tape. We are not going to rush to judgment,” Ramsey said.

“You have to take this in the context of the environment of what were operating,” said Mayor Michael Nutter.

i was just reading about it here.

says field, in his post:

Still, it’s not excuse to make a pinata out of a bunch of shooting suspects, and ignore all your years of training by letting your raw emotions take over.

while i agree to some extent, i’ve had the chance to watch, and experience for myself, some of the training police go through, and i’m not convinced we’re doing it right. for several decades now we’ve been steadily militarizing our police forces, which pretty much guarantees that the solution for very situation is a bullet. or a hail of bullets.

the shoot/don’t shoot simulator is one such migration from military training to civilian police training. if you ever go through it, i can pretty much guarantee you’ll never look at your fellow human beings in quite the same way as you did before.

so far though, i haven’t got a good answer beyond outlaw assault weapons, legalize drugs, disband swat teams.

[the cats are helping me type this]

radley balko is one of those libertarian dudes that i disagree with on almost everything, but he’s got a lot of material on police militarization.

For who?

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

For those not in the super class.
I worry about this because here at home we have SWAT patrolling the streets. No knock warrants are the excuse de jour. The level of brutality is escalating and the justice system is sanctioning it. Between the NY, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Chicago, LA … I fear we may be brewing another riot this summer. We won’t even talk about what is going on in Georgia. Sarah, if you have some insight about how we can engineer a pull back I would love to hear it. How can we get the police to do more beat patrols, community policing, after school programs, and end the brutality. It affects their safety as well as the civilians they are supposed to “serve and protect.”

to fix the criminal justice system, including the police. It’s no different from every other part of our infrastructure. Recruiting, training and re-training police is extremely expensive. Add in the additional problems of a drug war that makes little sense, but nicely funds violent gangs, the lack of mental healthcare in this country (a lot of police time is spent dealing with the mentally ill, believe it or not), and the collapse of jobs in our inner cities over the last thirty years.

One way to get more patrols and community work is to hire more police. LAPD would be a much better department if it had the officers to patrol the city instead of tying them to squad cars and sending them into areas where they are outnumbered by gang members and backup has to come through LA traffic. It encourages officers to police through intimidation. But after decades of doing that, it can be difficult to convince your citizens that they’d be better off with more police. They would be, not only would there be more and better interaction with the communities they are policing, but a hire up also brings in new blood to help change the culture, but that doesn’t make it an easier sell. And your always one step away from having one officer do something stupid and make it even harder.

And if you want to be really scared, it’s not police departments you should worry about it’s sheriff’s. There’s nothing stupider than electing your top law enforcement official. Except maybe electing your State Supreme Court. Because what could go wrong with Judges who need to raise a lot of campaign funds?

Thanks for the frame. More cops. Excuse me while I shudder. OK I get it. Take the strain off the system and the officers. Right?

What you want is your local neighborhood police. Someone who stops by businesses to make sure they aren’t having any trouble, says high to people on the street. Who sees the community as a community and becomes part of it by interacting with it.

It’s actually a move away from militarizing the police. And more a move to integrate them into their communities. But in large cities, that requires narrowing the amount of geography police cover, which involves more police.

Otherwise what you get, especially in a sprawling city like Los Angeles, is two guys driving around in a car, knowing back up is several minutes (if not longer) away because of traffic and distance, working in areas where, quite frankly, they are outmanned and outgunned by gang members. Scared and insecure people rarely do a good job policing.

Of course that’s not the entire answer. You also have to be able to screen and recruit good people into the force, which is expensive when done right. You have to update training regularly. You have to manage them well by setting standards and holding them to them.

But society also needs to think seriously about the strain it puts on police. When you don’t provide enough mental health care, you force officers trained to deal with criminals having to roll out and try to subdue a manic depressive whose gone off his meds. When you turn every drug user into a criminal and wage a war to stop drugs, you give gangs a reason to be violent and a source of enormous income. When you allow anyone to walk into a gun show and buy tons of firearms and ammunition with no background check, you create a situation where police feel outgunned. When you don’t provide jobs in the inner city, youth will find other ways to make money and spend their time. When you don’t run your prison system right (California’s is a disaster), people come out much worse than they went in. If you think street gangs are scary, you’ve never dealt with a prison gang.

As with so many other parts of our society, we’ve put enormous burdens on the police without asking ourselves if they can handle them or ensuring they have the right kind of resources to do the job. Liberals share some blame for this, democrats are happy to pass tougher drug laws and even throw some money at law enforcement, but a lot of them don’t understand policing and don’t want to bother because there’s a natural tendency in some circles (some of it well earned, some of it not) to see the police as a necessary evil. Someone I’ll call if my house gets broken into, but I’m the first to jump to the worst conclusions about a shooting or other incident.

And, of course, there are tens of thousands of police officers in this country who don’t beat suspects, who don’t fire indiscriminately. No police department is ever going to have no mistakes made. Even the best is staffed by human beings. The only difference is when they fuck up, they can do more harm than most because of their guns and badges. Which doesn’t mean when they fuck up they shouldn’t be held accountable, it means we have more of an obligation not to set them up to fail.