Many times the real solution is just to form a new police department. Let everybody go, start from scratch.

We should also remember that cops are also murdered. Here is a memorial page for those who were shot and killed this year. Perhaps the problem isn’t as simple as “cops are racist and bad”.

Cops are racist and bad and overwhelmingly violent.

We should also remember that cops are also murdered. — NOS4A2

That is true. They do sometimes have to deal with dangerous situations.

Cops are racist and bad and overwhelmingly violent. — StreetlightX

Some of them, not all.

he US is orders of magnitude more barbarous than the rest of the world, when it comes to their cops, as reflected in their social policy, quite specific to the US. — StreetlightX

That's a ridiculous statement.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

Facts don't care about your feelings — StreetlightX

Facts also don't care about your extremist, all or nothing way of thinking.

The only thing extremist is the list of dead black men that continue to pile up in the street on video - and not on video - every other day. And the unchecked police brutality is currently being exercised on the streets of the US and being documented all over.

Police in the US are a public health hazard. In fact, US police kill more in days than other countries do in years. This is of course ridiculous, but not for the reasons you state.

If you want some big-picture reading, Verso are even offering a free ebook on the topic right now, which you might use to educate yourself with.

StreetlightX, I think I found the reason, because I didn't notice your reply here:

Sorry for that, but this thread goes too fast for me. I was referring to your later answer, but now it makes more sense. I'll try to answer, even if you might not have the patience anymore.

I think this isn't because neoliberalism, because the reasons are engrained far earlier than contemporary neoliberalism. Basically the welfare state in the US has had large gaps all the time, there has always been a huge wealth gap and this has created povetry unlike seen in other OECD countries. Absolute povetry hasn't been eradicated as in other OECD countries. And the wealth gap is indeed also racial in the US, even if it now evident that a portion of white America is falling into similar misery. For Latin American countries, you can see a similar phenomenon with the gap between the native Indian community and European descendants.

Yet I still will argue that you can be compared to other countries.

The main purpose of the police is the same. What differs is that the US legal system is far more about retribution and punishment than a long term effort to prevent crime. This in my view is one of the cultural facts where in order to change the culture should be changed. And can the culture change? Yes, but likely it won't as the discussion never will go so far to make it clear for the population where the problem lies.

PTSD among police is something that should be considered.

Symptoms of PTSD were frequently endorsed; for example, 30% of officers reported having intrusive thoughts or nightmares, and 22% reported avoiding situations or places that reminded them of a traumatic event. With respect to the CAGE items assessing alcohol abuse, 14% of officers believed they should “cut down” on their drinking behavior, and 3.3% reported having an “eye-opener” first thing in the morning to get rid of a hang-over or steady their nerves (data not shown). Of the three conditions assessed, PTSD was the most common (23.8%), followed by alcohol abuse (18.7%) and depression (8.8%). Overall, 40.0% of respondents had at least one of the three mental-health conditions (Fig. 1).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4089972/

Especially since it negatively effects “response inhibition”.

This study provides evidence of heightened attention and/or arousal in police officers as indicated by the generally greater P3 amplitude in police compared to controls during a task requiring sustained attention and inhibitory control. Greater PTSD symptom severity in trauma-exposed individuals may affect frontal cognitive control systems related to response inhibition.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167876013000597?via%3Dihub

I don't think that the US is incomparable. That is of course too strong. But it is nonetheless unique in scale and political engineering that encourages the problem.

And those police fatalities have gone down:





Hence it's far more safer to be a policeman now than earlier. Also, killings by police have gone down. And of course, it's not only African Americans that are shot or killed. But that really doesn't matter.

The comparison between the US and other countries still tells a lot:

It is of course unsurprising that the most murderous police force in the world has PTSD problems. It must of course be traumatizing to have to continually kill and main your own citizens in public. And of course cops can quite literally walk out and quit their jobs - unlike those who they regularly murder, who cannot quit being black or poor.

US police kill more in days than other countries do in years. This is of course ridiculous, but not for the reasons you state. — StreetlightX

Not all countries. Brazil is #1 followed by Venezuela. In terms of rate per 10 million, there are 32 countries higher than the US.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country

Of course it's still absurdly high, but not the most murderous police force.

Yep. If Americans think now it's bad, they just can look to Latin America for a glimpse how much worse it can be.

