Tomaeto/Tomoto
Are you suggesting that just by wording a job description that it left open season for LEO’s to open disregard of civil liberties on the population? That is working just wonderfully in Chicago, isn’t it?
When did this happen, approximately?
They watch too many episodes of “COPS”.
Are you serious?
“ALOT” isn’t a real word, you know.
I think a lot of “COPS Problems” as you refer to them stem from not getting paid enough.
I have posted numerous times that I was a peace officer and saw the job changing around the 80’s. The reason was LAWYERS looking to sue. For example, I arrested a guy for public intox. Took him home, up three flight of steps and handed him over to the wife. He later tried to traverse the stairs, fell two flights and I was sued for not arresting, incarcerating him. Cost the city a lot of money. From then on, NOOOOO breaks for PI,DUI,D&D or damn near anything.
Another issue is single officer cars. After initial training there is less effective molding of attitudes. Nominally in groups people will tend to conform to a more normal standards. There are also some cops that are just bad at dealing with people. I had a boss who was a NM State Trooper for a while. He had a coworker that could escalate any situation to a fight and then hose everybody (including cops) down with OC during the resultant fight.
There are still a lot of good cops on the streets. At my last work location I worked with the local sheriff's department quite a bit. They had a lot of really talented folks and I learned a lot from them.
They work for the government...
I think you hit the nail on the head. Most individual police officers are just decent citizens doing their job....although I do personally know some that are on power trips.
The real problem is the over-reach of the national and state level laws. It is not possible for ANYONE to avoid breaking some law these days. There are so many we can’t even know them all.
And who is the first line...the government face the people see? The police.
Take for example that black guy in NYC a few years ago who was stopped by the NYPD for selling bootleg cigarettes and ended up dying. The NYPD was charged with “racism” for this, but geeze.....the guy died for a few penny tax on a smoke.
The people who should have paid for this are the money-grubbing petty bureaucrats who set these taxes. THEY are the ones who should have had their neighborhoods marched through.
These petty thieves hide behind the face of the police...and the police pay for it.
Good topic. Thanks for posting.
The issue is respect. We used to respect the police on a human level. Society respected the uniform. Children had a healthy fear and respect. We respected the police to excersize discretion. We no longer respect them, the job and their authority.
Perhaps part of the problem stems from calling them “Cops” vs. Police or Police Officers
Psst - they’re still ‘peace officers’ in many states. Including California, where the cops actually do wrongfully shoot people regularly.
The problem began in the 1970s.
http://i.imgur.com/9KiLVek.png
A wave of police assassinations around the US prompted the police, with the encouragement of the federal government, to change their tactics from “Old West style” to “SWAT”. In practical terms this meant several things.
1) Police were now supposed to “establish control and dominance” in situations, even if their authority was already recognized by those involved. This led to many non-confrontational events becoming confrontational.
2) Police were encouraged to frequently brandish their gun, but as the expression goes, “a gun will not make a bad situation better, but it can make a good situation bad.”
This was made far worse because guns only have three “modes”: holstered, brandished, and firing. For the vast majority of situations, this isn’t enough; which is why many police just adore the Taser, because it gives them a lot more options that are less-than-lethal. Even more important because other weapons, like billy clubs, blackjacks and saps, were discouraged or forbidden.
http://i.imgur.com/9jiErT2.jpg
3) Police were encouraged to isolate themselves from the public. A cop or two in their car, who would patrol a large area, and not know or be known by those who lived there.
4) Paramilitarization. The idea of equipping the police with *military* weapons and equipment. This was made possible by the grotesque asset forfeiture system, a percentage of which was given to local police, as long as it was spent on surplus military weapons and equipment. In the later stages, communications equipment easy to monitor by the federal police. This began the movement to federalize local police operations.
5) Training and certification at police academies. This was done to standardize local police operations to conform to SWAT, and thus federal, tactics.
6) Paralleling all of this were court decisions and federal mandates that ignored reality in the pursuit of an imaginary equality. “Equality before the law” is a good idea, but “equality of police procedure” can be both annoying to the public and inefficient when done by the police.
For example, a drunken brawl between a couple in a blue collar bar (break it up, put them in jail to sober up, then let them go) is inherently different than two violinists arguing over which one is the bassoonist’s real girlfriend after a concert (tell them to behave and go home.)
Requiring the police to treat the two the same is neither wise nor sensible. And while both can be classified as “domestic disputes”, that is where the resemblance ends.
I think this ought to be in general chat
Now they're just swatting....everything. Every sitch is a swat call. Warrant for a guy selling drugs....SWAT, distraught female locked in a car with gun to her head....SWAT, teenager in a park with what looks like a weapon....SWAT.
In fact, swat team raids in the U.S. have risen from approx. 17,000 to over 80,000 in the past decade. All thanx to the militarization of local law enforcement.
Posse Comitatus...uh uh uuuuuuh. That no longer ties the hands of those charged with “protecting” us. Just take a look and you'll see, we now have military patrolling our streets, they just call’em....police.
You can get a good picture of how much we've changed just by going back through the history of this country to see what exactly constituted "law enforcement" at any given time. For generations, the classic symbol of law enforcement in America was the rural county sheriff. His role was very different from what police officers do today. There was never any illusion that people needed a sheriff to protect them -- since an armed citizenry was perfectly capable of protecting itself. In fact, the original role of a law enforcement officer was to protect accused criminals from law-abiding citizens -- by taking those criminals into protective custody where they awaited trial through a legitimate U.S. legal process.
The use of the term "outlaw" on the American frontier illustrates this perfectly. Contrary to popular belief, the word "outlaw" was not used to describe a person whose actions were "outside the law" from a standpoint of illegality. In fact, the term was used to describe a person whose actions were so reprehensible that he was no longer considered worthy of protection under the law -- i.e., he was living "outside the law" and therefore had forfeited any rights he may have had to due process, etc. So a person who was deemed an outlaw basically had a bounty put on his head, and any law-abiding citizen was free to do whatever was necessary (including killing the bastard) without fear of any legal trouble.
Of course, we've long forgotten what any of this even means anymore. But that's to be expected when you live in a nation whose government is perfectly comfortable having its agents grope law-abiding citizens at "TSA checkpoints," while that same government openly acknowledges that it cannot -- and will not -- do anything to keep millions of invaders from pouring across our southern border.
Political activists within certain areas and Obama's policies regarding how they should ignore some very serious laws or be harassed from her e to kingdom-come play a bigger role than calling them "Peace Officers".
the feral denizens of American cities do not recogize the laaws of civilized people. tribal law prevails
When watching old reruns of COPS, I frequently think a lot of the behavior I see would end up getting the perp killed today.
