[craftinator]

> You need police to be well equipped

No; no I don't. I need police to be better equipped upstairs, maybe take some queues from the British or German police.

A slim portion of the American population is heavily armed, and police don't deal with armed suspects in something like 99% percent of 911 calls. In that <1% of cases, we can call SWAT. That's why SWAT exists, to be a highly trained, militarized version of the police.

[hourislate]

>I need police to be better equipped upstairs, maybe take some queues from the British or German police.

British Police

When they are not arresting mothers or 80 year olds for not wearing a mask or holding a sign.

https://www.dumpert.nl/?selectedId=7998859_cd38b070

German Police

They actually called in Jet Fighters, Helicopters and a few thousand active military. After have at least 1000 police looking too. In total over 5000 personal to find one guy in a forest. Seems excessive.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/17/german-police-...

[craftinator]

Oh good, I love a good cherry picking competition! As a Portlander, I can tell you first hand our police are regularly doing much worse than "arresting" mothers and grandmothers, they're first shooting them with tear-gas, impact munitions, then batoning and pepper spraying them on the ground. Watched it, first hand, just a few days ago.

As a former Marine, until watching our cops in action this year, I was all about them. Now I'm disgusted with them, and will do everything I can to take the toys away from these children. Until you've seen them first hand (or you are one... Just quit and live a better life), it's actually really hard to believe just how awful they are. Are cops are the "war on drugs" cops who bend or disregard every rule so they can "come down hard" and "make an example". That's the attitude. And if you think that's okay... Wait till your kid gets pulled over, or stopped for riding a bike through the wrong part of town. These people are thugs, and operate where no laws will touch them.

[Fnoord]

You went from one extreme position to the other.

I don't understand the position ACAB or NCAB (N = No). Clearly, some cops are bastards.

In The Netherlands my experiences with the Dutch police have been good or at worst neutral. I have been surprised numerous times how downright friendly and relaxed cops here can be. Even at the few demonstrations I been to (most notably two anti war in Iraq demos) no trouble whatsoever.

Even if you speak for US only I have a hard time believing the entire police force of US is rotten.

[hourislate]

I don't dispute there is a problem with law enforcement in the US.

[craftinator]

Good, we have a consensus then; now as for your original cherry picking comment, let's look at something more substantive[1]:

"In Germany, for example, police recruits are required to spend two and a half to four years in basic training to become an officer, with the option to pursue the equivalent of a bachelor’s or master’s degree in policing. Basic training in the U.S., by comparison, can take as little as 21 weeks (or 33.5 weeks, with field training). The less time recruits have to train, the less time is afforded for guidance on crisis intervention or de-escalation."

This isn't a single cherry picked event; it is the minimum required standard. I think that perhaps our police are just poorly trained thugs compared to the Germans; the British police force has a more comparable training to ours (36 weeks I believe), but they ARE NOT ARMED. In order to carry a firearm, they need higher rank, more years of experience, and additional training in order to carry a firearm.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/06/am...

[9HZZRfNlpR]

Our police is not armed because we don't keep shooting each other at protests which seems to become a norm over there. American societies, in general, is much more violent.

[craftinator]

> American societies, in general, is much more violent.

I disagree with this assertion. It's very hard to generalize this type of property; really the only way is to use some type of normalized data, and that faces the problem which plagues all generalization, in that it doesn't apply to large swaths of what is being generalized across. I think that Detroit is a violent place, and if you generalize across all of Michigan, you'll see Detroit isn't representational.

There are some places in the US, mostly in dense urban areas, where gang and organized criminal violence is a problem. These places need to have well armed violent response units. Cops should not be engaging every situation in these places as if they are all extreme violence situations, but in the case that there are people shooting at other people, call on those violent response units.