I assume in your mind I am making some racist point about the criminal nature of the negro or something along those lines.

But I'll ignore that, and answer regardless because I think it is an important point. Anyways, actually probably the biggest thing is a social safety net, so the vast majority of people aren't incentivized to put themselves in a position where violent criminality seems like a rationale decision. So police officers in these countries with much lower crime have completely different dynamics and interactions with the public.

I don't think that police officers in Sweden are drawing from a significantly different pool of people than ones in the US. So what you view as bad policing isn't innate to the police officers. There is definitely a giant environmental component. Most reasonable people I think will accept this.

Where we may diverge is that a progressive may feel the biggest environmental problem that needs to be fixed is the culture of policing; whereas I view this as a derivative of a bigger problem, which is the culture of criminality which is itself a derivative of desperation and lack of perceived viable alternatives.

And just attacking the culture of policing, especially in the cynical way it is being done right now, without addressing the larger issues, is likely to just make things worse IMO.

Huh, weird that you've spent your whole posting career opposing people who support things like "a social safety net".

Well, my biggest problem with them is the mean, not the abstract ends. For example, I never had very much bad to say about Bernie Sanders (FWIW I don't think I ever had anything bad to say), and there was even a very brief moment Victor and I seemed to be on the same side during the height of Bernie mania a few months ago.

I don't think racializing (and other non class identity groupings) everything is the way to go about this. I think it is likely to make things worse, and in my dark moments I wonder if that is actually the goal, and the entire progressive movement of today is a giant Trojan horse.

Trojan horse for what ?

There is a small center movement that Bernie was a part of. There is what's called the 'progressive movement' that includes Biden and Pelosi and is as corporate and center right as you can get.

Are you saying the Biden/Pelosi progressive party is a Trojan Horse for the radical right or are you saying the bland, normal center party is a Trojan Horse for the radical left.

Because we don't even have a left in the US, let alone 'radical left'.

The study that you apparently didn’t read, but are exalting, gives a bunch of examples. You should read it as skeptically as you can!

Suspended licenses as well.

Police are fine we just need to direct their energy to good.

Instead of investigating violent crime and responding to 911 calls they should storm in to boardrooms and break up mergers that don’t benefit the common man.

How does a cop know that a driver has a suspended license prior to pulling that driver over?

Interesting :

" Numerous studies have demonstrated that race can affect a police officer’s decision to stop and ticket a motorist. With a large sample of traffic cases from a major city in the Pacific Northwest, the present study examined the effects of driver race on criminal justice decisions in the street and in the courtroom. Using municipal court data, analyses showed that police officers were more likely to cite African Americans than other races for failing to produce a driver’s license or proof of automobile insurance but were less likely to ticket African Americans for committing a moving violation. Police officers were equally as likely to ticket White and African American drivers for equipment violations, which can be used as a pretext for more intrusive police practices. Logistic regression analyses showed that African Americans were more likely than other racial groups to have their traffic tickets dismissed in court for a lack of evidence or probable cause. A race-based pursuit of questionable traffic cases can undermine the perceived legitimacy of the police and degrade public support for police officers, particularly within African American communities. "


http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/doc..._decisions.pdf

So AA's are twice as likely to get the secondary citation of not having documents but are no more likely to be cited for actual violations. And they are more likely to have their tickets dismissed.

It's almost as if some police are fishing.......

I did read the study. Addressing alternative explanations was one of the reasons for the veil of darkness test. I'm pretty amazed that you read the study if you believe that it supports your position.

In any case, I was posing my question to Inso0, who effectively admitted that he believes black people drive differently than white people. When asked to elaborate, he declined, claiming that he couldn't do so without coming across as racist, at least in the eyes of most other posters.

This. I guess that it is possible that a police officer in a small town could know that the town drunk drives a particular car and has a suspended license. But it doesn't seem very likely in populated areas.

That’s not racist! That is just good common sense! Like if you see a South American, you should see them as somebody who can chop off your head with a machete at a moments notice. This is not racism. It is just a reaction born out of pragmatism.

The problem is we are not attracting the right people to the job at all right now. In fact we are attracting all the wrong people.

The first thing that needs to be done is to redefine the responsibilities of the police by creating a much more narrowed focus set of parameters for the job. Secondly we need to redefine who we want for those jobs. Right now they recruit dumb, mindless drones whose primary skill is following instructions. (This makes the police murder cult that much more insidious).

The number one issue with police unions (and many other unions) is that they make it virtually impossible to discipline and remove bad workers with any efficacy. If that could be resolved without blowing the unions up it would be great, but I don’t think it can.

As for how to deal with pay and benefit issues without a union? That is really tough when 40% of the country lives to make sure people make as little as possible.

Many policeman make absurd salaries and most of them are really, really, really, really bad at their jobs of protecting and servicing. Obviously if you believe their job is “menace and mayhem” you might feel differently.

You dated an African American woman? Oh so not a racist then.

Just kidding, you are on a racist steamroll in this thread. Congrats. The cream really does rise to the top.

Ins0’s source on racial driving discrepancies:

It depends on the municipality, but I would disagree with Rococo re: the pay not being great. In general it is still a very good paying career for someone with no college degree or other valuable trade skill.

I agree that they seem to attract mainly the authoritative macho types and it seems to be a common landing spot for people coming out of the armed forces. If you require a college degree of some kind, you probably filter out a lot of the 'too dumb to get through college so I'll just become a cop/join the army' crowd. I don't think that's the unreasonable hurdle these days that it has been historically.

Another issue is the nature of civil service exams. As it stands, as long as someone can pass an exam or two, and the requisite background checks, they are pretty much entitled to the job once their number comes up. Unlike the FBI or CIA who are exempt from this type of system and can pick and choose from the best candidates, Police Departments just hire everyone going down a list.

When you combine low education requirements and a hiring policy that just takes on anyone and everyone with an incredibly complex job you are sort of setting people up to fail. This is especially true when you consider many departments only train officers for a bare few weeks.

The last, and probably biggest, problem is that police are such a hodge podge of state/county/city/township departments, with wildly varying degrees of training/pay/standards, that it is an unbelievably disorganized mess. There are no national standards, and I don't foresee there being any any time soon.

Education requirements vary by municipality. I wasn't suggesting that the pay was poor for someone with no education beyond high school and no trade skills. I was suggesting that the pay wasn't high enough (in light of the risk and weird hours) to attract what marksman described as the "right people to the job".

There is a reason why police departments hire pretty much anyone who is willing to take the job. It's the same reason why pretty much anyone can join the armed forces in the United States.

At current staffing and pay levels, I am extremely skeptical about whether police departments could fill their ranks if they raised the bar significantly for hiring.

The easy response is: "So what. If police forces shrink by 20-30%, that's fine." Maybe that's right. But it's a complex question. There would be benefits and costs that everyone should acknowledge at the outset. And those benefits and costs almost certainly would vary from area to area.

I think it works in a world with free/low cost college tuition where a much larger % of people are getting degrees. You could theoretically, at some point, even begin targeting people with desirable degrees such as human/social services, etc. If you want cops that look at themselves as a community service, rather than an occupying force, I think that's how you get them.

I think, ideally, local governments should work with community colleges to develop things like 2 year policing associates degrees like they already offer for things like nursing and EMT. So you either sign up with a Bachelor's or your 2 year Policing Associates. That has to be a far better solution than the (or on top of the) 8 weeks or whatever training they get in some places. It would also not even come out of the police budget.

None of this happens as long as they continue to just sign up every Tom, Dick, and Harry that walks in. You may be right that it is just not feasible now, I just don't know. I was just laying out where I think the systemic issues lie.

In a lot of major metro areas in the United States, you need some amount of college credit or military service to be eligible to be a police officer. In NYC, it's 60 hours of college credit or 2 years of military service. In rural areas and smaller police forces, I suspect that you can get hired with no college and no military service.

I agree with you that the best police officers will have a community service mindset rather than an occupying force mindset. Unfortunately, there is a very real feedback loop in the United States. People who are oriented toward community service -- for example, people who traditionally are attracted to social work -- don't want to work as police officers for at least two reasons. First, they don't believe that police forces share their values (certainly correct to a degree). Second, they are well aware that people like marksman think police forces are "murder cults."

As a result, many people who would make good police officers shy from the job at the moment, and police forces end up with a lot of officers who have the occupying force mindset, which of course reinforces marksman's views about the police.

It's a hard cycle to break.

FWIW there is exactly this. There are AA and BA criminal justice degrees, and many people interested in becoming police officers take them before going through academy training. But it isn't mandatory or organized through a government agency (at least to the best of my knowledge).

Not only is it a hard cycle to break, but nothing going on right now with all the protests and policy changes is doing anything but working against breaking the cycle (IMO).

Whether most people realize it or not, at this point I think it is perfectly reasonable to conclude BLM is a Trojan Horse whose actual purpose is to deteriorate relations between the police and community, and destabilize society making real reform that much more difficult.

Where are you getting this information from, out of curiosity. Anecdotally, I knew a couple people that were unable to pass the psych evaluations. Regardless, I was never under the impression everyone who wanted to be a police officer could be. I am curious why you are under this impression.

Oh right, the real damage to a community comes not from the people who kill members of the community with impunity, but from the people who speak out against that.