To Serve And Protect

It also has a lot to do with how Police are trained. Huge amounts of money goes into convincing local PDs to train like the military, act like the military, and be equipped like the military. Many of the training videos and techniques prepare officers to behave and react like military men in a war zone with the citizens they arrest being painted like rebels as if they were terrorist in Baghdad. As someone who trains in a field of law enforcement ( a juvenile detention center) I will tell you what gets wired gets fired. If you train a cop to be on edge expecting that everyone has or is a huge threat, then give them the gear for it, they are going to act on it. Dallas has made huge progress over the last 7 years with its PD because it has rejected this model and focused on community based policing. Dallas cops have been trained to be a part of their community and not the occupiers of their communities.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ing-those-things-could-now-be-more-difficult/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/dallas-police/490583/

 

For the record I completely agree that police need training to prevent them from being killed on the job, but in my experience this is often done in a matter that stresses what is the potential for danger vs what is the actual danger.

For example in our deescalation training we historically taught that we have to continually look for the potential risk and act in accordingly. The problem with that is that it is a horrible way to make decisions as it only measures the worst case scenario and ignores other factors like frequency or magnitude. If we approached everyday situations like that we would never fly in an airplane as it has the potential to be catastrophic. When you add frequency into the equation you see that while plane crashes are quite horrific, they very seldom happen in the US.

If you run police through terrorist based, psycho killer based training all day they will see everyone on their beat as a terrorist, psycho killer. Add this to the fact that it is one of the hardest jobs in the world and the broken perspective that poor minorities are dangerous criminals, and boom you have the recipe for an unarmed therapist getting shot while laying down.

 

Let me preface this by saying that I understand that a lot of folks will not like what I am about to say...

But that conditioning is not just being done at the police academy, its being done on the TV, at the movie theater, and especially on the radio. Billions of dollars are being generated by folks who sell the completely false image of black men and women that is consumed not just by other races and effects their view of blacks, but black folks and greatly effects their view of themselves. I don't want to go off on a tangent regarding lost person hood, but this is a huge problem in America that is just ignored or even celebrated.

 

well that makes it way better, he was actually trying to kill the autistic man playing with a train and missed at that distance... glad that is all cleared up.

 

Actually really good to hear Barnes, seriously, congrats brotha. And we'll obviously not agree on this, but hey, what can you do? And this recent shooting, it looks bad, really bad. Someone is losing their job.

 

I think a balance of training is a good thing. I don't agree with people wanting to de-militrize the police for several obvious reasons. Shooting sprees are becoming more and more frequent. Gangs are better equipped than actual police depts. Im sure many of you remember the LA robbers that outgunned the LAPD...

Depts are starting to focus more and more on community relations, but don't expect depts to abandon their training on officer Safety.

 

Well peacekeepers and enforce the law as well. I'm not sure what departments focus just soley on these life or death scenarios, but I don't think its a bad thing to do so.

I've been trained over and over on what we call "officer safety". While we don't want to be overbearing, we also don't want to be complacent. It's actually a pretty common occurance where we don't do a pat search of some kind, and the person has a gun, or a knife, its just better for us to be safe than sorry.

 

I am not saying that we should stop having swat teams or special groups within the PDs that can interacts with the rare need for heavy force. I am saying that training all police officers like they are in a combat zone and having them drive armored vehicles around town on a regular bases doesn't help anyone. Cops can't see the people they work to keep safe as the enemy waiting around every corner.

Furthermore, I never said stop training on officer safety. As someone who understands the realities of that pencil easily becomes a shiv, I know first hand that officer safety is of up most importance. The problem with the thinking that is currently going on is that it leads officers to see everyone as a threat to there life and to react as if everyone is going to attack. Imagine if drivers ed was that way. Driving a car can be extra ordinarily dangerous. It is literally a life and death exercise. Should we train all drivers to operate like the freeway is a death trap? Of course not, it would cause accidents to go up because people are overly hyped. Same with cops, my officers, etc. If you train that everyone has a weapon, you act like everyone has a weapon. And instead of de-escalating situations, you over react and escalate it putting yourself and the other person in harms way. I have seen it first hand literally hundreds of times. Bad situations made worse by staff over reacting. Staff that become the aggressor because they have been taught that its me or them and I am going home tonight, when remaining level headed solves the issue. Perfect examples of the teacher in Austin and the shooting in Miami yesterday.

Listen, I'm not just making this stuff up, I work as a part of law enforcement(I'm a Juvenile Supervision Officer and Juvenile Probation Officer), and with Police Departments. I have had long conversations with great cops who will tell you the same thing. I have seen great cops do great things for kids. I also am a certified training in de-escalation and have been training and doing it for years.


We don't need this going on in America: