mistake and assume gazelle when it is a lion, you are completely fucked.

So, given enough time and iteration, errors are going to be biased toward lion, because the cost of a fuckup is much less, plus these decisions have to be made quickly. Very quickly. While adrenaline is pumping through the system and fight or flight response is switched to On.

It is worth noting that of the 1000 people killed by police, from what I see there is no breakdown of how many of those people were actually dangerous.

One reform that could occur relatively easily is to stop using SWAT teams to execute search warrants. SWAT teams are trained for violence. They have itchy trigger fingers because they are trained to deal with people who are already known to be armed, and to breach locations where resistance is known to exist. Using them to execute a search warrant is like using an exocet missile to blow up a tin can. Another one are universal body cams. Cameras automatically cause de-escalation, because everyone knows they are being observed. Cops and suspects alike. Lastly, better training on dealing with the mentally ill and animals.

[Terralthra]

So far in 2015, nearly 100 people have been killed by police, many of them unarmed. Police firearm deaths stand at 1, a Mississippi gaming commission investigator shot, by accident, by another agent.

[Jub]

1. It is illegal. Just. Flat. Out. Illegal. It is really hard to amend our constitution, and trying on that issue would be political suicide for anyone who tried. Not gonna happen, even if the policy could work.

2. The policy wont work. The gun-owning population is too large, we dont have national gun registration (so dont know who has guns) and any registration scheme would be political suicide for anyone who tried to get it passed.

These first two show me that the US if fundamentally flawed and unwilling, or perhaps even incapable of changing to better itself. If there was a will to fix things no amount of law would stand in the way, so really this is hiding behind a paper shield and pretending it will stand up to a beating. I don't care that there is no will to do so now, it doesn't mean that it can't and shouldn't be attempted in a controlled and steady manner.

3. Disarming the majority of the population will do nothing to stop those who are responsible for shooting at police. Those people tend to be criminals of the more dedicated variety. Gang members, drug smugglers, crazies with fortified compounds etc.

I expect that you'll be providing stats to back this up.

While the average joe schmoe wont know where to get a black market gun (which is why gun control works to reduce gun homicide because most regular murders are done by Joe Schmoe who wants to commit insurance fraud by killing his wife/gets really pissed off and shoots his wife etc), the dedicated criminal element does.

This is the point. If the average person isn't armed to the current degree the police don't have to be as fearful of every stop ending in potentially lethal violence. This allows them to calm down and react rather than act.

An Island is relatively easy to police. Smuggling guns into british ports is more difficult that sneaking a car load of guns across our extremely porous southern border. So in addition to the right wing nuts who wont turn over their guns, getting new smuggled guns in would be trivially easy. Like getting cocaine into the US easy.

Indeed, but then you simply make gun crime far more punishable than crimes with other weapons and make it so that your average gang or cartel would rather not make themselves a police target by using guns. They're business and if using guns is bad for business they'll change methods.

In the UK, police are mostly unarmed. Which means they have to use other strategies to de-escalate a potentially lethal situation. That is good for them. Hell, it might work in the US, but the overall crime rate has to be brought down first, and that is going to take at least a generation after significant improvements to our social safety net.

You mean the already historically low rates of violent crime still aren't low enough? When will it ever be safe enough if not now?

That is per year, and their injury rate is a few orders of magnitude higher.

There is a feedback loop in action here. It is sort of like walking in the african savannah. If you hear a twig snap behind you, you might assume it is some harmless animal walking around like a gazelle or something, or you might assume it is a lion. If it is a gazelle and you react as if it is a lion, you might run and sprain your ankle, or freak out and embarass yourself, but you wont get mauled or killed. If you make the opposite mistake and assume gazelle when it is a lion, you are completely fucked.

So, given enough time and iteration, errors are going to be biased toward lion, because the cost of a fuckup is much less, plus these decisions have to be made quickly. Very quickly. While adrenaline is pumping through the system and fight or flight response is switched to On.

Funny that we must train soldiers to kill and police not to. It seems like we need more potential soldiers as cops and less cops as anything that deals with violent high stress situations.

It is worth noting that of the 1000 people killed by police, from what I see there is no breakdown of how many of those people were actually dangerous.

I doubt such numbers exist and even if they did how can we trust the police to be accurate in reporting these things with their complete unwillingness to open themselves up to the public.

One reform that could occur relatively easily is to stop using SWAT teams to execute search warrants. SWAT teams are trained for violence. They have itchy trigger fingers because they are trained to deal with people who are already known to be armed, and to breach locations where resistance is known to exist. Using them to execute a search warrant is like using an exocet missile to blow up a tin can. Another one are universal body cams. Cameras automatically cause de-escalation, because everyone knows they are being observed. Cops and suspects alike. Lastly, better training on dealing with the mentally ill and animals.

I agree with all of the above.

[Joun_Lord]

For example, in the UK the majority of their police are unarmed. The UK has a population of 64 million but only has 6,653 authorized firearm officers and they only responded to 12,550 operations which firearms were authorized. So, it's not that surprising that they would have far fewer instances of police use of deadly force.

