[kevinskii]

I used to be a reserve deputy sheriff. One night we got a call about two "vicious Rottweilers" who had broken through their fence into the neighbor's yard and were mauling the pet bunny.

It turned out that the dogs were two happy playful boxer puppies who didn't physically harm the rabbit in the slightest, and the fence was so rotten that a stiff breeze could have knocked it down.

What stuck with me, though, was that a couple of the cops who showed up to the scene were disappointed that they wouldn't get to shoot a dog after all.

[toomuchtodo]

That tells you all you need to know about who we select for in law enforcement roles. Society needs peacekeepers and people who know how to and prefer de-escalation, not warriors.

https://www.vox.com/2020/7/31/21334190/what-police-do-defund... (Vox: We train police to be warriors — and then send them out to be social workers)

[samcheng]

Not really warriors. Bullies.

[kcplate]

I don’t think this is accurate. However, almost every person I knew in school that I would have described as a bully I knew growing up became a cop for some part of their life.

So, I’d say from my perspective and experience, it’s likely a job that is probably attractive to bullies, as opposed a job that is creating them.

[ajay-b]

In my observations of law enforcement, it seems only a small portion are interested in being proper police. The vast majority uses it as a way to gold power, and over a career, that power erodes the human side.

[CheezeIt]

I’m pretty sure they have the job for the salary.

[pseudalopex]

Why not both?

Some people become police after failing to qualify for the military. Salary can't be their only motivation.

[chmod600]

The facts presented are that, despite a frantic call about viscious dogs, the responding officers were able to assess that the threat level was low, and avoid shooting the dogs.

But you seem to be holding them accountable not for their actions, but their words later.

There is entirely too much focus on peoples thoughts rather than their track record of actions.

[Cycl0ps]

If we take this heresay as gospel we have a situation where an on duty officer would have shot the dog, had they thought they could get away with doing so. Additionally they admitted as much in conversation, and I consider speaking about wanting to discharge your weapon during a call to be an action worth note.

Let's raise the stakes for another example. If a cop does a debrief after a routine traffic stop and says, "I was waiting for a reason to shoot this man where he stands", that's a matter of concern. It doesn't matter that the cop did the correct thing this time, because they're showing that the desire to kill someone is the driving force in their actions.

[chmod600]

It doesn't just require taking the story as gospel, you'd also have to take the officers' words as deterministic of their actions (which is dubious at best), and you'd also have to interpret them in the worst possible way.

For instance, you can interpret disappointment in at least two ways:

(A) Disappointment that they were unable to apply lethal force regardless of the situation; or

(B) Disappointment that the situation did not call for lethal force, but had no desire to apply lethal force where it was not required.

You chose (A), but there's really no evidence presented for that interpretation over (B).

This is just another reason we should judge actions rather than words. Actions are much more objective.

[Zxian]

Why is B much better here? It enables the officer to claim they felt threatened when no valid threat existed and then exercise lethal force in self defense (whether or not the threat was valid).

I can't think of any reason why someone should be justifiably disappointed they couldn't apply lethal force.

[hammyhavoc]

Intent is everything. Does that disappointment of not being able to justify shooting dogs extend to disappointment over not shooting a human being for other people working as police?

[chmod600]

I simply disagree. "Intent" without any positive step toward realizing that intent, much less carry it out to completion, means little in comparison to a real action.

I don't claim that words mean nothing, but we seem to be weighting them much too highly. Especially when we have actual actions to compare it to.

[hammyhavoc]

Intent informs the end result ultimately.

[daveguy]

Seems to me we are weighting the reaction to the reaction to them too highly.

[robcohen]

I hear you, but do you want the job? I always hear that “society should select this and that” for police and military jobs, but the people saying these things that society should do would almost never volunteer. So it feels like a hollow solution.

That said, the training could be much better than it is. But people like low taxes.

