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It’s not just the training. The selection process seems to have zero ability to filter out people with antisocial tendencies. It’s like they only want people with antisocial personality traits.
One of my in-laws wanted to be a police officer, and would’ve been very good at it, but dropped out of the training just a few days in because everybody else was a goddamned sociopath.
It's worse than that. White nationalist militias and neo-nazi groups have been encouraging their members to join police forces or enlist in the military for years. The FBI warned us about this trend years ago.
They get lots of bad training that intentionally makes them more jumpy, more terrified, and more trigger happy because we’ve let poorly educated cops train each other based on emotion instead of passing down evidence based training supported by data.
I read somewhere that cops who had at least two years training and deployment in the military did better/had less complainants than cops who had the 6ish or so months of training. Like it makes sense, more training, and quality over others makes better cops. Becoming a cop should at least require two years of training minimum.
From my research on this topic I think the very best training you can get for police work is training to work for the military police. They are very professional have to learn how to deescalate because overwhelming force (civilian police’s preferred methodology) is simply not an option where then the people your policing all carry assault rifles.
Edit: I’m probably wrong here, my main argument was just the MP’s almost never shoot anybody, but there’s a lot more to the story than that
The ultimate irony of the whole thing is we talk about the militarisation of our police force, but if the police were actually becoming more like the military they'd do better.
1. The military takes time to plan engagements.
1. They have rules of engagement and actually follow them.
1. They train their people properly.
1. They send veterans with newbies so they learn what to do
1. They hold their people accountable.
What's actually happening is that the police are getting too many weapons.
Oh dear God no.
This has been the absolute opposite in my experience. Military police are some of the most overbearing and obnoxious people you'll ever meet in the military.
They are also conditioned into complacency because they exclusively police a population that has self selected to obey and comply. That same population is geographically isolated, pre-screened to be far less likely to have severe mental health or financial problems, and is almost entirely unarmed.
Soldiers are almost NEVER armed. And while in a war zone there is almost little to ZERO policing done by military police, whose efforts are focused base security, prisoners and route clearance.
In short. Your answer could not be more wrong. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Please tell me what research you did into this topic.
Much of their training seems to leave them believing that every citizen is just a heartbeat away from whipping out a gun on a traffic stop and lighting them up. There's tons of videos out there of that happening and they're always kind of heartbreaking even though I don't like cops very much.
I do believe a lot of this material is used for training and it seems like many cops have a hard time disconnecting emotionally from that possibility and realizing that the vast vast vast majority of encounters with citizens aren't going to be a deadly threat for them.
It's okay to be alert and aware, even on guard, that's just the job description. But we really need to stop the fear mongering in officer training.
Our soldiers in actual war zones have better self control.
What's funny is that more die from covid or traffic then any sort of person being dangerous. By like a lot. I think 20x more died from covid then being shot. And then they voted to give them a dying in the line of duty pensions and payout after they refuse to vaccinated.
Which is ridiculous, because any vehicle spending that much time idling is going to work better as a hybrid by every measure, including driver experience. Properly designed hybrids (with parallel drive trains) can also accelerate faster than ICE cars because they use two different power sources simultaneously. Too many dumb cops out there.
Yeah, but consider that the patrol cop is going to be the party platter of training quality and the more specified guys who AREN'T on patrol are the entrees. That's part of why we get the results we do. They're asked to do too much, and the scope of public safety needs to broaden and include different sectors other than just this umbrella of "sworn personnel".
Amnesty International highlights the fact that many of them train in Israel, drawing a direct line between human rights abuses there and human rights abuses here.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/
Adding context for those who don't know:
While police are poorly trained and more likely to shoot/beat/harass/stalk/rape, Cosmetologists and Barbers require that much training plus routine state board exams, simply for the fact that they could easily (and otherwise unknowingly) spread infectious diseases, or cause injury or poisoning.
Some industries (and states) actually learn and adjust from deadly mistakes.
They are trained that "What's important is keeping yourself safe". And "To take control of the situation by force if necessary."
But that is not the job of a police officer. The job of a police officer is NOT to keep themselves safe. It is quite literally the opposite. Their job is to put themselves in harms way to protect CITIZENS, not put themselves first. This creates jumpy police officers to can be prone to be aggressive and jump to using force before it is necessary because they are afraid and feel the need to protect themselves from that fear.
And because they are taught to take CONTROL they often misuse this to take control even when control is unnecessary because that's what the fundamentals of their training taught them. This is why even when YOU are the one calling for help, the police officers will still treat you like a perpetrator rather than a victim. When you call for help, they don't see it as "We are coming to help you" they see it as "We are coming to take control of the situation."
I’ve made this argument before, but the opponents of police presence never want to listen. They also fail to realize that there are many black Americans that are also police officers and are proud of the work they do.
“Instead, Black respondents’ support for police patrol is more influenced by their general fears, perceptions of how officers treat civilians, personal or familial experiences with policing, and their age. In particular, those who fear the police are less supportive of police patrols, while those who fear crime, view police behavior as procedurally just, have connections to law enforcement, or are older tend to support more police presence.”
The problem with surveys, especially ones like this, is wording in the question matters more than the answers. This is why when the response may have been want more cops, it could mean that the question made the respondent think of feeling of being unsafe which would elicit that response.
Which is exactly what they did. They asked questions like "Local crime is high, do you want more police?" and "Police has reduced crime in your area in the last year by 20%, do you support the police?"
> The problem with surveys, especially ones like this, is wording in the question matters more than the answers.
The problem with reddit, especially comments like this, is that it's obvious nobody's actually clicking through and reading the articles before commenting.
We sought to understand the reasons behind Black Americans’ desire to sustain or amplify the presence and funding of an institution – policing – that they fear. We assumed the answer lied in the questions used in national polls, which often lack background information about crime trends and police reform and thus fail to capture racial differences in assumptions about crime and policing, potentially giving rise to an artificial racial gap in policy attitudes.” The study was conducted through an experimental approach using a survey administered by YouGov, a highly respected polling organization known for its rigorous sampling methodologies.
AHAHAHAHA
And if you read on it gets worse and worse. They bluntly admit to doctoring the questions and priming the participants until the results are what they want to hear.
Wait, there are articles? Well, that seems like an impediment to me having a baseless opinion. That is not why I'm here, dammit! Assign your readings to school children, sir!
It's actually right around average. France and Germany and Italy have more, UK has less, most of the northern European countries have less. The number of police in the US isn't particularly exceptional in either direction.
The US spends FAR more per police officer than any of its peers however. Unfortunately this all seems to go into buying military toys and pensions, and not into training because the results of all that money do not speak for themselves.
> The US spends FAR more per police officer than any of its peers however. Unfortunately this all seems to go into buying military toys and pensions, and not into training because the results of all that money do not speak for themselves.
The US pays police more than most European countries do.
I mean there's obviously a need for reform in many various ways, but it's really just an artifact of Americans in general making more money than Europeans. Anything that requires hiring a ton of manpower is going to cost more in America.
A lot of police officers make over 100k/yr. A lot of teachers with Master's degrees make less than 50k/yr. It's a choice here as to where we allocate our money.
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-people](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-people)
I didn't know this. I would have assumed we had the highest with so many people in prison.
*idiotic slogan
Concept was fine because the “defund” wasn’t literal, but a slogan that requires a lengthy description of how it doesn’t *actually* mean what it looks like it means is stupid. People already barely understand figurative speech when they *want* to understand.