It looks like disarming a nation, in conjunction with increasing the size and scope of the social safety net, does actually make it safer then, far from what people whined loudly when I suggested that we disarm the citizens on the United States in the last gun crime thread.

I am going to whine loudly about this suggestion.

Gun crime is not the problem. Gun crime is a symptom of a problem. There are Euro-commie countries like Switzerland and Finland that are almost as heavily armed as Murricans and cops don't go around blowing people away, people don't go around blowing people away, and gun crime is almost non-existent.

Now it might just be that Europeons are more evolved then boorish Americans, have larger penises so don't need to use penis compensators to compensate for their penises or just are all such lousy shots nobody dies but more likely the fact they have low unemployment rates (the Swiss in particular), healthy social safety nets, and just have far lower crime rates.

The problem in the US is parts of the country like inner shitties and white trash redneckvilles are quite literally 3rd world countries with all the crime, drugs, lack of employment, and lack of services that one would normally expect from a shithole 3rd world country. Much of American ain't that bad though, I think per capita of crime per 1000 peoples we don't even break the top 20. Also there is Florida which I don't think is violent so much as just fucking weird as fuck.

The lack of opportunity, hope, money, and education creates crime. Lack of mental health services (and a massive social stigma) create untreated dangerous mentally ill individuals. Taking ur gunz would not change this.

And frankly punishing people because cops want to blast people is insulting and I'm insulted if you are insulted by my being insulted. Thats a bit like saying rape victims are at fault for being raped for wearing short skirts, Americans are to fault for being shot for owning guns. Cops are the ones who need to change so as to not kill fuck loads of wankers every year while carrying Wii-motes, pocket knives, and invisible weapons (the deadliest of weapons).

The "shoot first, try to confiscate cameras second and ask questions only after a community outcry" attitude needs to fucking change. Also I need some change, I gotta ride the bus tomorrow. Cops are supposed to save lives, not put down motherfuckers.

Which is I think an attitude problem with alot of cops. They don't seem to be policing so much as soldiering or punishing. They aren't solving crime, keeping neighborhoods safe, and saving lives. They are punishing people, fighting crime, fighting criminals, at war with crime, us vs them, and alot of bitches get hurt, killed or worse of all stuck in prison. There is no want to rehabilitate, prison is just to punish, criminals are just bad guys and thats it, not people that fucked up and need help, people that at best should be stuck in a mentally and physically hellish facility ran by high school bullies and gangs or killed.

Social change needs enacted, not gun bans. Cops need retraining to be goddamn cops again and not soldiers in combat or executioners with sidearms, not punish their victims and potential victims. Wii-motes and pocket knives don't need banned, cops need to show a smidgeon of restraint. People need help, hope, and maybe some shit to do other then making meth, robbing houses, and fucking, not treated like criminals forever more.

[Jub]

I am going to whine loudly about this suggestion.

Gun crime is not the problem. Gun crime is a symptom of a problem. There are Euro-commie countries like Switzerland and Finland that are almost as heavily armed as Murricans and cops don't go around blowing people away, people don't go around blowing people away, and gun crime is almost non-existent.

Now it might just be that Europeons are more evolved then boorish Americans, have larger penises so don't need to use penis compensators to compensate for their penises or just are all such lousy shots nobody dies but more likely the fact they have low unemployment rates (the Swiss in particular), healthy social safety nets, and just have far lower crime rates.

The problem in the US is parts of the country like inner shitties and white trash redneckvilles are quite literally 3rd world countries with all the crime, drugs, lack of employment, and lack of services that one would normally expect from a shithole 3rd world country. Much of American ain't that bad though, I think per capita of crime per 1000 peoples we don't even break the top 20. Also there is Florida which I don't think is violent so much as just fucking weird as fuck.

The lack of opportunity, hope, money, and education creates crime. Lack of mental health services (and a massive social stigma) create untreated dangerous mentally ill individuals. Taking ur gunz would not change this.

My point is that the US and its citizens aren't mature enough to have weapons. Until they fix their social issues they shouldn't be armed. It's that simple. We don't give guns to children and the US is acting the part of a petulant child refusing to behave better yet insisting they be given all the privileges of adulthood.

Which is I think an attitude problem with alot of cops. They don't seem to be policing so much as soldiering or punishing. They aren't solving crime, keeping neighborhoods safe, and saving lives. They are punishing people, fighting crime, fighting criminals, at war with crime, us vs them, and alot of bitches get hurt, killed or worse of all stuck in prison. There is no want to rehabilitate, prison is just to punish, criminals are just bad guys and thats it, not people that fucked up and need help, people that at best should be stuck in a mentally and physically hellish facility ran by high school bullies and gangs or killed.

Social change needs enacted, not gun bans. Cops need retraining to be goddamn cops again and not soldiers in combat or executioners with sidearms, not punish their victims and potential victims. Wii-motes and pocket knives don't need banned, cops need to show a smidgeon of restraint. People need help, hope, and maybe some shit to do other then making meth, robbing houses, and fucking, not treated like criminals forever more.

I agree, but you should do both. This isn't an either or situation.

