No comment
 

syndrome
 

Kitty Genovese, standard introductory lecture at university for everbyody attending courses in social psychology. At least back in my time. Recently, the way the story got told so far, has been put into doubt a bit. I doubt that after this long time the correct verison of narration can be found out, however.

However, there is a difference between the bystander effect, and the displayed behaviour of the teens here.

In case of Kitty Genovese, the people did not react due to several psychological interpretations of their motives, from believing that somebody else would call the police anyway so one miust not do it oneself, to believeing that one would be physically unsuited to interfere with a physically strong attacker.

In case of these teens here now they did not help in order to get a nice motive for their cellphone video, which they actively rated as more important than the life of the person drowning. The death of the other was actively desired for - and for very low, antisocial motives. Lacking interest of any sorts was not what made these teens doing what they did: they simply were bored and found the death of a man entertaining. They even mocked him and laughed about him. That is not a lack of interest to care for somebody in need, but an active interest - an interest in seeing the man dying.

This borders the mindset of active intentional murder, in my book. and this wouold be the charges thrsy would need to face if I would have a say in the matter.

Unfortunately, the bureaucratization of the law seems to allow them to escape consequences without being held responsible.

Its a growing problem here in Germany. Accidents on the Autobahn, and bystanders blocking police and rescuers from getting forward to the scene.

More and more people are seriously deranged in their heads, and moral values.

Not 'Minnesota Nice'
 

Well that's not the only problem it seems..... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/07/18/we-are-utterly-devastated-family-demands-answers-after-minneapolis-police-shoot-and-kill-woman-who-called-911/?utm_term=.fcaae7f5d78e IE: call 911.....then run away!:oops: EDIT: the police chief, a woman, has resigned at the request of the mayor....also a woman:o

Quote:

The two officers were driving through an alley near the home of Justine Damond, 40, after she called 911 late Saturday to report a possible assault, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), the state agency investigating the shooting. The officer who was driving the patrol car told investigators that right after the loud noise, Damond approached the car on his side. The officer who was in the passenger seat then fatally shot Damond through the driver’s side window, Mohamed Noor reached over and shot Justine Damond, 40, multiple times from the passenger seat of his squad car while she spoke to his colleague on the drivers side in a back alley behind her upscale Minneapolis home. according to investigators.http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/...0433667528.jpg:timeout: His partner must surely have an earache! if not night-blindness from the muzzle blast!

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-ap...ING.jpg&w=1484

Seriously what is wrong with the police over there? Too much incidents lately :huh:

The world is mad a tells ya, totally mad :nope:

The police incident(s) signal the inferior training standard of police in the US regarding soft skills and non-violent behaviour, also reflect the need to be physically more on your guard in a more violent environment than still in most of Europe's places. Police training in the US and Europe, and qualification needs for candidates, are apparently very different. In Europe, there is a stroinger focus on soft skills and social competences. Finally, racism in the US probably also plays a motive in many incidents.

The behaviour of those killer teens is even more worrying, it reflects the cultural decline in our generations and the social erosion of the moral cement in our societies. Call it degeneration, decadence, or whatever you want. The Western world and its value system is falling apart, gets intentionally relativised, even voluntarily submits to challengers. Lets not mistaken, the teen incident is not a national, American issue - it could as easily have happened in Europe as well.

I have since long stopped thinking of history in linear terms, to me it is moving in cycles, and considering that many forethinkers in past eras of Europe, and the Asian cultures in general and until today thought and think the same way, I am in good company there. Civilizations, empires get born, raise, culminate and blossom during a time of climax, then fall and then die. The West definitely has entered the last phase of this cycle, and already some time ago. Our technological capabilities will not change this. The writings are on so many walls now that the Western world looks like a maze with graffitis.

This is an extremely complex issue and one that can't be completely explained in a blog post.

One of the many factors, in my opinion, is the Militarization of our police force. We have our police wearing military type uniforms, using military type ranks, and using military weapons, and using military type tactics. This combined with a consequentialism doctrine leads to such problems.

The police are not the military and the military are not the police.

In the military, uniforms, ranks and the tactics encourages a "us against them" attitude where the "enemy" is dehumanized. The military even uses terminology like "collateral damage" "Human effects" and "acceptable losses": All these serve to help isolate, to some extent, the emotions about killing people. These are all necessary for the military as the job of the military is to kill people and destroy stuff in furtherance of national policy.