(Of course, the statistic of Syria is a bit absurd when it's estimated that about half a million have died in the civil war.)

Fair enough. Not that it's exactly distinguished company that the US keeps around itself - Pakistan, Mexico and Iran, among others.

Oh yes and then there was that study where about 40% of cops are domestic abusers, can't forget that one. One assumes when they come home from beating up protestors, they beat their wives as a digestif to help them sleep more soundly.

Cute that "liberatrain" in this thread is of course crying over cops. Because as we all know libertarians stand for nothing and are literal public bathroom scum.

Then what might account for the appearance that police/citizen interactions are getting worse?

You know the answer, everybody packs a video camera in his or her pocket and a truly easy way to get it published now days exists.

And just like with the Pandemic, I think we truly should set higher standards for this millennium as earlier times. The fatalities caused by the police ought to go down. The US society could still be less violent, you know.

Like the country YOU live in, NOS4A2.

Hey I found an excerpt from Vitale's book that I mentioned!:

"It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar David Bayley argues: "The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defence against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth."

Bayley goes on to point out that there is no correlation between the number of police and crime rates... The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviours of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements. Bayley argues that policing emerged as new political and economic formations developed, producing social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal and informal processes. This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the 18th century: slavery, colonialism and the control of a new industrial working class."

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/7kpvnb/end-of-policing-book-extract

It’s true. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and all that.

Ahhh so much good literature being published right now:

"American liberalism has a distinctly contradictory relationship with black protest. On the one hand, liberals imagine themselves the best friends (in contemporary parlance, “allies”) of the cause of black equality. On the other, since at least the 1930s, liberals have recoiled from black militancy, convinced it served little purpose but to strengthen the hand of reactionaries... Though liberals like to talk a lot about the value of listening in moments like these, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they’d prefer not to."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/rioting-george-floyd-liberals-black-lives-matter

One piece of the problem that may or may not have been mentioned here is the role of police unions. In some places, Minneapolis among them, the police unions have protected bad behavior. This morning the head of the MPD union claimed that officers are being scapegoated. This from The Guardian:

The president of the Minneapolis police union has written to its members calling George Floyd a “violent criminal”, describing those protesting over his death as terrorists and criticizing the city’s political leadership for not authorizing greater use of force to stop the rioting.

The letter drew a swift rebuke from a former Minneapolis police chief who called it a disgrace.

Lt Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, defended the four officers involved in Floyd’s death... “What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd. The media will not air this. I’ve worked with the four defense attorneys that are representing each of our four terminated individuals under criminal investigation, in addition with our labor attorneys to fight for their jobs. They were terminated without due process,” wrote Kroll, according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Star Tribune.

Floyd had served time in prison for aggravated robbery but Chauvin could not have known that when he detained him. Video footage shows that Floyd was not behaving in a violent manner during his arrest, was not armed, and was not suspected of a violent crime.

Here's a picture of Kroll, speaking at a Trump rally in Minneapolis, 2019.

Yeah I read about this. Apparently the protestors travelled back in time to ensure Floyd would die and then kick off the good stuff.

When police unions are being run by trash like him, is it any wonder that American police are murderous thugs who beat their wives?

There are cops all over the country standing in solidarity with the protestors... check your sources my friend. I'm impressed by the overall population this time around. Hopefully something more is done to correct the issue...

Hashtag not all cops?

Another officer shot in the head in Vegas last night. Alive, but on life support.

https://fox59.com/news/officer-shot-in-the-head-in-las-vegas-on-life-support/

There are cops all over the country standing in solidarity with the protestors... — creativesoul

They are. Only to teargas protestors as soon as the news vans turn off. This is Philly one moment:

And about 5 minutes later:

Don't fall for the PR. It's the same shit abusive boyfriends do, buying flowers after punching their partners. Or in this case before.

Here is the woman Obama referenced in his article. Sad.

What's funny about this issue is that it's actually united liberals and conservatives against the lunatic fringe who support/are sympathetic to either violence against police or violence towards businesses/looting. I follow right-wing twitter and even the conservative hosts are talking about the need for police reform and obviously the injustice of the Floyd murder.

I was called a "one note liberal" earlier which is kind of funny because I don't remember the last time I was ever called a liberal. I'm center-right/libertarian.

The Root has some great headlines.

The Punk-Ass President Had Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed So He Wouldn’t Look Like a Bunker Bitch