[Flagg]

Since guns are a complete nonstarter due to America and our founders being total maniacs. The next best option IMO that hasn't been suggested (that I've seen) are CCTV cameras everywhere like in the UK. With cops wearing cameras, citizens carrying cameras, cruisers with cameras, and finally a CCTV blanket, you have so much more opportunity to catch these incidents on camera and a lot harder for either party to spin shit their way.

[Joun_Lord]

I am going to whine loudly about this suggestion.

Gun crime is not the problem. Gun crime is a symptom of a problem. There are Euro-commie countries like Switzerland and Finland that are almost as heavily armed as Murricans and cops don't go around blowing people away, people don't go around blowing people away, and gun crime is almost non-existent.

Now it might just be that Europeons are more evolved then boorish Americans, have larger penises so don't need to use penis compensators to compensate for their penises or just are all such lousy shots nobody dies but more likely the fact they have low unemployment rates (the Swiss in particular), healthy social safety nets, and just have far lower crime rates.

The problem in the US is parts of the country like inner shitties and white trash redneckvilles are quite literally 3rd world countries with all the crime, drugs, lack of employment, and lack of services that one would normally expect from a shithole 3rd world country. Much of American ain't that bad though, I think per capita of crime per 1000 peoples we don't even break the top 20. Also there is Florida which I don't think is violent so much as just fucking weird as fuck.

The lack of opportunity, hope, money, and education creates crime. Lack of mental health services (and a massive social stigma) create untreated dangerous mentally ill individuals. Taking ur gunz would not change this.

My point is that the US and its citizens aren't mature enough to have weapons. Until they fix their social issues they shouldn't be armed. It's that simple. We don't give guns to children and the US is acting the part of a petulant child refusing to behave better yet insisting they be given all the privileges of adulthood.

A very small minority of its citizens and police are immature when it comes to wepons. Crime isn't so bad anymore anyway, certainly no where near the levels of the past by a long shot, and disarming doesn't disarm those few who have shown a willingness to abuse arms made of fire. You don't (usually) punish a whole group of people for the actions of a few, atleast you shouldn't you evil person that punishes whole groups, yes you personally do that, I know I was there! If one person in your neighborhood locks someone up Ariel Castro style, abuses their doorlocks, you wouldn't advocate dislocking everyone in your neighborhood would you?

Plus disarming Americans not only means they can no longer hold things but also creates a whole set of other problems while doing little to solve the problems that would make disarming attractive to some. The guns aren't the problem, their misuse is a symptom of a larger problem.

Which is I think an attitude problem with alot of cops. They don't seem to be policing so much as soldiering or punishing. They aren't solving crime, keeping neighborhoods safe, and saving lives. They are punishing people, fighting crime, fighting criminals, at war with crime, us vs them, and alot of bitches get hurt, killed or worse of all stuck in prison. There is no want to rehabilitate, prison is just to punish, criminals are just bad guys and thats it, not people that fucked up and need help, people that at best should be stuck in a mentally and physically hellish facility ran by high school bullies and gangs or killed.

Social change needs enacted, not gun bans. Cops need retraining to be goddamn cops again and not soldiers in combat or executioners with sidearms, not punish their victims and potential victims. Wii-motes and pocket knives don't need banned, cops need to show a smidgeon of restraint. People need help, hope, and maybe some shit to do other then making meth, robbing houses, and fucking, not treated like criminals forever more.

I agree, but you should do both. This isn't an either or situation.[/quote]

For many it is an either or situation and the complete intractability of both sides of the gun debate is something that grinds my gears but thats neither here nor there. A gun ban would do little to help things, thus not much of a point to do it beyond satisfying Euro-commies afraid of Americunts guns or believing Americans are too childish to own guns or whatever their reason for hating the Murrican right to arm bears and Liberal commies afraid of the inanimate lumps of metal wielded by peons or whatever reason they hate guns for everyone but their bodyguards. Far better to focus on things that would actually create positive solutions, wouldn't alienate a buttload of people, and will still allow small dicked rednecks to not feel so tiny downstairs. So small. Poor Cletus.

And again criminalizing law abiding citizens and blaming victims of gun violence by punishing them is certainly no way to go about things.

[Kamakazie Sith]

I dunno, I just think what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Even though mental illness is in many cases something you are born with, it's true that many, maybe most school shooters seem to have some mental illness. So if someone who isn't fond of people with mental illnesses due to incidents like school shootings and decided to post a hyperbolic and incendiary title that is literally true... I can't say I would like it, but the world is as it is.

I think the world isn't made better by such titles so they should be avoided. Such things don't create discussion they create hate.

It looks like disarming a nation, in conjunction with increasing the size and scope of the social safety net, does actually make it safer then, far from what people whined loudly when I suggested that we disarm the citizens on the United States in the last gun crime thread.

While I agree with you I also agree with Alyrium that such an idea is political suicide and next to impossible. Every time something terrible happens any potential progress is immediately sabotaged by all the calls for gun restrictions. It would be nice if for just once we focused on improving social services.

So US police are fearful of 1-in-15,000 odds of being killed and this makes them over react? The police in the US gun down far more people each year than they're even remotely at risk of losing themselves.

