I would go further. I would suggest demanding that all training of police officers be subject to auditing similar to how a college course can.
Now of course rules would be put in place to limit numbers, disallowing slots to be filled with affiliated persons, providing safety equipment should the course requirement for students, and a copy of all printed and electronically distributed material.
Rules to protect students and teachers from disruption could however include no electronic devices, phones, tablets, or such and professional dress and demeanor. Anyone auditing would not be allowed to interject during any class not interact with students. Observation is a powerful tool in itself.
No amount training in the world is going to matter when there is no accountability after-the-fact.
Or when your training is directly at odds with the the job that you are expected to do by your boss.
The police, as they exist today, are largely unsuited for dealing with the majority of issues they get called out for. No amount of training is going to fix that. No amount of training is going to turn them into mental health experts, or social workers. No amount of training is going to empower them to do something useful about the pants-less gentleman yelling outside my apartment at 2 am, or about the tent city down by the overpass. [1]
Training is, however, a great substitute for actual reforms, that you can point at as a 'see, we are doing something'.
[1] What they should actually do about the tent city is an open political question, but doing a monthly sweep, where they arrest and release the occupants, and throw all their belongings in the trash is probably not a good long-term plan. No amount of training is going to stop that, either.
What the public is discovering with the recent spotlight on this subject, is that the current system of police behavior is the result of a complex web of misaligned (and frequently malicious) interests having their sway over police departments and the law.
I disagree with your characterization here, because I don't believe improved training materials are at odds with all of the other overhauls needed throughout the system.
Separately, EFF has a secondary concern here: they are interested in increased transparency around electronic surveillance practices used by the police. Information like this could be useful for mounting a legal defense by drawing attention to outdated/disproven police practices.
I would go further. Have all classes and training sessions recorded so there's record for review of how accurately curriculum is being followed, what off the cuff side commentary might be made, etc - to weed out bad instructors, bad role models. This also acts as protection for the officers themselves if there's evidence they were trained poorly or wrongly.
It presumes before the fact that all police killings are justified (Obviously there was a clear and present danger to others!), and holds up remorselessness about killing as a sort of quasi-enlightened state.
Normal people have nightmares for years after killing someone, even in the most perfectly justified cases of self defense. You don't easily recover. If you can kill someone and be more or less OK after that, you probably have antisocial personality disorder or you've had a lot of training to desensitize you to killing. Neither of those are good qualities in public service.
What you call misconstruing I call reading between the lines.
Edit: and I think remorse is a healthy and useful check on the excess of police violence we've been seeing. I suppose if you think it's all just fine, we're not going to have much common ground for understanding.
Justice is not served when a police officer takes the role of judge, jury and executioner. Summary execution is the worst of outcomes, and deprives victims of their most fundamental freedom. This guy doesn't think so. He wants cops to love exercising that extra-legal power. It's sick and an affront to the constitution.
Thanks to sousveillance, we've caught far too many cops on video, shooting unarmed people in the back as they're running away. I call that summary execution. Do you agree?
Another pattern we see a lot of is cops escalating situations, and then when the accused (rather understandably) matches that escalation, then the officer kills and claims self defense. I'd actually describe that as premeditated murder, because the danger is a predictable result of the cop's own actions.
In the very rare instance of an emplaced shooter, where less lethal means cannot be used and the area cannot be evacuated, then yeah, it makes sense to shoot back defensively.
Way too much of police training is focused on killing people. Training, as is done in much of the world, should focus on de-escalation.
More cops die in traffic than at the hands of criminals. It's an astonishingly safe job, considering the focus placed on "remorseless killing".
Question: have you ever shot and killed someone in self defense?
I have. I was in my home working late, when an intruder broke into my living room with a handgun. I heard the noise, grabbed my Remington. I told him to drop his weapon, and let me ziptie his hands. He tried shooting me, I hit him with two shells. He died within minutes.
You have no idea what it's like to be a lawful gun owner, and explain to the police why there's a dead man in your living room that you just shot. I was arrested that night and sat in jail for a week while they tried to determine if I had murdered man. Keep in mind, at the time I lived in a Castle Doctrine state, it's legal to shoot intruders in self defense.