[heavyset_go]

Cops are often the highest paid employees on a government's payroll. Hell, I've lived in states where the cops' median salary of $105,000 a year[1] was higher than the median salary for software engineers, which was about $90,000 a year. That's before overtime, too. Not only that, but they get great benefits and the ability to retire with a full pension after only 20 years of working.

People line up for these types of jobs. It's just that a certain type of person is hired to fill them.

[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s...

[whynotkeithberg]

Many people that are protectors do join the force. But they're bullied off and intimidated by the bullies on the force who have far more seniority and the backing of the police union. Trying to speak out about the wrong doings of other police officers on the force has cost many good officers their career while the police who commit murder get a paid vacation and their job back. At worst they have to find a job at a new department which is never difficult for them. So yes, there are tons of people who would love to have such a job if proper oversight became a thing as well as the removal of many problematic officers.

[edgyquant]

Two things

1. Asking engineers if they want the job doesn’t seem like a gotcha. Of course not they’re engineers

2. I wouldn’t mind the job, really, but I don’t want to work with the type of people who currently are on most police forces.

[bavila]

I'm sure there are many very intelligent people who want to become police officers. But there are police departments that have no interest in hiring officers who are "too" intelligent and will systematically exclude applicants with high IQs:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

[dantheman]

You need to filter out the warriors and hold them accountable for their actions...

[hammyhavoc]

I have been trying to find the words to describe this for years, you are far more eloquent than I am! Peacekeepers are indeed what the world needs.

[iamadog18309]

Or maybe instead of promoting a class of people to have magical powers of coercion who are jointly above the law we could rely on personal and social accountability. The continued erosion of individual accountability through bureaucracy and institutions has done little more than destroy communities and complicate regular function through a litany of Catch-22 scenarios and provide an illusory backdrop of "security" while promulgating an ideology firmly founded in the broken window fallacy and leveraging policing authority to generate revenue. It should be noted that historically, police did not function as they do now. Beginning in the 1830's and finally reaching saturation in 1880. It was a system meant to subjugate the bottom class that originated in slave recapture. It's not intended for peacekeeping, it's not preserved in our interests.

Gary Potter, "The History of Policing in the US"[1]:

"In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992)."

"More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.” What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.” These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the “collective good” (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state."

Neil Postman, "Technopoly":

“Adolf Eichmann becomes the basic model and metaphor for a bureaucrat in the age of Technopoly. When faced with the charge of crimes against humanity, he argued that he had no part in the formulation of Nazi political or sociological theory; he dealt only with the technical problems of moving vast numbers of people from one place to another. Why they were being moved and, especially, what would happen to them when they arrived at their destination were not relevant to his job. Although the jobs of bureaucrats in today's Technopoly have results far less horrific, Eichmann's answer is probably given five thousand times a day in America alone: I have no responsibility for the human consequences of my decisions. I am only responsible for the efficiency of my part of the bureaucracy, which must be maintained at all costs.”

[1]:https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-...

[happytoexplain]

I think most people don't appreciate that a non-negligible amount of police officers are simply interested in the opportunity to exert violence, and even to kill. The same mindset is observable in homeowners/storeowners with fantasies about defending their property/family from an intruder (exactly where they land on the conversational spectrum between "defend from" and "kill" depends both on their own morality and on the present company). This mindset is expressed even more openly in the military, which makes sense.

If even 1% of police officers have this mindset, that's a spectacular failure of civilized society. In apparent probability, it's somewhere north of 1%. But how small could we realistically get this number via policy (assuming a magical ability to measure it)? It might be so ingrained in present society and/or human nature, and so hard to test for, that we can't eliminate or even satisfactorily minimize it. I hope eventually we take meaningful steps toward the one realistic thing we can attempt: Mercilessly removing such officers from the force when they do make their morality/incompetence clear. Unfortunately, to do this, we would need to somehow work around the despicable protection such officers are granted by their own, and by voters, which is complicated by consisting partly of genuine support for an incredibly difficult and critical job, and partly by unspoken (and sometimes spoken) support for oppression and violence.