LJ Idol: Season 9, Week 13: Open Topic

[ravenshrinkery]

I have a love-hate relationship with police. They are absolutely needed to maintain public order, as there are plenty of criminal elements that absolutely need to be dealt with by someone with lawful use of force. However I don't believe there is anything resembling enough outside supervision of what police do on a daily basis, or adequate

Comments

[i_17bingo]

The escalation is what bothers me. With the status quo for culture being so disrupted by generational changes, people are afraid of so much that, instead of trying to understand anything other than themselves, they hunker down with their beliefs and their guns and their youtube comments. To some, violence as a precautionary measure is the only sane thing to think about.

In Georgia recently, they passed a law allowing anyone to carry a gun anywhere, and within a day, a customer at a convenience store decided that a fellow customer didn't look like he should be armed, and he drew on him. No wonder everyone's scared.

So this only tangentially related to your essay, I realize, but still. Fear is on my mind a lot lately.

[ravenshrinkery]

Some people like to say an armed society is a polite society, but I don't think anything could be further from the truth. You're right, that attitude is what makes people afraid of each other and it should. The idea of everyone walking down the street with means to kill several people isn't exactly mitigated by everyone else having the same means. In fact it makes it more likely that such a situation would turn into a loose variant on a Mexican standoff likely to result in many innocent bystanders getting hit.

The theory behind police escalating conflict is that by doing so casualties are minimized by placing the situation under their control as quickly as possible. Long-term relationships aren't generally considered under this model. I tell police all the time that when they're in uniform they pretty much stop having a name. Their name is now "Cop". Whenever they encounter someone on the street that person associates with them all of the experiences they've had with police in the past, and will add this one to them.

[ryl]

There's an issue in My Fair City recently where there've been a few shootings at the projects. There's always a crowd of people around, a gun goes off, someone goes down, and everyone scatters. Then the police show up and no one will talk to them. There's an ingrained culture in our black community of no snitching. The families know who the shooter was and they go after them and the whole thing keeps getting worse.

It doesn't help that I've seen our current police chief in action when he was the chief of My Former Fair City and he is not the type of person who'd make that situation any better. He's above the law because he is the law, yanno?

[ravenshrinkery]

I'm surprised after decades that police in a lot of places haven't figured out why that is, and continue to just throw up their hands and blame the victims and bystanders. It's obvious if you ask any person of color, or anyone privilege-aware.

I see many a thuggish bully just out of high school take on the job because he had connections somehow to a local department. I've also heard of people being rejected from law enforcement because they were too smart or insightful, which might lead to use of discretion that might not support the party line. This idea that police can never let any disagreement between them appear in the public eye is a massive part of the problem.

When I lived in Rochester, NY there was a row over the then Chief distributing a memo detailing street slang, that was largely inaccurate and quite offensive. I can only presume to some degree police want this conflict in society. They actually could make their own lives easier.

[hosticle_fifer]

A recent controversy that annoys me is the Police Corporation thing - have you heard about that? Some taxpayer-funded departments have incorporated to pool resources. They just declared that the act of "incorporating" makes them a private organization that does not have to respond to FOIA requests.

There seems to be a huge difference between the local cops near me, whom I have always gotten on with, and the overreactionary militarized thugs you hear about on the news. Maybe I'm just lucky. What would go a LONG way towards improving public/police relations would be the actual prosecution of cops who execute people on camera, at least. A few weeks of paid administrative leave for killing someone who is handcuffed or subdued just doesn't cut it.

[ravenshrinkery]

I did hear about that, and I am pretty sure it is going to go absolutely nowhere, and if it does it will go a long way towards convincing me we live in a police state