I guess you missed the part where I said over 2000 police were assaulted with firearms alone with a total of 10,000 cops being attacked with deadly weapons. So, when you say "police in the US gun down far more people each year then they're remotely at risk of losing themselves" it makes me think you just skimmed over my post without actually reading it. Hell, even if you only allow for instances of police injured by these attacks with deadly weapons you end up with 1500 per year which puts them over number that are shot and killed by police.

When people start quoting odds for how likely it is for a police officer to be killed that makes me just want to quote the odds for anybody to be killed by police. Hell, you only have a 10% chance of being shot and killed if you assault a police officer with a deadly weapon. The chances of you being shot and killed by a US cop when not trying to seriously injure or kill them is 1 in 40,000. So, I'm suppose to believe that US police violence is an out of control problem with odds like that?

Can we really say that a significant percentage more police would be dead if they didn't kill anybody? Even if it was one dead officer per 10 of those thousand people killed, I'd take ~150 dead US cops yearly an 1-in-5,333 odds of them being killed in the line of duty over innocent people and animals killed and maimed by the police. Citizens don't have the expectation of danger that police officers have and the US police need to accept less safety in order to better protect those that they should 'protect and serve'.

I think you would significantly lower instances of civilians being shot and killed by police under controversial situations if you stress compliance with a police officer and at the same time you can value the lives of police officers that have families and people that depend on them and their income.

Police officers are taught and accept the risk of putting the lives of innocent people before their own. We never agreed to put our lives before those people engaged in dangerous or criminal behavior. When you're not complying with simply instructions such as; sit down, put your hands up, drop the weapon, don't move; your actual intentions become very suspect because actual reasonable people are able to easily comply with such instructions. So, complying with those instructions is far easier than reading the minds of those that aren't complying, being able to know what is concealed within their clothing and see if they are armed, and beat action versus reaction.

Here's a video to help demonstrate this. This is starting to be a trend. The last activist came to the same conclusion.

Source

[Thanas]

The chances of you being shot and killed by a US cop when not trying to seriously injure or kill them is 1 in 40,000.

Quick question - is that a general risk of being injured or killed by police or the risk of people who entered into contact with the police?

[Kamakazie Sith]

The chances of you being shot and killed by a US cop when not trying to seriously injure or kill them is 1 in 40,000.

Quick question - is that a general risk of being injured or killed by police or the risk of people who entered into contact with the police?

I took the number of police/citizen contacts (40,000,000) and divided it by the number of police shootings in the United States (approximately probably over 1000).

See Table 1 2008

EDIT - Interesting figure I noticed. Out of those 40,000,000 police/citizen contacts in 2008 only 1.4% resulted in the threatened or actual use of force.

[Thanas]

Thanks, that clears it up.

[Jub]

While I agree with you I also agree with Alyrium that such an idea is political suicide and next to impossible. Every time something terrible happens any potential progress is immediately sabotaged by all the calls for gun restrictions. It would be nice if for just once we focused on improving social services.

Fixing social services would be an excellent and admirable start, but I still wonder if reducing gun ownership as played up as a way to keep the heroic police safer might play okay in some political circles.

I guess you missed the part where I said over 2000 police were assaulted with firearms alone with a total of 10,000 cops being attacked with deadly weapons. So, when you say "police in the US gun down far more people each year then they're remotely at risk of losing themselves" it makes me think you just skimmed over my post without actually reading it. Hell, even if you only allow for instances of police injured by these attacks with deadly weapons you end up with 1500 per year which puts them over number that are shot and killed by police.

When people start quoting odds for how likely it is for a police officer to be killed that makes me just want to quote the odds for anybody to be killed by police. Hell, you only have a 10% chance of being shot and killed if you assault a police officer with a deadly weapon. The chances of you being shot and killed by a US cop when not trying to seriously injure or kill them is 1 in 40,000. So, I'm suppose to believe that US police violence is an out of control problem with odds like that?

I was specifically comparing deaths to deaths, if we look at those handled by police in a way that would be deemed assault if not for the badge the numbers start to tilt back away from the favor of the police again. In any case, when compared with police in other nations with comparable wealth per capita, population density, and crime rates the US doesn't come off especially well but even I'll admit that there are factors at play here that mean it isn't US cops bad, other cops good.

I think you would significantly lower instances of civilians being shot and killed by police under controversial situations if you stress compliance with a police officer and at the same time you can value the lives of police officers that have families and people that depend on them and their income.

Expecting compliance from the drunk, the high, and the mentally ill isn't realistic. Hell we've seen cases where a person just insisting the police explain the situation to them in a vigorous fashion was treated as a threat, so I don't think citizens should have to bow down to cops. That's not how it works in most other western nations. I don't have to fear the police in Canada and rigidly follow strict protocols with them because they're more reasonable and less twitchy. In the US I'd be afraid to seek out an officer for help given the horror stories.

