Quote:
Originally Posted by Catfish
Seriously what is wrong with the police over there? Too much incidents lately  |
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.