[imagist]

> You are woefully misinformed if you think that police in the US are taught that violence is the only tool in their repertoire.

"There have been too many lives lost to police killings. Too many phone calls telling families that their loved ones, particularly young black men, won’t be coming home. But in most cases, it isn’t because individual police officers are consciously racist or think black lives don’t matter. It is because officers perform the way they are trained to perform."[1]

"Officers are trained to shoot until the threat is no longer present."[2]

Paul Waldman: Did you think what the officers did [in Powell's shooting] was appropriate? It seems pretty clear that that's standard operating procedure.

Maria Haberfeld: Yes it is, absolutely. [3]

> And even more so that you would say that police presence is the cause of violence.

Could you explain to me how a person with a gun could ever decrease violence?

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/police-g...

[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/19/ferguso...

[3] http://prospect.org/article/expert-us-police-training-use-de...

[TeMPOraL]

> Could you explain to me how a person with a gun could ever decrease violence?

The way every standing army out there does it by just being there and having guns?

As for the quotes, the biggest issue I see with the police brutality topic is lack of hard numbers. "There have been too many lives lost to police killings" is meaningless in this context. How many? 5 this year? 50? 50 000?

Eyeballing numbers from [0], the US - a 300 million country - has about one million police officers with arrest powers. 5, or even 50 deaths over one million officers is, frankly, an irrelevant statistical blip, not a major and important issue.

Now I'm not saying there is no issue in the US. I haven't seen the numbers, because they tend to not show up in the discussion. It seems to me however, that this is another media-driven issue - i.e. something that does not exist until media start talking about it, and worst case may actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy afterwards.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_...

[ubernostrum]

The way every standing army out there does it by just being there and having guns?

Now contrast with all the posts going around social media from military veterans explaining the training they got on rules of engagement, including use of deadly force as an absolute last resort when all other options fail after explicit attempts, and look at how often the narrative with police is simply shoot first, then shoot more, then keep shooting. And that's without getting into increasingly-recorded incidents where we see things like officers retroactively planting guns on corpses to back up a claim that "I had to shoot him, he was going for a gun!"

Also:

5, or even 50 deaths

Try 2.8 per day[1] that we know of, which is over one thousand per year.

http://www.vox.com/a/police-shootings-ferguson-map

[imagist]

> The way every standing army out there does it by just being there and having guns?

And how is that, exactly?

The cold war, where much greater threats than the threat of standing armies were at play, exhibited itself in violence all over the world.

It shouldn't require explanation that the threat of violence doesn't prevent violence.

[MaysonL]

The most peaceful Central American country doesn't have a standing army – and that's arguably a main reason it is the most peaceful.

[TeMPOraL]

Is it? Or maybe the fact it's implicitly protected by all the other standing armies?

I'm not sure which country you're talking about so I can't tell.

[MaysonL]

Costa Rica