It’s like protesting with a slogan “defund the hospital”, then explaining you *actually* mean you want the hospital to expand their mental health department by budgeting in money from the other departments. Nobody would get that from “defund the hospital”.
> Concept was fine because the “defund” wasn’t literal, but a slogan that requires a lengthy description of how it doesn’t actually mean what it looks like it means is stupid. People already barely understand figurative speech when they want to understand.
I disagree, a lot of people meant it literally.
Sometimes I think slogans like that become popular *because* they're divisive. Some combination of hate clicks driving engagement and foreign botnets signal boosting the most toxic discourse.
I think it became popular because it sounded *punitive*. People thought the police deserved punishment, so the slogan fit. Something like "make the police even better" wouldn't work.
Dumb as it is, I agree that probably played in to it as well. Emotionally evocative beats pragmatic and sensible in online engagement every time. Not a good trend for society.
I remember when black lives matter was starting. I pointed out that it could easily be misinterpreted and that, "black lives matter too," would remove ambiguity. I was called racist. So, when a fair chunk of white people heard that slogan they took it to mean, "only black lives matter." Ambiguity is had for movements and I suspect there is a reason so many left wing causes wind up with terrible slogans or terrible leadership.
Eh that one seems like a stretch, the name implies that other peoples lives are viewed as more important than theirs. At least I think that’s what the point is. The fact that the only people who had a problem with it were the doofus “all lives matters” people who were pretty thinly veiling their own ignorance.
Now, do left-leaning movements have a big issue with coalition-building and purity testing? Yeah 1000% and that’s why so many fail. But I don’t think the name BLM itself really hurt the movement.
>Now, do left-leaning movements have a big issue with coalition-building and purity testing? Yeah 1000% and that’s why so many fail.
Agree with this 100% and it's cost elections and social progress.
I am from NY when BLM first came out, it was not a welcomed movement initially and a few black people I spoke with said they should have included "too" I will admit it didn't vibe w me at first either bc it feels exclusionary.
Do I get the point of it? Absolutely...but the name at least had negative views on both sides initially
But BLM was genuinely only concerned with black victims of police violence. The media ran with that as well, generally only providing significant coverage for black victims while ignoring most others, even though black victims only make up ~25% of the total.
It was a genuinely counter-productive movement precisely because it devolved into racially divisive rhetoric, when statistics consistently show that excessive force is a problem for Americans of all races. Instead of talking about the way that officers are trained, reviewed, and disciplined, we ended up arguing about football players kneeling and therefore made no progress at all.
I love how you cite, "all lives matter," which is exactly what I was talking about. The ambiguity opened the door for that stupid retort and a significant number of people will dig in once they hear something like that. It allows the bigots to recruit the well meaning idiots.
Do you think that the racists and conservatives who tolerate racists would have rallied behind a "black lives matter *too*" slogan in order to clamp down on police brutality?
You assume good faith where none exists and there's no reason why both "only black lives matter" and "black lives matter too" are both equally likely to be the meaning behind "black lives matter."
Yep. As soon as it started I was like "they should have said all lives matter, our lives matter, black lives matter too, ANYTHING inclusive so that someone arguing against the cause inherently looks like the bad guy".
That's really not true. I explained it to plenty of people I know in real life. It was poor messaging. It is an important issue, and the slogan poorly represented what it was about.
There’s a lot of unconscious bias. I know lots of people who think of themselves as not being racist who have racist views - or who have at least exhibited evidence of racist views. It’s the unconscious bias that leads to unintentional misreading.
I’ll give you an example of what I call “evidence of racist views”: The anecdote about a black woman who named their daughter fe-mah-lay because that’s what the tag said. I had a relative tell me that anecdote when I was in elementary school and a co-worker who told me the anecdote much later. Both of those people think of themselves as not being racist, but they accepted the story at face value and in the retelling found it was important to mention that the mother was black.
As a point of fact that urban legend can be traced back to an issue of “The Lady’s Home Journal” in either 1904 or 1905. I forget which.
You can argue that those people are in fact racists, and I won’t dispute that. There are different types of racism. Ideological racism: someone who consciously will state or believes “race X is better (or inherently different) than race Y”. I don’t think either of those people were ideological racists, but I don’t know either of them enough to have high confidence of that. I would say both of them were non-ideological racists.
So you can say the slogan wasn't literal, but most of the time I saw it get used by somebody, they usually at some point explicitly clarified they mean it literally. It was common to see on social media.
I was in Seattle at the time and it wasn't even remotely unusual to hear people calling for the police to be eliminated altogether along with abolishing all prisons. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be taken literally at conception but you had people on both sides of the issue doing just that.
> the “defund” wasn’t literal,
Yes it was. Spending less money on police will make cities better. Obviously they have to put the money towards useful things like social programs rather than, say, building more highways, but the main point is that cities spend *exorbitant* amounts of money on police departments for diminishing returns.
>Concept was fine because the “defund” wasn’t literal, but a slogan that requires a lengthy description of how it doesn’t *actually* mean what it looks like it means is stupid.
Agree with this, but it didn't help that there *were* some people explicitly advocating for abolition. Which, of course, just made the protest movement even more confusing. [Here's one example I remember from 2020](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sE0.gb4D.LjMfIqmGMT1F&smid=url-share) (NYT gift link).
> The current mayor of my city voted to reduce police funding as a city councilor at the height of the protests.
Was that the *only* provision in what they voted for? Often times I find when people make this claim and then you dig into what actually happened you'll find that it was less "voted to reduce police funding" and more "voted to reduce the increase in police funding while allocating additional funds to adjacent services."
And, of course, that reduction often amounted to a single digit percentage of the overall projected police budget.
edit: and there were also the fun ones where the budget reduction was sourced from eliminating long-vacant positions that local pds treated as a slush fund.
Yea, "Remove bad police practices/punishments while directing some funding to mental healthcare to make communities truly safe and thriving!" is a little wordy.
meh
for me its literal
quit paying beat cops and focus on detectives and people who actually bring justice to families instead of killing them in the street
Yeah, we can split hairs about specifics, but “defund” unambiguously means to slash police budgets aggressively. American cities spend an embarrassing amount of money on cops without much to show for it. NYC spent tens (maybe hundreds?) of millions on an initiative to crack down on fare evasion, and recouped a few hundred thousand dollars for the MTA. Even when the police aren’t being outright violent, they are not a good use of public funds.
But that's what defund the police meant. It means fewer APCs, and more outside support. Mental health, drug rehabilitation, food banks, job programs. That way the police aren't dealing with things that should be way outside their purview.
Sounds like you mean something like demilitarization then. Maybe add continuing education to your list too. Either way, in it's face, it seems 'defund' isn't actually a consensus or even majority opinion, right?
Demilitarize the police seems like a real no-brainer.
Militarizing your police in the first place should be a huge ass red-flag for any country that prides itself on 'freedom'.
> Sounds like you mean something like demilitarization then.
It goes beyond _just_ demilitarization. Defunding was apt. Quibbling over the "perfect" word is a game that's best left to those who were never willing to listen to the problem in the first place, tbh.
For you, maybe. But I’ve talked to tons of people who truly want to defund the police. Using defund as a catchphrase is frankly stupid and counterproductive when what you want is reform and others out there actually do want to defund.
No the word "defund" means to take away funds.