Police officers are taught and accept the risk of putting the lives of innocent people before their own. We never agreed to put our lives before those people engaged in dangerous or criminal behavior. When you're not complying with simply instructions such as; sit down, put your hands up, drop the weapon, don't move; your actual intentions become very suspect because actual reasonable people are able to easily comply with such instructions. So, complying with those instructions is far easier than reading the minds of those that aren't complying, being able to know what is concealed within their clothing and see if they are armed, and beat action versus reaction.

Unless I've been doing nothing wrong and the police stop me. I could easily turn to ask a question instead of immediately complying and that should be allowed. Unless I'm an immediate threat police should not be ordering me to the ground and to keep my hands where they can see them, they should be asking me if I'd be willing to stop and speak with them and evaluating things based on my response. Given that most of the people an officer will deal with are innocent expecting complete control over a situation and demanding 10% compliance with anything you say is stupid. Expecting compliance with demands that degrade an innocent person is not something that I feel should be expected or encouraged by a police force working in a free society.

Here's a video to help demonstrate this. This is starting to be a trend. The last activist came to the same conclusion.

Source

I don't disagree that in a single officer situations escalation can be needed, but that just means you need two officers per car and that the doors on squad cars should stand up to handgun fire so police can use them as cover thus allowing them more time to think. Greater compliance would also be helpful, but again shouldn't be expected and should be trained for.

[Elheru Aran]

A quick note:

3. Disarming the majority of the population will do nothing to stop those who are responsible for shooting at police. Those people tend to be criminals of the more dedicated variety. Gang members, drug smugglers, crazies with fortified compounds etc.

I expect that you'll be providing stats to back this up.

I don't have stats on hand, but it should be noted that there are effectively *two* main groups of gun owners (perhaps arguably an intermediate group as well) in the US: responsible gun owners, and criminals (with gun owners having criminal tendencies falling in between, see Bundy Ranch and so forth). Repressing guns to the extent of criminalizing gun ownership would make criminals of a large body of the population who are largely law-abiding and (usually) responsible in their handling and use of firearms. That is not a good situation to have on your hands and, in the US, would be all too likely to bite you on the ass. Hard.

[Simon_Jester]

The other is "Because of the way the US operates, it is actually rather likely for police to run into mentally unstable, armed people who are genuinely dangerous." Dealing with such people without killing them requires special training (and money), and limiting the number of such people requires institutions (and money) dedicated to doing so.

So you're saying that the training to prevent people being killed in these situations costs some large amount of both time and money. I'm going to need you to show that Britain or Germany spend that much more than the US per officer on training.

I'm not arguing that it would cost more than the US now spends. I'm arguing that it requires prioritization.

Police are going to try to spend money on whatever they get money to do, and whatever their political masters tell them to do.

Imagine if the politicians decide to defund welfare and use the police to raid the resulting crack houses. Then the police are going to need to gear up with heavy weapons and assault tactics. Because frankly, if you're going after a crack house you need those.

Conversely, imagine if the politicians decide that it's better to reduce overall crime by building strong, healthy relationships with unstable communities, being helpful to the people in those areas, and generally winning hearts and minds. Suddenly, large reserves of money are opened up to fund crisis-defusing training and nonlethal weapons, while much less is being used to push the lethalization and militarization of the police.

In America, we have big federal grants for the War on Drugs and War on Terror... which police are best positioned to earn by being big, bad, ballsy, heavily armed SWAT types. We have a huge sector of the population which has no sympathy for the rights or dignity of the 'underclass' whatsoever, and will almost automatically try to vote down any politician which does have such sympathy.

It's a problem, and a major obstacle to reform that has nothing to do with the corruption and attitude problems of individual police departments.

And you can say "that's the 'just following orders' defense." Thing is, it really isn't. Civil servants and law enforcement and bureaucracies in a democratic society are supposed to do as they are told by elected politicians. That's part of the point- the police are ultimately accountable to people who are in turn nominally accountable to the voters.

If the politicians decide to make it easy to fund SWAT teams to go after drug dealers and imaginary terrorists, and hard to fund "how to peacefully defuse situation" training, then the police aren't given a realistic choice to ignore the SWAT team operations and focus on peacefully defusing situations.

Then perhaps these police forces should be open and honest about why they can't perform their jobs better rather than becoming more withdrawn from the public eye.

It is also not the place of civil servants and public employees to publicly condemn elected officials that are their bosses and set policy agendas.

Generally, when a police chief comes out on the record as saying "this elected politician's actions are stupid," that police chief is going to be in very serious professional trouble and may have just sunk their career. And there are good reasons for that- again, you really don't want the bureaucracy becoming insubordinate to the political leadership.

The drawback is, of course, that it encourages the people running police departments to be even more amenable to militarization, gives them little choice in any event, and does nothing to restrain politicians who want to make things worse for ideological reasons.

...

In the year 2012, 48 US cops were killed by firearms and 5 were stabbed. Those fatalities resulted from just over 2000 instances of US police being attacked with firearms and in total a bit over 10,000 were attacked with what is considered deadly force. US cops have killed approximately 1000 people in the same year. Please feel free to post similar statistics for the UK.

So US police are fearful of 1-in-15,000 odds of being killed and this makes them over react?

Bullshit. The risk of being killed as a policeman is far higher than that if you are attacked with deadly force. The risk of being severely injured is higher still, as is the risk of being killed if you do not act to defend yourself.

