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What people fail to realize is that police rarely get to deal with polite and nice law abiding citizens.
Neither do the clerks manning the "Returns" desk at Macy's. More seriously, if you cannot deal with the particular realities of a job, don't go into it.
Not true actually. There was a major study done where they asked people who had been victim of a crime to report the race of their perpetrator. 50% of the answers were black males. This is exactly the same figure as the amount of crimes black males are committed for (50%). So there is actually zero racial bias when it comes to police picking suspects.
I was talking about the 2016 study by Roland Fryer that has been widely mischaracterized by many. I don't know what you are talking about at all.
Where did I say shoot to prevent? I said prevent them from further actions. Obviously the goal is to restrain them and de-escalate the situation. I am not ok with killing anyone "just because". I am more inclined to side with someone who has to make that decision to save their own life.
Not when the suspect has a gun by the way, then as I said it is fully justified shooting to kill. But many times the perp will be unarmed or just armed with a knife, baseball bat or something similar (usually someone mentally ill or high on drugs), and instead of waiting for backup so that they can try tazing etc, they will often attack right away (and shoot the suspect) - or at least this is what we see on videos.
Lets take the Huntington Beach shooting above as an example. What if instead of starting to fight with the scrawny meth head, he would call in backup and 6 officers would surround him. Then, three officers can point their gun at him in case he does anything of substantial risk of danger to the officers or bystanders. The other three officers can taze him at the same time. Once they have him on the ground, they can disarm the suspect of whatever weapon they have (except if they have a gun). That's how they do it in countries like Brazil, South Africa and Thailand, countries with a lot of crime and gun violence. They have substantially less police shootings compared to the US.
Is it perhaps a lack of funds that causes this to not be an option? Or why are officers constantly showing up and fighting with suspects alone and not calling for backup?
I am very much on the right of the political spectrum and if a hardened criminal dies then I guess that's good in most cases. But many people who die due to police shootings did not deserve it. They may deserve a year in jail, but not death. These greeting dogs are a good example:
But nobody is forcing you to be a police officer. And it's not like you don't get paid for it. You chose that line of work. If you don't want to put your life on the line, you should've done something else. Therefore I don't think it's an excuse to say you shoot first because you want to go home to your family. It's not like you are a civilian who got attacked.
Your job is to keep the streets safe for everyone, even people with mental illnesses or teenagers acting tough in front of their buddies. You need a very cool head to do that and many officers obviously don't seem to have that. I guess paying the police more but have a tougher selection process would solve a lot of problems.
And this, is what makes you clueless. You're basing your opinion on what the media is showing you. Which by the way us rarely the entire picture. Rarely is a Tazer the proper response to a knife threat. Meet me and I'll teach you about the 21-foot rule regarding edged weapons.
Sure, except the people who called the police for a minor thing only to have a nervous lone officer come and shoot their dog or their son who has a schizophrenic fit.
My point was that if the police came in a larger force of say 6 officers when responding to possibly dangerous 911 calls, then a lot of these situations could be dealt with without lethal force. Even a knife wielding maniac should not have to be shot dead if he is surrounded and tazed.
If they can do it everywhere else in the world, why not in America?
Damn. I'm not even sure how to respond to remarks like these. 6 officers? I worked for a large county officer and we were lucky to get one to a scene quickly when we were busy. Backup may arrive within a minute or two or maybe 10 or so.
But, you have your right to your opinion no matter how far off base you might be.
Well, that's the thing. Officers used to do foot patrol, where they'd get to know a neighborhood, and the people in it. So incidents where the local deaf man gets shot because he didn't hear an officer's command wouldn't happen. Or the Hispanic teen playing with a toy gun or water pistol, who got shot and killed. But police forces have been sequestering themselves more, by staying in their cars, and even going so far as to get high-tech army surplus vehicles, like tanks. This doesn't help, needless to say. It's a trend in the wrong direction. There needs to be a balance.
There also needs to me training nation-wide on how to deal with the mentally ill.
But anyway, yeah; communication and collaboration are brilliant in their obviousness. But the issues are probably more complex than that, too.
Your memory on the history of LE is not correct. Police shootings of "deaf men" or "Hispanic" teens playing with guns is has happened since the advent of LE.
In a 2017 poll of police officers by Pew Research, 72% said that "police officers do not believe that officers who consistently do a poor job are held accountable".
But go ahead, do your own research, which you won't. You have a clear opinion already.
"endure an internal affairs investigation"? Good. Beneficial to the whole community to show that cops can be held responsible, although any wise person will debate the efficacy of self-policing of the profession (pun intended). An external investigation is what is needed in all such cases.
That's not what the poll said. It said "underperforming officers". http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank...-key-findings/
This is almost certainly true, as public sector employees have due process rights to continued employment under the 14th amendment. Quite simply, this means you cannot just fire someone for underperforming. You must follow due process of law and build a defensible case against them that shows a consistent pattern of multiple incidents.
Though, this is also the reason that most cops that are fired are fired based on the actions and inputs of other cops.
One huge problem with an external investigation is that the officer has a 5th amendment right not to participate. This will almost immediately end most investigations. An officer has no such right with an internal investigation. They must participate and must answer questions and cannot invoke the 5th amendment. If they refuse, they can be fired. If the investigation is an internal investigation, they cannot be fired nor even punished for refusing to answer questions or otherwise participate. The 14th amendment rights available to the officer also complicates external investigations (e.g. the officer can file an EEOC suit against the external investigator just for investigating, something they cannot do against an internal affairs investigation, though that causes problems of using internal affairs to harass minority officers).
Take traffic stops for example: Do we really need here in 2017 to have officers doing this? This is a waste of resources. First off, traffic stops are extremely dangerous for officers, leading to a highly charged situation to begin with. Second, with the speed camera/red-light camera technology out there we shouldn't have officers pulling over people for those things. Third, if it's things like broken taillights or improper driving that is at issue, then use the dashboard camera to photograph/flim the offending vehicle (and their license plate of course) and send the ticket to the offending address.
Not sure I saw this addressed, but many states have found the use of speed and red-light cameras to be violations of due process of law. Your idea of sending tickets based on license plates would very definitely violate due process of law: the car owner would merely have to refuse to say they were the driver (and the 5th amendment would prevent them from being compelled to give up themselves as the driver), and the ticket would have to be dropped for lack of proof of the identity of the driver.
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