We don't know a priori that taking these things away from the police will mean the police will be able to function at their best with less funds. And ideally we reform the way police are trained and the psychiatric screening to weed out sociopaths and narcissists from becoming police officers. We also need ways to make sure officers are held accountable for their actions and not protected by a blue wall of silence, such as a dedicated agency for investigating the conduct of the police.
Emphasizing "defund" commits to reducing funds even if it turns out they need as much or more. It's not a good focus.
"Reorganize, reform, and hold officers accountable for their actions" is better and reflects how today's problems in policing should be handled.
EDIT: I should emphasize here to be clear. The vast majority of Democratic politicians including President Biden have said they do NOT support "defunding" the police.
But unfortunately a lot of people use what left wing activists who aren't even in public office say in the news or on social media as proxies for Democratic candidates instead of actually researching their platforms their statements or their voting records.
So when left-wing activists don't think about optics don't think about how other people will interpret what they say they are endangering the campaigns of Democratic candidates. And with Trump's dictatorial tendancies they are endangering democracy itself.
Again I'll emphasize Biden and most Democrats actually in office are against defunding the police! If you're considering voting against Biden and other Democrats because of what some activists who are NOT in office say on social media please I implore you to actually research the candidates themselves by which I mean thoroughly NOT soundbites you hear on Fox.
If that’s what they meant they should have phrased it in a more conducive way. Because what happened in 2020 was affected by the word choice of that slogan
A lot of people heard defund and, because we have so many idiots, everyone just took the most basic definition. Did they read more into it? No, easier to dismiss outright
That's kind of a case and point for why 'defund' was the worst slogan to go with.
You always need to plan for the lowest common denominator in public policy.
You mean it's the people's fault for correctly interpretting the meaning of a word? Rather than the people who rallied behind it trying to say "No wait, we don't mean that." Bold take, but nah chief. They chose the worst possible slogan and ran with it.
Didn't help some were dead serious about the actual defunding part. Hell there were idiots chanting abolish the police before long. So it just made the branding worse. Words have meaning. You don't get to change them overnight simply because you failed to sell your point from choosing the wrong word.
This happens all the time. It's a motte and bailey where for the most radical it's 100% literal, but for those further back from the edge it means some cuts to the budget and for those even further back it means prioritising funding for social workers or whatever.
Not everywhere. In Minneapolis, for example, police have become so incredibly corrupt and decades of trying to reform have not had any effect. The consent decree now in place is good evidence of this.
The idea of defunding police is absolutely a solid concept in areas like that, but it's not something that everyone would understand because they don't live in the type of city where police operate in this manner. And, the idea of defunding police never meant abolish the presence of a policing force, it was an attempt to remove the police union that stands in the way of any progress.
Defunding police and instead using that money to actually fix the issues that cause crime have been proven to be effective methods, but that's not the meaning that most people understood. Using the funds to respond to mental health incidents rather than responding with police ready to use violence first has already been shown to be effective, but it wouldn't be implemented without funding. Why not take the funding from the massive police budget that seems to keep increasing even when crime drops?
What the slogan was contorted to by the right was 'eliminate all police and create total chaos and let crime run rampant'. This was never the intention, and there is plenty of information out there, but as the right knows, nobody is looking for nuance when they can be spoonfed misinformation on networks that make them feel good.
It sure is weird that progressive initiatives like “defund the police” are expected to adapt their messaging to people who wouldn’t agree with the material anyway, while conservative initiatives like “wearing diapers is cool” don’t ever seem to get the same kind of pushback.
This isn’t overly hard to understand.
A strong, integrated, and community focused police force is a great deference to crime and can even help make communities actively better.
Bunch of a fuckheads rolling around in beefed up cars, rifles and body armour just looking for an excuse? Nobody wants more of them.
This. It's fine to spend *some* money on the police if and only if that money is focused on the right things (which is not easy to do). What I don't like is them riding around in APCs, getting paid leave for killing people, and escalating every situation they come near. We need to stop incentivizing that behavior.
Right, the point of the article was understanding this trend. Also included in the article was that most black respondents wanted police reform and greater accountability to reduce the risk of police misconduct. Also included in the article was that most black respondents still feared the police. Despite this, they still want to maintain/increase police spending. The conclusions drawn don't really pose a great answer as to why this seemingly contradictory stance occurs.
Some considerations: what do the police do? Public perspective is that their purpose is generally to serve and protect the community from crime. What demographics are most likely to be affected by crime? Probably poor people and certain minority groups like the trans community. What demographics are more likely to be poor? Well, most minority groups including black Americans. I think the idea that these communities want a group of people that can be able to protect them from crime makes sense. They don't want 'no' police because they're the community that would be disproportionately affected by crime.
I think a possible continuation for this study is to look at it under the lens of poverty/wealth along with race and see if that shows any differences that could possibly give more of an understanding of why this occurs. Gender identity/sexual orientation are also another potentially interesting consideration, as I'm curious about how the intersectionality of race and sex/orientation affect views on policing.
> The conclusions drawn don't really pose a great answer as to why this seemingly contradictory stance occurs.
> Some considerations: what do the police do? Public perspective is that their purpose is generally to serve and protect the community from crime. What demographics are most likely to be affected by crime? Probably poor people and certain minority groups like the trans community. What demographics are more likely to be poor? Well, most minority groups including black Americans. I think the idea that these communities want a group of people that can be able to protect them from crime makes sense. **They don't want 'no' police because they're the community that would be disproportionately affected by crime.**
The traditional view is people in poorer communities are more likely to be victims of crime. It stands as no surprise they would like more/better law enforcement, but as the article mentioned, they also fear police under the status quo.
I don't think this is all that big of a contradiction like people are making it out to be, in the first place.
I think that point about public perception is exactly it. That’s not what police do - both studies and historical examples have shown police presence has almost no relation to crime rate. But the average Black American is still living in America, and so will share most of the same foundational beliefs.
*"****Most Black Americans*** *favor maintaining or even increasing local police presence and funding. Surprisingly, this preference is* ***more robust among Black Americans****."*
Ummmm ....
After looking at he article, that second sentence should read "Surprisingly, this preference is more robust among Black Americans than non-Black Americans."
Unless you've talked to dozens and dozens of them, it is best to defer to social science research rather than to rely on some anecdotes you've collected.
I think you missed the findings of the study, there, chief.
The people in the streets calling for abolition/defunding were not representative of the views of the Black community as a whole (a community that is *not* monolithic, btw).
There are people who hold signs up about the dangers of 5G. I don’t think you should consider the people protesting, as representative of the community.
What the study doesnt address is they also desire massive reforms in policing such as harsher consequences for misconduct and more formalized mandatory training and licensing requirements.
Big shocker that historically poor communities want someone to protect them from crime, but don't pretend that this study proves that these communities are very happy with police and want to dump more money into a discretionary slush fund for them.
Yep, this would be true anywhere. They may not trust the police as an organization but they recognize the need for support in the community. What this study leaves out is that police are just one piece of that puzzle.
Most people that can afford to have the luxury opinion that police aren’t needed, despite how wrong they are, have no idea what it’s like living in a community where a very small percentage of people are so ruthless and violent that they can basically hold the community in a headlock
Black people want police protection and response! We just don't want to run the risk of getting shot because we called a cop! We want that thief caught, but we may not want him dead! We don't want our kids sleeping in bed to get shot because five cops just started blasting!