A lot of policemen get stabbed and don't die, I imagine. That doesn't mean the are or should be expected to stand there as knife target practice dummies just because it's horrifying to imagine the police killing someone who is trying to murder them with a knife.

Let's be intellectually honest here and make a distinction between police actually protecting themselves against real violence, and police overreacting randomly and then trying to pretend nothing went wrong.

The police in the US gun down far more people each year than they're even remotely at risk of losing themselves. Can we really say that a significant percentage more police would be dead if they didn't kill anybody? Even if it was one dead officer per 10 of those thousand people killed, I'd take ~150 dead US cops yearly an 1-in-5,333 odds of them being killed in the line of duty over innocent people and animals killed and maimed by the police. Citizens don't have the expectation of danger that police officers have and the US police need to accept less safety in order to better protect those that they should 'protect and serve'.

So basically, you're saying that this is an occupation where you should not be allowed to defend yourself in certain ways because it's better to have attritional casualties among the police.

Do you even begin to grasp how bizarre and alien you sound when you try to say, essentially, that self-defense should be illegal? Which you have done in multiple forms before. This is not a thing normal people accept on a gut level, and for that very reason it is unenforceable.

The only societies that have succeeded in making self-defense illegal were the ones that banned it for a class of second-class citizens who were forbidden to defend themselves against the elite.

I dunno, I just think what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Even though mental illness is in many cases something you are born with, it's true that many, maybe most school shooters seem to have some mental illness. So if someone who isn't fond of people with mental illnesses due to incidents like school shootings and decided to post a hyperbolic and incendiary title that is literally true... I can't say I would like it, but the world is as it is.

I would argue that encouraging people to be hyperbolic and inflammatory makes them less likely to understand the realities of a situation, and more likely to use their prejudices to make a decision about a complex issue.

I can't think of a single political issue where listening to the most hyperbolic firebrands on that issue would be a good idea. It's not just that radicals often believe things that are wrong. It's that, not feeling obliged to check facts before making allegations, radicals lose the ability to distinguish truth from falsehoods that support their own views.

We've seen this with things like Duffelblog posts (the military equivalent of The Onion articles) being snuck onto this site and treated as real evidence of real US military atrocities by certain posters.

It's worth trying to resist our biases and make sure we are thinking accurately about the situation. Failing to try is great for venting our emotions and general anger at this or that, but it's really not consistent with having reasoned discussion that leads to true conclusions.

1. It is illegal. Just. Flat. Out. Illegal. It is really hard to amend our constitution, and trying on that issue would be political suicide for anyone who tried. Not gonna happen, even if the policy could work.

2. The policy wont work. The gun-owning population is too large, we dont have national gun registration (so dont know who has guns) and any registration scheme would be political suicide for anyone who tried to get it passed.

These first two show me that the US if fundamentally flawed and unwilling, or perhaps even incapable of changing to better itself. If there was a will to fix things no amount of law would stand in the way, so really this is hiding behind a paper shield and pretending it will stand up to a beating.

In this case, there is rousing debate over what "fixing this" would even mean, which is precisely why there is no unified national will on the subject. You may think you know everything that matters about this debate. But if you want to have meaningful opinions about a democracy, you have to accept that other people get to vote too.

And refusing to acknowledge that they do vote and do reject certain actions is just... blind stupidity.

I don't care that there is no will to do so now, it doesn't mean that it can't and shouldn't be attempted in a controlled and steady manner.

Nonsense.

I mean, you're basically saying "screw the electorate, I have convictions!" Which is exactly the opposite of what you do in a democracy you want to function.

3. Disarming the majority of the population will do nothing to stop those who are responsible for shooting at police. Those people tend to be criminals of the more dedicated variety. Gang members, drug smugglers, crazies with fortified compounds etc.

I expect that you'll be providing stats to back this up.

Realizing that he's talking about who shoots at police... do you really expect him to be unable to provide?

While the average joe schmoe wont know where to get a black market gun (which is why gun control works to reduce gun homicide because most regular murders are done by Joe Schmoe who wants to commit insurance fraud by killing his wife/gets really pissed off and shoots his wife etc), the dedicated criminal element does.

This is the point. If the average person isn't armed to the current degree the police don't have to be as fearful of every stop ending in potentially lethal violence. This allows them to calm down and react rather than act.

On the contrary- because police deal with the career criminals and violent elements of the underclass every day. That's literally their job.

When you routinely stop people because you think they're drug couriers, yes you have to worry that this particular drug courier is high and carrying a gun. Because a considerable number of drug couriers are high and do carry guns, whether it's legal for them to do so or not.

An Island is relatively easy to police. Smuggling guns into british ports is more difficult that sneaking a car load of guns across our extremely porous southern border. So in addition to the right wing nuts who wont turn over their guns, getting new smuggled guns in would be trivially easy. Like getting cocaine into the US easy.

Indeed, but then you simply make gun crime far more punishable than crimes with other weapons and make it so that your average gang or cartel would rather not make themselves a police target by using guns. They're business and if using guns is bad for business they'll change methods.