But not the police. But if you make the police like the military (the militarization of the police) one can't be surprised if the police start acting like the military, That is what we have today.

The police have a "us against them" attitude where the US is the police and the THEM is the citizens. There may be justifications for this attitude and probably are, but the resulting conduct should not be encouraged. There is also a consequentialism attitude with many of our police forces.

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy. Christopher Dawson

If your plan to protect the citizens involves killing citizens, you might want to rethink your plan.

My solution starts with demilitarization of the police

1. Put the police in police uniforms. These uniforms should be appropriate to their job, but they should not resemble military uniforms

2. Remove military rank from police officers. Use a more civilian rank

3. Equip the police with police weapons, not military weapons. The police need the appropriate weapons, but the police do not need APCs and machine guns. Fully automatic weapons are useful when all the bad guys are in that direction and all the good guys are in the other direction -- a situation that probably seldom occurs with the police. The concept of "collateral damage" and "acceptable losses" should not be a paradigm to the police.

4. The most important point, in my opinion -- We need to develop specialized weapons for the police. One of the jobs of the police is to neutralize a threat. It is an important job. One way to neutralize a threat is to shoot holes in to them and kill them.... but is that the only way? I think not... not in the 21st century.

I would be willing to pay more in taxes to fund research into non-lethal weapons development. Clearly the TASER has limitations, so let's not just stop there. We have smart people who can work on this.

A live suspect is always better then a dead one....from a citizen's viewpoint. The police/DA may feel differently as a dead suspect can't testify.

5. We need to, in an appropriate manner, start holding police accountable for their actions. If a police officer violates policy, there needs to be a personal accountability. Other professions have personal accountability, why not the police. This does not mean going from one extreme of practical immunity to the other extreme of complete liability. There needs to be a middle position where the police are protected while following policy but at the same time have a personal liability when they violate the policy.

A few months ago, I was reading about what I thought was a pretty cool idea. The police using small drones to assist with traffic stops.

This article (which I can't find the source, unfortunately) described how the police, after pulling over a car, could use a small drone to approach the car, with an on board camera/sensor and would be able to physically deliver the driver's license and registration back to the officer who is still in the car. This helps isolate the police officer from what is potentially one of the more hazardous aspects of their job -- checking the ID of the person. While the officer can run the plates, that only IDs the vehicle and who owns it. Running the plate does not give the officer any information about who may be driving it and exposes the officer by putting the officer in a vulnerable position of approaching a vehicle with unknown persons in it.

I thought using the drone (air or ground) sounded like a clever idea.

I don't think we would ever get to the point where the officer would never have to approach the vehicle, but we might.

The bottom line is that the police AND civilians need to be protected. No one is claiming that the police have to be defenseless, but the other extreme of shooting first needs to end.

The police using lethal force against a suspect needs to be the action of last resort. Often I feel that it may be closer to the top of the action choices with some police officers.


A very complicated issue, but one that I feel we can solve if we have a national level commitment.

If we put a fraction of the research efforts/money that we spend on developing new weapons into developing new police tools, we, as a nation, can solve this problem.

Though its a few years old its still very good report about the militarization of our police forces.

War Comes Home

"Militarization of policing encourages officers to adopt a “warrior” mentality and think of the people they are supposed to serve as enemies"

"Eurie Stamps was in his pajamas, watching a baseball game, when SWAT officers forced a battering ram through his front door and threw a flashbang grenade inside. Stamps, a 68-year-old grandfather of twelve, followed the officers’ shouted orders to lie facedown on the floor with his arms above his head. He died in this position, when one of the officers’ guns discharged. Stamps wasn’t the suspect; the officers were looking for his girlfriend’s son on suspicion of selling drugs. The suspect was arrested outside the home minutes before the raid. Even though the actual suspect didn’t live in Stamps’ home and was already in custody, the SWAT team still decided to carry out the raid.

Framingham has since disbanded its SWAT team"

https://www.aclu.org/report/war-come...merican-police

The militarization of the police had nothing to do with this ^. ;)

No comment.. again.
In german:

http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2...st_zon.link.sf

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-u...s-to-employees

No comment.

^ It's for your convenience. What could possibly go wrong?

People use Facebook on a daily basis, writing everything they think and feel and worse into those public pages, some publishing credit card information. Implants of the future can do that for you, so you don't have to type it all in. :yeah:

Walking credit cards. Maybe a lobotomy would make things even easier :doh:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40848372

No comment. :dead:

Minnesota Nice; it's actually the law!