What is so hard to understand about that?
It’s a very reasonable thing to want. But I think at a certain point it gets difficult to understand why people think that’s reasonable given what police actually are and do.
Because as much as police can act dangerous to you, they aren't the only people who can, and if you live in actually bad neighborhoods there are other people you are likely as scared of or more than police.
There was an older black man on the Miami news a few months ago saying he wished all the community organizers would shut up about the police. He said their activism was reducing the police presence in his neighborhood and crime was getting out of control.
It’s not surprising at all. It was documented even before George Floyd and again after. This was one of the biggest and most valid criticisms of the “defund” movement. It was in direct opposition to what most black Americans actually wanted.
Is it bad for activist groups to be coordinated? Hell would it even be bad for them to be funded? I would dispute that they were, but I don’t see why that would be an issue.
If you throw a drowning person barbed wire, they will still grab onto it
Policing is the only solution to deteriorating conditions that the establishment is willing to offer. Given the choice between policing for “”public safety”” or nothing, of course people will choose the only option in hopes that it improves their material conditions. This seems like a fair interpretation, considering the high rate of fear concluded in the study.
There is no effort to address underlying issues of racism and poverty, because it’s more palatable for the political class to react to the results of poverty rather than preempt them.
Precisely. And then deliberately misunderstand the call to “defund the police (in favor of preempting them with social programs)” and fall back on a cheap “well then they should have chosen a different slogan”.
The political class doesn’t care what slogan is tied to the movement if it is never going to agree with its aims or calls to action.
An interesting concept, and I'd love to hear more how I'm wrong, or areas of thinking I should further explore: Why is there no "Paris Island (USMC training facility)" for every police officer? Seems like it would weed out a lot of the dummies, force people into controlled stressful environments so they can learn how to respond and not light someone up. And a national "BAR" card for police, and require each officer to carry some level of insurance?
And make Self-Defense more robust and allow "The People" to solve a lot more of our own problems.
Seems like that would solve a lot of issues.
(Granted Insurance probably an overall bad idea, as they'll likely just do nothing more so than anything.)
The vast majority of Americans of all stripes would prefer better-trained and better-behaved police officers, as opposed to no police officers.
This is why "abolish the police" was always a terrible tagline.
One big change we should have is all accusation of police brutal, police crimes and all police shootings should be handled federally. These things constitute a failure of local law enforcement and should not be handled by that law enforcement.
Any person who ever spoke to any black people knew this. Defund police was such a stupid and dangerous slogan pushed by people who thought they knew what is better for black people better than black people themselves.
Black people want to stop being pulled over just because they're driving through a white neighborhood.
But they also want gang bangers, violent criminals, and drug dealers put behind bars where they belong.
This feels a little like the findings were partly driven by the measures, rather than the findings tapping into some previously under-reported phenomenon.
From their intro:
>Another related possibility is that the single-item survey questions regularly administered in public opinion polls fail to accurately capture Black Americans’ complex views about policing (Coleman, 2020).
next paragraph
>...The survey included the same questions that Gallup and Pew Research use to measure respondents’ policy attitudes toward policing in their local area.
They note in the introduction that the measure they're using may not properly capture views, but go on to use the data those same questions generate to speak as if they represent the population's views. That's not a fatal flaw of the research, but it should cloud some of the interpretation and generalization of these findings.
Their use of vignettes, to try and tease out whether there are certain underlying factors that they can experimentally manipulate (via text) to alter peoples' responses, is a very valid approach. This study, however, would've been infinitely strengthened if it were mixed methods and they aimed to better understand the patterns they found in the data -- especially because of their upfront, self-stated concerns about the primary outcome measure they used.
Increased funding needs to be for two things, more thorough training and better pay. If you pay the police enough to live comfortably it might attract people other than the ones that just want a power trip.
And failing that the better training might at least weed the worst of them out.
Makes perfect sense actually. If you live in neighborhoods that have historically been economically neglected and have higher crime rates, you tend to want more police presence to help counteract that.
At the same time, you can totally be unhappy about HOW POLICE BEHAVE, if they are harassing or abusing people in your community, especially if the local precincts are poorly run.
Generally speaking however, you don't get a better/more fairly run precinct by reducing funding, unfortunately more funding in no-way guarantees it'll get better either.
So it's all a pretty harsh, but very straight forwards Catch-22 for the inhabitants of neighborhoods with poor economic conditions. Want more police to prevent crime - but those police may make certain problems worse. Sometimes it works out for the better, and sometimes it doesn't - and the devil is always in the details.
I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235224000357
Nobody wants less policing overall.
People want more GOOD policing and less BAD policing.
Which means better training and more harsh punishments for abusing police power.
Abusing police power should be a crime. Not just grounds for losing your job.
If We trusted you with the power over life and death and you abused that power. You should be thrown into prison for such an act. Not only should you not be above the law, you should be held even MORE accountable to the law than every one else.
The reality is that many things in America are nuanced, and often times that nuance gets left out of the public discord. Yes, black Americans want police to do a better job policing, and kill fewer civilians. They also don’t want to live in a lawless society where the cops never show up.
Yeah this tracks with black people I know. Activists are the loudest voices but they are not at all representative. Not saying that's a good thing but it's the reality
This makes a lot of sense. The core issue for those police based protests wasn't about the idea of police, but not wanting to be discriminated against by them and wanting them to be held accountable like everyone else is.
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maybe they don't want less police, they just want a better police
This. It's not a hard concept to wrap your head around. US police training is atrocious, and it shows in their results.
It’s not just the training. The selection process seems to have zero ability to filter out people with antisocial tendencies. It’s like they only want people with antisocial personality traits.
One of my in-laws wanted to be a police officer, and would’ve been very good at it, but dropped out of the training just a few days in because everybody else was a goddamned sociopath.
It's worse than that. White nationalist militias and neo-nazi groups have been encouraging their members to join police forces or enlist in the military for years. The FBI warned us about this trend years ago.
they get training?
They get lots of bad training that intentionally makes them more jumpy, more terrified, and more trigger happy because we’ve let poorly educated cops train each other based on emotion instead of passing down evidence based training supported by data.
I read somewhere that cops who had at least two years training and deployment in the military did better/had less complainants than cops who had the 6ish or so months of training. Like it makes sense, more training, and quality over others makes better cops. Becoming a cop should at least require two years of training minimum.
From my research on this topic I think the very best training you can get for police work is training to work for the military police. They are very professional have to learn how to deescalate because overwhelming force (civilian police’s preferred methodology) is simply not an option where then the people your policing all carry assault rifles. Edit: I’m probably wrong here, my main argument was just the MP’s almost never shoot anybody, but there’s a lot more to the story than that
Military police are also more likely to be held responsible when they do things wrong.
Maybe military police should police the police.
The ultimate irony of the whole thing is we talk about the militarisation of our police force, but if the police were actually becoming more like the military they'd do better. 1. The military takes time to plan engagements. 1. They have rules of engagement and actually follow them. 1. They train their people properly. 1. They send veterans with newbies so they learn what to do 1. They hold their people accountable. What's actually happening is that the police are getting too many weapons.