Wait, you're expecting to make a crime go away by ramping up the punishments?

That doesn't actually work.

Among other things, because it reduces the incentive not to commit a serious offense that might let you avoid being charged with a minor offense.

For example, if you make the penalty for theft exactly as bad as the penalty for murder, thieves start murdering the people in the houses they rob, to get rid of witnesses that could identify them. What do they have to lose? It's life in prison (or the death penalty) either way...

You propose to make the penalty for illegal gun possession so bad that it'd scare a hardened criminal. One who already expects to ultimately end up in prison for years at a time just as a consequence of their choice of career. Exactly how is that going to work?

Funny that we must train soldiers to kill and police not to. It seems like we need more potential soldiers as cops and less cops as anything that deals with violent high stress situations.

Uh... honestly, that's kind of dumb. Soldiers have always been far more dangerous to the people they encounter than any police force is today. Training or no training. In many cases these cops already are trained to avoid conflict to varying degrees- you just don't notice the cases where that happens.

It is worth noting that of the 1000 people killed by police, from what I see there is no breakdown of how many of those people were actually dangerous.

I doubt such numbers exist and even if they did how can we trust the police to be accurate in reporting these things with their complete unwillingness to open themselves up to the public.

[/quote]So why do you assume that 1000 police killings equals 1000 unjust killings or whatever?

If we can't know how many of those people actually credibly threatened a policeman or civilian, how can we possibly know whether or not the police were just 'trigger-happy' in deciding to kill them?

[Thanas]

In America, we have big federal grants for the War on Drugs and War on Terror... which police are best positioned to earn by being big, bad, ballsy, heavily armed SWAT types. We have a huge sector of the population which has no sympathy for the rights or dignity of the 'underclass' whatsoever, and will almost automatically try to vote down any politician which does have such sympathy.

It's a problem, and a major obstacle to reform that has nothing to do with the corruption and attitude problems of individual police departments.

And you can say "that's the 'just following orders' defense." Thing is, it really isn't. Civil servants and law enforcement and bureaucracies in a democratic society are supposed to do as they are told by elected politicians. That's part of the point- the police are ultimately accountable to people who are in turn nominally accountable to the voters.

If the politicians decide to make it easy to fund SWAT teams to go after drug dealers and imaginary terrorists, and hard to fund "how to peacefully defuse situation" training, then the police aren't given a realistic choice to ignore the SWAT team operations and focus on peacefully defusing situations.

However, this completely absolves the huge police lobbies and police themselves, which is wrong. They do have a tremendous influence on politics. Let's not paint this as "police are just doing what the voters want" when they in fact have a very large influence on how policies are formed. And they also have a lot of discretion in what tactics they actually use too, because the Mayor is sure as heck not telling the swat team to enter house X, nor do the voters. Police have a huge influence on policy and discretion on what parts to enforce and how.

[Flagg]

I dunno, I just think what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Even though mental illness is in many cases something you are born with, it's true that many, maybe most school shooters seem to have some mental illness. So if someone who isn't fond of people with mental illnesses due to incidents like school shootings and decided to post a hyperbolic and incendiary title that is literally true... I can't say I would like it, but the world is as it is.

I would argue that encouraging people to be hyperbolic and inflammatory makes them less likely to understand the realities of a situation, and more likely to use their prejudices to make a decision about a complex issue.

I can't think of a single political issue where listening to the most hyperbolic firebrands on that issue would be a good idea. It's not just that radicals often believe things that are wrong. It's that, not feeling obliged to check facts before making allegations, radicals lose the ability to distinguish truth from falsehoods that support their own views.

We've seen this with things like Duffelblog posts (the military equivalent of The Onion articles) being snuck onto this site and treated as real evidence of real US military atrocities by certain posters.

It's worth trying to resist our biases and make sure we are thinking accurately about the situation. Failing to try is great for venting our emotions and general anger at this or that, but it's really not consistent with having reasoned discussion that leads to true conclusions.

It's a title, was the article itself hyperbolic? Because the vast majority of this thread has been a blatant red-herring discussion started by Alyeska about how a few posters are butthurt over the title as if there were some rule or that it's endemic of the board culture to not offend people who are easily butthurt.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that we should avoid chasing the red herrings of people who get butthurt over a thread that wouldn't even be posted in anymore except for their shenanigans over a fucking thread title.

[Flagg]

In America, we have big federal grants for the War on Drugs and War on Terror... which police are best positioned to earn by being big, bad, ballsy, heavily armed SWAT types. We have a huge sector of the population which has no sympathy for the rights or dignity of the 'underclass' whatsoever, and will almost automatically try to vote down any politician which does have such sympathy.

It's a problem, and a major obstacle to reform that has nothing to do with the corruption and attitude problems of individual police departments.

And you can say "that's the 'just following orders' defense." Thing is, it really isn't. Civil servants and law enforcement and bureaucracies in a democratic society are supposed to do as they are told by elected politicians. That's part of the point- the police are ultimately accountable to people who are in turn nominally accountable to the voters.