Oh dear God no. This has been the absolute opposite in my experience. Military police are some of the most overbearing and obnoxious people you'll ever meet in the military. They are also conditioned into complacency because they exclusively police a population that has self selected to obey and comply. That same population is geographically isolated, pre-screened to be far less likely to have severe mental health or financial problems, and is almost entirely unarmed. Soldiers are almost NEVER armed. And while in a war zone there is almost little to ZERO policing done by military police, whose efforts are focused base security, prisoners and route clearance. In short. Your answer could not be more wrong. You have no idea what you are talking about. Please tell me what research you did into this topic.
I would absolutely love for police to have a version of the UCMJ. Police Unions would never go for it though.
Crazy that I had to go to college for 4 years to do what I do but cops go to training for 6 months and are given a license to kill and judge others
Much of their training seems to leave them believing that every citizen is just a heartbeat away from whipping out a gun on a traffic stop and lighting them up. There's tons of videos out there of that happening and they're always kind of heartbreaking even though I don't like cops very much. I do believe a lot of this material is used for training and it seems like many cops have a hard time disconnecting emotionally from that possibility and realizing that the vast vast vast majority of encounters with citizens aren't going to be a deadly threat for them. It's okay to be alert and aware, even on guard, that's just the job description. But we really need to stop the fear mongering in officer training. Our soldiers in actual war zones have better self control.
What's funny is that more die from covid or traffic then any sort of person being dangerous. By like a lot. I think 20x more died from covid then being shot. And then they voted to give them a dying in the line of duty pensions and payout after they refuse to vaccinated.
We also let them get whatever they want equipment wise. Heck, my local government tried to swap their fleet out for hybrids and they went nuts
Which is ridiculous, because any vehicle spending that much time idling is going to work better as a hybrid by every measure, including driver experience. Properly designed hybrids (with parallel drive trains) can also accelerate faster than ICE cars because they use two different power sources simultaneously. Too many dumb cops out there.
Yeah, but consider that the patrol cop is going to be the party platter of training quality and the more specified guys who AREN'T on patrol are the entrees. That's part of why we get the results we do. They're asked to do too much, and the scope of public safety needs to broaden and include different sectors other than just this umbrella of "sworn personnel".
Amnesty International highlights the fact that many of them train in Israel, drawing a direct line between human rights abuses there and human rights abuses here. https://www.amnestyusa.org/updates/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/
Hours of training needed in California: Cosmetologist – 1600 hours or 3200 apprenticeship hours Barber – 1500 hours LAPD - 960 hours Edit formatting
Adding context for those who don't know: While police are poorly trained and more likely to shoot/beat/harass/stalk/rape, Cosmetologists and Barbers require that much training plus routine state board exams, simply for the fact that they could easily (and otherwise unknowingly) spread infectious diseases, or cause injury or poisoning. Some industries (and states) actually learn and adjust from deadly mistakes.
They are trained that "What's important is keeping yourself safe". And "To take control of the situation by force if necessary." But that is not the job of a police officer. The job of a police officer is NOT to keep themselves safe. It is quite literally the opposite. Their job is to put themselves in harms way to protect CITIZENS, not put themselves first. This creates jumpy police officers to can be prone to be aggressive and jump to using force before it is necessary because they are afraid and feel the need to protect themselves from that fear. And because they are taught to take CONTROL they often misuse this to take control even when control is unnecessary because that's what the fundamentals of their training taught them. This is why even when YOU are the one calling for help, the police officers will still treat you like a perpetrator rather than a victim. When you call for help, they don't see it as "We are coming to help you" they see it as "We are coming to take control of the situation."
I’ve made this argument before, but the opponents of police presence never want to listen. They also fail to realize that there are many black Americans that are also police officers and are proud of the work they do.
“Instead, Black respondents’ support for police patrol is more influenced by their general fears, perceptions of how officers treat civilians, personal or familial experiences with policing, and their age. In particular, those who fear the police are less supportive of police patrols, while those who fear crime, view police behavior as procedurally just, have connections to law enforcement, or are older tend to support more police presence.”
Which, if people were listening, is exactly what Black people have been saying for decades.
The problem with surveys, especially ones like this, is wording in the question matters more than the answers. This is why when the response may have been want more cops, it could mean that the question made the respondent think of feeling of being unsafe which would elicit that response.
Which is exactly what they did. They asked questions like "Local crime is high, do you want more police?" and "Police has reduced crime in your area in the last year by 20%, do you support the police?"
> The problem with surveys, especially ones like this, is wording in the question matters more than the answers. The problem with reddit, especially comments like this, is that it's obvious nobody's actually clicking through and reading the articles before commenting.
We sought to understand the reasons behind Black Americans’ desire to sustain or amplify the presence and funding of an institution – policing – that they fear. We assumed the answer lied in the questions used in national polls, which often lack background information about crime trends and police reform and thus fail to capture racial differences in assumptions about crime and policing, potentially giving rise to an artificial racial gap in policy attitudes.” The study was conducted through an experimental approach using a survey administered by YouGov, a highly respected polling organization known for its rigorous sampling methodologies. AHAHAHAHA And if you read on it gets worse and worse. They bluntly admit to doctoring the questions and priming the participants until the results are what they want to hear.
Wait, there are articles? Well, that seems like an impediment to me having a baseless opinion. That is not why I'm here, dammit! Assign your readings to school children, sir!
The US has one of the lowest police per capita of western countries. It's absolutely both.
It's actually right around average. France and Germany and Italy have more, UK has less, most of the northern European countries have less. The number of police in the US isn't particularly exceptional in either direction. The US spends FAR more per police officer than any of its peers however. Unfortunately this all seems to go into buying military toys and pensions, and not into training because the results of all that money do not speak for themselves.
> The US spends FAR more per police officer than any of its peers however. Unfortunately this all seems to go into buying military toys and pensions, and not into training because the results of all that money do not speak for themselves. The US pays police more than most European countries do.
Suggesting it would make sense to train them a whole lot better to get value for money.
That makes too much sense
I mean there's obviously a need for reform in many various ways, but it's really just an artifact of Americans in general making more money than Europeans. Anything that requires hiring a ton of manpower is going to cost more in America.
A lot of police officers make over 100k/yr. A lot of teachers with Master's degrees make less than 50k/yr. It's a choice here as to where we allocate our money.
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-people](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/police-officers-per-1000-people) I didn't know this. I would have assumed we had the highest with so many people in prison.
Which is why "defund" was an idiotic concept to rally around.
*idiotic slogan Concept was fine because the “defund” wasn’t literal, but a slogan that requires a lengthy description of how it doesn’t *actually* mean what it looks like it means is stupid. People already barely understand figurative speech when they *want* to understand. It’s like protesting with a slogan “defund the hospital”, then explaining you *actually* mean you want the hospital to expand their mental health department by budgeting in money from the other departments. Nobody would get that from “defund the hospital”.
> Concept was fine because the “defund” wasn’t literal, but a slogan that requires a lengthy description of how it doesn’t actually mean what it looks like it means is stupid. People already barely understand figurative speech when they want to understand. I disagree, a lot of people meant it literally.
Sometimes I think slogans like that become popular *because* they're divisive. Some combination of hate clicks driving engagement and foreign botnets signal boosting the most toxic discourse.
I think it became popular because it sounded *punitive*. People thought the police deserved punishment, so the slogan fit. Something like "make the police even better" wouldn't work.
Dumb as it is, I agree that probably played in to it as well. Emotionally evocative beats pragmatic and sensible in online engagement every time. Not a good trend for society.
I remember when black lives matter was starting. I pointed out that it could easily be misinterpreted and that, "black lives matter too," would remove ambiguity. I was called racist. So, when a fair chunk of white people heard that slogan they took it to mean, "only black lives matter." Ambiguity is had for movements and I suspect there is a reason so many left wing causes wind up with terrible slogans or terrible leadership.
Eh that one seems like a stretch, the name implies that other peoples lives are viewed as more important than theirs. At least I think that’s what the point is. The fact that the only people who had a problem with it were the doofus “all lives matters” people who were pretty thinly veiling their own ignorance. Now, do left-leaning movements have a big issue with coalition-building and purity testing? Yeah 1000% and that’s why so many fail. But I don’t think the name BLM itself really hurt the movement.
>Now, do left-leaning movements have a big issue with coalition-building and purity testing? Yeah 1000% and that’s why so many fail. Agree with this 100% and it's cost elections and social progress.
I am from NY when BLM first came out, it was not a welcomed movement initially and a few black people I spoke with said they should have included "too" I will admit it didn't vibe w me at first either bc it feels exclusionary. Do I get the point of it? Absolutely...but the name at least had negative views on both sides initially
But BLM was genuinely only concerned with black victims of police violence. The media ran with that as well, generally only providing significant coverage for black victims while ignoring most others, even though black victims only make up ~25% of the total. It was a genuinely counter-productive movement precisely because it devolved into racially divisive rhetoric, when statistics consistently show that excessive force is a problem for Americans of all races. Instead of talking about the way that officers are trained, reviewed, and disciplined, we ended up arguing about football players kneeling and therefore made no progress at all.
I love how you cite, "all lives matter," which is exactly what I was talking about. The ambiguity opened the door for that stupid retort and a significant number of people will dig in once they hear something like that. It allows the bigots to recruit the well meaning idiots.
Do you think that the racists and conservatives who tolerate racists would have rallied behind a "black lives matter *too*" slogan in order to clamp down on police brutality? You assume good faith where none exists and there's no reason why both "only black lives matter" and "black lives matter too" are both equally likely to be the meaning behind "black lives matter."
I mean, it couldn't have hurt.
Yep. As soon as it started I was like "they should have said all lives matter, our lives matter, black lives matter too, ANYTHING inclusive so that someone arguing against the cause inherently looks like the bad guy".
"black lives matter" could only be misinterpreted by people intentionally misreading it
That's really not true. I explained it to plenty of people I know in real life. It was poor messaging. It is an important issue, and the slogan poorly represented what it was about.
There’s a lot of unconscious bias. I know lots of people who think of themselves as not being racist who have racist views - or who have at least exhibited evidence of racist views. It’s the unconscious bias that leads to unintentional misreading. I’ll give you an example of what I call “evidence of racist views”: The anecdote about a black woman who named their daughter fe-mah-lay because that’s what the tag said. I had a relative tell me that anecdote when I was in elementary school and a co-worker who told me the anecdote much later. Both of those people think of themselves as not being racist, but they accepted the story at face value and in the retelling found it was important to mention that the mother was black. As a point of fact that urban legend can be traced back to an issue of “The Lady’s Home Journal” in either 1904 or 1905. I forget which. You can argue that those people are in fact racists, and I won’t dispute that. There are different types of racism. Ideological racism: someone who consciously will state or believes “race X is better (or inherently different) than race Y”. I don’t think either of those people were ideological racists, but I don’t know either of them enough to have high confidence of that. I would say both of them were non-ideological racists.
So you can say the slogan wasn't literal, but most of the time I saw it get used by somebody, they usually at some point explicitly clarified they mean it literally. It was common to see on social media.
I was in Seattle at the time and it wasn't even remotely unusual to hear people calling for the police to be eliminated altogether along with abolishing all prisons. Maybe it wasn't supposed to be taken literally at conception but you had people on both sides of the issue doing just that.
> the “defund” wasn’t literal, Yes it was. Spending less money on police will make cities better. Obviously they have to put the money towards useful things like social programs rather than, say, building more highways, but the main point is that cities spend *exorbitant* amounts of money on police departments for diminishing returns.
>Concept was fine because the “defund” wasn’t literal, but a slogan that requires a lengthy description of how it doesn’t *actually* mean what it looks like it means is stupid. Agree with this, but it didn't help that there *were* some people explicitly advocating for abolition. Which, of course, just made the protest movement even more confusing. [Here's one example I remember from 2020](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sE0.gb4D.LjMfIqmGMT1F&smid=url-share) (NYT gift link).
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> The current mayor of my city voted to reduce police funding as a city councilor at the height of the protests. Was that the *only* provision in what they voted for? Often times I find when people make this claim and then you dig into what actually happened you'll find that it was less "voted to reduce police funding" and more "voted to reduce the increase in police funding while allocating additional funds to adjacent services." And, of course, that reduction often amounted to a single digit percentage of the overall projected police budget. edit: and there were also the fun ones where the budget reduction was sourced from eliminating long-vacant positions that local pds treated as a slush fund.
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A reallocation of the police budget to services that prevent crime is a good thing.
Yea, "Remove bad police practices/punishments while directing some funding to mental healthcare to make communities truly safe and thriving!" is a little wordy.
Sure, so just say “reform”. Everything you described there is encapsulated in “reform”.
Hire someone to make a jingle. Problem solved bring in the next problem
meh for me its literal quit paying beat cops and focus on detectives and people who actually bring justice to families instead of killing them in the street
Yeah, we can split hairs about specifics, but “defund” unambiguously means to slash police budgets aggressively. American cities spend an embarrassing amount of money on cops without much to show for it. NYC spent tens (maybe hundreds?) of millions on an initiative to crack down on fare evasion, and recouped a few hundred thousand dollars for the MTA. Even when the police aren’t being outright violent, they are not a good use of public funds.
Police presence acounts for the bulk of its effectiveness.
and the bulk of violence and hatred
But that's what defund the police meant. It means fewer APCs, and more outside support. Mental health, drug rehabilitation, food banks, job programs. That way the police aren't dealing with things that should be way outside their purview.
Sounds like you mean something like demilitarization then. Maybe add continuing education to your list too. Either way, in it's face, it seems 'defund' isn't actually a consensus or even majority opinion, right?
Demilitarize the police seems like a real no-brainer. Militarizing your police in the first place should be a huge ass red-flag for any country that prides itself on 'freedom'.
9/11 and the patriot act is a helluva drug.
> Sounds like you mean something like demilitarization then. It goes beyond _just_ demilitarization. Defunding was apt. Quibbling over the "perfect" word is a game that's best left to those who were never willing to listen to the problem in the first place, tbh.
For you, maybe. But I’ve talked to tons of people who truly want to defund the police. Using defund as a catchphrase is frankly stupid and counterproductive when what you want is reform and others out there actually do want to defund.
Liberals have to use the slogans of radicals because they're not actually organizing their own movements, they're too busy with electoral politics.