If the politicians decide to make it easy to fund SWAT teams to go after drug dealers and imaginary terrorists, and hard to fund "how to peacefully defuse situation" training, then the police aren't given a realistic choice to ignore the SWAT team operations and focus on peacefully defusing situations.

However, this completely absolves the huge police lobbies and police themselves, which is wrong. They do have a tremendous influence on politics. Let's not paint this as "police are just doing what the voters want" when they in fact have a very large influence on how policies are formed. And they also have a lot of discretion in what tactics they actually use too, because the Mayor is sure as heck not telling the swat team to enter house X, nor do the voters. Police have a huge influence on policy and discretion on what parts to enforce and how.

Simons argument is weird and frankly, untrue. Civil servants are, just like in the military, OBLIGATED not to follow illegal orders. They swear an oath to above all, the Constitution of the United States of America. Period.

[Kamakazie Sith]

However, this completely absolves the huge police lobbies and police themselves, which is wrong. They do have a tremendous influence on politics. Let's not paint this as "police are just doing what the voters want" when they in fact have a very large influence on how policies are formed. And they also have a lot of discretion in what tactics they actually use too, because the Mayor is sure as heck not telling the swat team to enter house X, nor do the voters. Police have a huge influence on policy and discretion on what parts to enforce and how.

That's certainly true with some departments. NYPD demonstrated this quite well. However, other departments don't have strong unions backing them or influencing policy decisions so it's not a black and white matter that you can generalize.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Simons argument is weird and frankly, untrue. Civil servants are, just like in the military, OBLIGATED not to follow illegal orders. They swear an oath to above all, the Constitution of the United States of America. Period.

Maybe you meant to say immoral orders? No knock warrants are legal. Anti-drug operations are legal.

[Thanas]

However, this completely absolves the huge police lobbies and police themselves, which is wrong. They do have a tremendous influence on politics. Let's not paint this as "police are just doing what the voters want" when they in fact have a very large influence on how policies are formed. And they also have a lot of discretion in what tactics they actually use too, because the Mayor is sure as heck not telling the swat team to enter house X, nor do the voters. Police have a huge influence on policy and discretion on what parts to enforce and how.

That's certainly true with some departments. NYPD demonstrated this quite well. However, other departments don't have strong unions backing them or influencing policy decisions so it's not a black and white matter that you can generalize.

Sure, but one should also not generalize by saying "PDs are utterly beholden to the public voters".

[Kamakazie Sith]

However, this completely absolves the huge police lobbies and police themselves, which is wrong. They do have a tremendous influence on politics. Let's not paint this as "police are just doing what the voters want" when they in fact have a very large influence on how policies are formed. And they also have a lot of discretion in what tactics they actually use too, because the Mayor is sure as heck not telling the swat team to enter house X, nor do the voters. Police have a huge influence on policy and discretion on what parts to enforce and how.

That's certainly true with some departments. NYPD demonstrated this quite well. However, other departments don't have strong unions backing them or influencing policy decisions so it's not a black and white matter that you can generalize.

Sure, but one should also not generalize by saying "PDs are utterly beholden to the public voters".

Absolutely, and I have to admit that the NYPD incident opened my eyes to just how powerful they can be.

[Gaidin]

Simons argument is weird and frankly, untrue. Civil servants are, just like in the military, OBLIGATED not to follow illegal orders. They swear an oath to above all, the Constitution of the United States of America. Period.

Civil servants in general don't have the power to determine if a policy(what most standing orders are) is illegal. That takes something like a judge or a new executive. Yes, you talk about police, yes you say orders, but what causes most of the arguments on this forum is actually a departments policy on how an officer can or must act if a situation of a certain nature arises. An officer, your civil servant, doesn't have the power to argue with that. It takes your lawyers taking that to court, or having a new high ranking representative elected. The best example here would be NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy and its current drama, although to my knowledge that's still being fought out.

Another example for policy and how it actually got struck down for the civil servants is the ACA(something of a red herring to police force arguments). Birth Control distribution was buried in the HHS policy instead of the law, so SCOTUS functionally ruled that freedom of religion law overruled the HHS policy. Literally illustrates what I'm trying to say above.

[Elheru Aran]

Yeah, the police department is not the military. The PD is under the control of whatever administrative level of the states they are at, and act to enforce the laws at that level of state government. There is a distinct difference between them and the military. Certainly there is the formality of an oath to support the Constitution, but in practice police departments are far less likely to be concerned with such things than the military. They are rather more interested in enforcing the laws of their state.

[Flagg]

Umm... I don't know if you guys got the memo but the laws in their jurisdiction are superseded by the Constitution of the United States of America. That's what they swear to uphold the last time I saw an induction ceremony. If a cop sees another higher ranking cop commit an illegal act, such as murder and that superior tells you to plant a gun on the dead guy and write it up in a way that puts the superior in the clear, they are obligated to not follow any of those orders. This is America still, not Nazi Germany or the USSR.

[Gaidin]

Hence the damn courts. 99% of the civil servants aren't trained in the complexities of the law. And that post is talking about something altogether different. An illegal act and a policy leading to actions you find disagreeable and think are illegal are two wildly different things. Most of the threads on this forum are the latter.