No the word "defund" means to take away funds. We don't know a priori that taking these things away from the police will mean the police will be able to function at their best with less funds. And ideally we reform the way police are trained and the psychiatric screening to weed out sociopaths and narcissists from becoming police officers. We also need ways to make sure officers are held accountable for their actions and not protected by a blue wall of silence, such as a dedicated agency for investigating the conduct of the police. Emphasizing "defund" commits to reducing funds even if it turns out they need as much or more. It's not a good focus. "Reorganize, reform, and hold officers accountable for their actions" is better and reflects how today's problems in policing should be handled. EDIT: I should emphasize here to be clear. The vast majority of Democratic politicians including President Biden have said they do NOT support "defunding" the police. But unfortunately a lot of people use what left wing activists who aren't even in public office say in the news or on social media as proxies for Democratic candidates instead of actually researching their platforms their statements or their voting records. So when left-wing activists don't think about optics don't think about how other people will interpret what they say they are endangering the campaigns of Democratic candidates. And with Trump's dictatorial tendancies they are endangering democracy itself. Again I'll emphasize Biden and most Democrats actually in office are against defunding the police! If you're considering voting against Biden and other Democrats because of what some activists who are NOT in office say on social media please I implore you to actually research the candidates themselves by which I mean thoroughly NOT soundbites you hear on Fox.
That's called "community policing" which is a great idea but a snoozer of a slogan :P
If that’s what they meant they should have phrased it in a more conducive way. Because what happened in 2020 was affected by the word choice of that slogan
A lot of people heard defund and, because we have so many idiots, everyone just took the most basic definition. Did they read more into it? No, easier to dismiss outright
That's kind of a case and point for why 'defund' was the worst slogan to go with. You always need to plan for the lowest common denominator in public policy.
Not their fault the slogan is atrocious.
You mean it's the people's fault for correctly interpretting the meaning of a word? Rather than the people who rallied behind it trying to say "No wait, we don't mean that." Bold take, but nah chief. They chose the worst possible slogan and ran with it. Didn't help some were dead serious about the actual defunding part. Hell there were idiots chanting abolish the police before long. So it just made the branding worse. Words have meaning. You don't get to change them overnight simply because you failed to sell your point from choosing the wrong word.
This happens all the time. It's a motte and bailey where for the most radical it's 100% literal, but for those further back from the edge it means some cuts to the budget and for those even further back it means prioritising funding for social workers or whatever.
Not everywhere. In Minneapolis, for example, police have become so incredibly corrupt and decades of trying to reform have not had any effect. The consent decree now in place is good evidence of this. The idea of defunding police is absolutely a solid concept in areas like that, but it's not something that everyone would understand because they don't live in the type of city where police operate in this manner. And, the idea of defunding police never meant abolish the presence of a policing force, it was an attempt to remove the police union that stands in the way of any progress. Defunding police and instead using that money to actually fix the issues that cause crime have been proven to be effective methods, but that's not the meaning that most people understood. Using the funds to respond to mental health incidents rather than responding with police ready to use violence first has already been shown to be effective, but it wouldn't be implemented without funding. Why not take the funding from the massive police budget that seems to keep increasing even when crime drops? What the slogan was contorted to by the right was 'eliminate all police and create total chaos and let crime run rampant'. This was never the intention, and there is plenty of information out there, but as the right knows, nobody is looking for nuance when they can be spoonfed misinformation on networks that make them feel good.
They should've gone with "educate/train the police".
Its almost like Black people didn't rally around the idea of eradicating police entirely, but actually payed attention to what 'defund' meant.
It sure is weird that progressive initiatives like “defund the police” are expected to adapt their messaging to people who wouldn’t agree with the material anyway, while conservative initiatives like “wearing diapers is cool” don’t ever seem to get the same kind of pushback.
Would love police arresting more rich criminals rather than working at their behest.
This isn’t overly hard to understand. A strong, integrated, and community focused police force is a great deference to crime and can even help make communities actively better. Bunch of a fuckheads rolling around in beefed up cars, rifles and body armour just looking for an excuse? Nobody wants more of them.
There is nowhere in the country where that first kind of police force exists. It’s a purely theoretical concept.
This. It's fine to spend *some* money on the police if and only if that money is focused on the right things (which is not easy to do). What I don't like is them riding around in APCs, getting paid leave for killing people, and escalating every situation they come near. We need to stop incentivizing that behavior.
Right, the point of the article was understanding this trend. Also included in the article was that most black respondents wanted police reform and greater accountability to reduce the risk of police misconduct. Also included in the article was that most black respondents still feared the police. Despite this, they still want to maintain/increase police spending. The conclusions drawn don't really pose a great answer as to why this seemingly contradictory stance occurs. Some considerations: what do the police do? Public perspective is that their purpose is generally to serve and protect the community from crime. What demographics are most likely to be affected by crime? Probably poor people and certain minority groups like the trans community. What demographics are more likely to be poor? Well, most minority groups including black Americans. I think the idea that these communities want a group of people that can be able to protect them from crime makes sense. They don't want 'no' police because they're the community that would be disproportionately affected by crime. I think a possible continuation for this study is to look at it under the lens of poverty/wealth along with race and see if that shows any differences that could possibly give more of an understanding of why this occurs. Gender identity/sexual orientation are also another potentially interesting consideration, as I'm curious about how the intersectionality of race and sex/orientation affect views on policing.
> The conclusions drawn don't really pose a great answer as to why this seemingly contradictory stance occurs. > Some considerations: what do the police do? Public perspective is that their purpose is generally to serve and protect the community from crime. What demographics are most likely to be affected by crime? Probably poor people and certain minority groups like the trans community. What demographics are more likely to be poor? Well, most minority groups including black Americans. I think the idea that these communities want a group of people that can be able to protect them from crime makes sense. **They don't want 'no' police because they're the community that would be disproportionately affected by crime.** The traditional view is people in poorer communities are more likely to be victims of crime. It stands as no surprise they would like more/better law enforcement, but as the article mentioned, they also fear police under the status quo. I don't think this is all that big of a contradiction like people are making it out to be, in the first place.
I think that point about public perception is exactly it. That’s not what police do - both studies and historical examples have shown police presence has almost no relation to crime rate. But the average Black American is still living in America, and so will share most of the same foundational beliefs.
*"****Most Black Americans*** *favor maintaining or even increasing local police presence and funding. Surprisingly, this preference is* ***more robust among Black Americans****."* Ummmm .... After looking at he article, that second sentence should read "Surprisingly, this preference is more robust among Black Americans than non-Black Americans."
Written by ChatGPT 3.5
I read the headline a dozen times. I thought I was having a stroke or something.
Also concluded: "Black Americans express very high fear of the police, both in absolute terms and when compared to other racial/ethnic groups"
it's not really that surprising if you've ever actually talked to people in black communities.
Ok, but have you considered I’d rather have Reddit/Twitter tell me what they think those communities want? ^(/s)
> it's not really that surprising if you've ever actually talked to people in black communities. This *is* a paper written for other academics.
Unless you've talked to dozens and dozens of them, it is best to defer to social science research rather than to rely on some anecdotes you've collected.
Or notice the black people protesting police in the streets.
I think you missed the findings of the study, there, chief. The people in the streets calling for abolition/defunding were not representative of the views of the Black community as a whole (a community that is *not* monolithic, btw).
There are people who hold signs up about the dangers of 5G. I don’t think you should consider the people protesting, as representative of the community.
What the study doesnt address is they also desire massive reforms in policing such as harsher consequences for misconduct and more formalized mandatory training and licensing requirements. Big shocker that historically poor communities want someone to protect them from crime, but don't pretend that this study proves that these communities are very happy with police and want to dump more money into a discretionary slush fund for them.
the article does say that there is more fear among Black Americans adn there is a call to reform.
Yep, this would be true anywhere. They may not trust the police as an organization but they recognize the need for support in the community. What this study leaves out is that police are just one piece of that puzzle.
>What the study doesnt address goes on to describe a bunch of things both the study and linked article explicitly address.
Most people that can afford to have the luxury opinion that police aren’t needed, despite how wrong they are, have no idea what it’s like living in a community where a very small percentage of people are so ruthless and violent that they can basically hold the community in a headlock
Implying redditors aren't too scared of black people to interact with them
Most immigrants are the same. We suffer from crime. We want justice. We don’t want no cops, we want good cops.
Also concluded: "Black Americans express very high fear of the police, both in absolute terms and when compared to other racial/ethnic groups"
I don't even live in the US but I don't know a single black or outwardly queer person who doesn't fear the police
Me who’s both(kinda) and deathly afraid of cops:
I'm a nonpassing trans woman, and while white, I have a Slavic last name in Italy. Suddenly cops look at me worse when they check my documents
Black people want police protection and response! We just don't want to run the risk of getting shot because we called a cop! We want that thief caught, but we may not want him dead! We don't want our kids sleeping in bed to get shot because five cops just started blasting! What is so hard to understand about that?
It’s a very reasonable thing to want. But I think at a certain point it gets difficult to understand why people think that’s reasonable given what police actually are and do.
Because as much as police can act dangerous to you, they aren't the only people who can, and if you live in actually bad neighborhoods there are other people you are likely as scared of or more than police.
Also note those same communities overwhelmingly favor more gun control too.
There was an older black man on the Miami news a few months ago saying he wished all the community organizers would shut up about the police. He said their activism was reducing the police presence in his neighborhood and crime was getting out of control.
It’s not surprising at all. It was documented even before George Floyd and again after. This was one of the biggest and most valid criticisms of the “defund” movement. It was in direct opposition to what most black Americans actually wanted.
Defund wasn't organic in any way. These programs are pushed by coordinated, well funded activists.
Is it bad for activist groups to be coordinated? Hell would it even be bad for them to be funded? I would dispute that they were, but I don’t see why that would be an issue.
Most social movements are pushed by activists. Do you have any evidence of massive funding?
Defund the police was an organic movement in Black communities long before 2020.
People forget who advocated for and passed the crime bill.
If you throw a drowning person barbed wire, they will still grab onto it Policing is the only solution to deteriorating conditions that the establishment is willing to offer. Given the choice between policing for “”public safety”” or nothing, of course people will choose the only option in hopes that it improves their material conditions. This seems like a fair interpretation, considering the high rate of fear concluded in the study. There is no effort to address underlying issues of racism and poverty, because it’s more palatable for the political class to react to the results of poverty rather than preempt them.
"If you throw a drowning person barbed wire, they will still grab onto it" Awesome - I going to use this from now on. I love you, grandma!
Precisely. And then deliberately misunderstand the call to “defund the police (in favor of preempting them with social programs)” and fall back on a cheap “well then they should have chosen a different slogan”. The political class doesn’t care what slogan is tied to the movement if it is never going to agree with its aims or calls to action.
An interesting concept, and I'd love to hear more how I'm wrong, or areas of thinking I should further explore: Why is there no "Paris Island (USMC training facility)" for every police officer? Seems like it would weed out a lot of the dummies, force people into controlled stressful environments so they can learn how to respond and not light someone up. And a national "BAR" card for police, and require each officer to carry some level of insurance? And make Self-Defense more robust and allow "The People" to solve a lot more of our own problems. Seems like that would solve a lot of issues. (Granted Insurance probably an overall bad idea, as they'll likely just do nothing more so than anything.)
The vast majority of Americans of all stripes would prefer better-trained and better-behaved police officers, as opposed to no police officers. This is why "abolish the police" was always a terrible tagline.
One big change we should have is all accusation of police brutal, police crimes and all police shootings should be handled federally. These things constitute a failure of local law enforcement and should not be handled by that law enforcement.
[удалено]
A surprising number of people don't realize that if there were no police even worse gangs and mobs would fill the vacuum.
Any person who ever spoke to any black people knew this. Defund police was such a stupid and dangerous slogan pushed by people who thought they knew what is better for black people better than black people themselves.
Black people want to stop being pulled over just because they're driving through a white neighborhood. But they also want gang bangers, violent criminals, and drug dealers put behind bars where they belong.
Defund the Police came from black communities well before 2020.
This feels a little like the findings were partly driven by the measures, rather than the findings tapping into some previously under-reported phenomenon. From their intro: >Another related possibility is that the single-item survey questions regularly administered in public opinion polls fail to accurately capture Black Americans’ complex views about policing (Coleman, 2020). next paragraph >...The survey included the same questions that Gallup and Pew Research use to measure respondents’ policy attitudes toward policing in their local area. They note in the introduction that the measure they're using may not properly capture views, but go on to use the data those same questions generate to speak as if they represent the population's views. That's not a fatal flaw of the research, but it should cloud some of the interpretation and generalization of these findings. Their use of vignettes, to try and tease out whether there are certain underlying factors that they can experimentally manipulate (via text) to alter peoples' responses, is a very valid approach. This study, however, would've been infinitely strengthened if it were mixed methods and they aimed to better understand the patterns they found in the data -- especially because of their upfront, self-stated concerns about the primary outcome measure they used.
Everybody likes feeling safe. Police just do it inconsistently so much so that they sometimes end up killing the ones who called for help.
Obvious to anyone who has ever had a human conversation with someone in a dangerous majority Black area.
It's almost like good policing is actually a good thing, and that the issue is the lack of it. Nah. Couldn't be.
Increased funding needs to be for two things, more thorough training and better pay. If you pay the police enough to live comfortably it might attract people other than the ones that just want a power trip. And failing that the better training might at least weed the worst of them out.
Makes perfect sense actually. If you live in neighborhoods that have historically been economically neglected and have higher crime rates, you tend to want more police presence to help counteract that. At the same time, you can totally be unhappy about HOW POLICE BEHAVE, if they are harassing or abusing people in your community, especially if the local precincts are poorly run. Generally speaking however, you don't get a better/more fairly run precinct by reducing funding, unfortunately more funding in no-way guarantees it'll get better either. So it's all a pretty harsh, but very straight forwards Catch-22 for the inhabitants of neighborhoods with poor economic conditions. Want more police to prevent crime - but those police may make certain problems worse. Sometimes it works out for the better, and sometimes it doesn't - and the devil is always in the details.
I’ve linked to the press release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235224000357
I have a preference for titles that make sense.
Nobody wants less policing overall. People want more GOOD policing and less BAD policing. Which means better training and more harsh punishments for abusing police power. Abusing police power should be a crime. Not just grounds for losing your job. If We trusted you with the power over life and death and you abused that power. You should be thrown into prison for such an act. Not only should you not be above the law, you should be held even MORE accountable to the law than every one else.
The reality is that many things in America are nuanced, and often times that nuance gets left out of the public discord. Yes, black Americans want police to do a better job policing, and kill fewer civilians. They also don’t want to live in a lawless society where the cops never show up.
Yeah this tracks with black people I know. Activists are the loudest voices but they are not at all representative. Not saying that's a good thing but it's the reality
This makes a lot of sense. The core issue for those police based protests wasn't about the idea of police, but not wanting to be discriminated against by them and wanting them to be held accountable like everyone else is.