Anyways long story short, and a few hundred thousand dollars later in court and legal fees, I was acquitted. Fortunately I had security footage of the intruder on my back porch, otherwise I might still be in jail.
Self-defense and 2A is NOT the same power as the police. Nor should it, no one should have absolute violent authority.
Disregarding all the parts of your story that don't make sense, or are downright very uncommon with home invasion defensive shootings (ya, I doubt any of this happened from how you wrote this story) - your point about self defense not being the same power as the police is a little precarious.
Police shootings are almost always defensive shootings. Maybe you might disagree with the rationale behind the need to apply deadly force in some specific situation - fine - but that doesn't suddenly mean police have some 007 "License to Kill" or anything.
The police are flatly not allowed to indiscriminately shoot people - just like a citizen isn't allowed either. There's very few police shootings when compared to the volume of interactions they have nation-wide every year. When there are shootings, they are reviewed to determine if there was a crime committed - and punished if there was.
Perhaps criminal review and punishment need to be stepped up? But just because there's some agencies that don't hold some officers to the same standards as everyone else doesn't mean it's like that everywhere.
Call someone out for using a fake story about killing another human being just to further a point?
To anyone experienced or knowledgeable about defensive shootings and home invasions - the story above reads like the author watched too many action movies.
Positively ID'ed an armed intruder and then proceeded to have a complete conversation with said armed intruder in the middle of the night? Asked the armed intruder to allow him to "ziptie" their hands? The armed intruder doesn't run away at first signs that someone is home or awake, and still doesn't run when the occupant reveals themselves to be armed? Then proceeded to have a shootout with the intruder and somehow placed two accurate shots on target from across a room or hallway? All with adrenaline and a cocktail of other mind-altering, body trembling, dexterity-inhibiting chemicals surging through their body? Total BS.
Then went to jail for a week and couldn't apparently afford bail even though they then spent hundreds of thousands on an apparent criminal investigation for suspected murder (says they might still be in jail to this day) even though there's an armed dead intruder lying in the room after a forced entry? In a "Castle Doctrine State"? Ya, that doesn't happen either.
Most people can't speak coherently with all that going on, let alone fire accurate shots either. It's a myth "you can't miss" with a shotgun. At average room or hallway distances, the spread is about 5 inches or less with 00 Buck, and usually those shots are fired from the low-ready or hip positions due to the immediacy of the situation. It's pretty darn easy to miss in a situation like that.
The entire story is either grossly exaggerated, or completely made up. All for what? To appear to be arguing from some position of authority and make people accept OP's argument as fact? That's appalling, and it's things like this that make responsible gun owners look bad.
>explain to the police why there's a dead man in your living room
>and a few hundred thousand dollars later in court and legal fees
This is not legal advice. In the future, please consider not talking to the police for any reason. Please also consider buying legal insurance for self-defense incidents.
Aside from that, I don't see what your point is. The power to defend yourself with violence is a legal right that Americans have in practice in most states. In Texas people with licenses to concealed carry end up committing fewer unjustified killings per capita than the police. They seem to be wielding their rights just fine.
We certainly give them permission to change laws and politics, based off impressions and experiences gained during education. We should ensure that education isn't polluted and warped, and what better of a way to do that than to record all of it.
This way, if some students start demanding awful policies be enacted, we can review their experiences in the classroom and find where the blame should be placed!
"Auditing what they say privately" is begging the question. The parent's point is that the training of police officers should be public. No one is proposing that we record the police trainers when they go out for dinner with their family.
I guess it means what we interpret "off the cuff side commentary" to be. I'm certainly not claiming we're going to attach a camera to people 24/7, but I think even in the classroom we should not be recording every interaction they have.
I just think it's a little bizarre to feel dystopia creep from checks on police rather than from police checks on civil liberties.
edit: or rather, to feel dystopia creep more from the idea of monitoring how police are taught to use surveillance technologies, than from the actual police use of surveillance technologies itself.
+ Recording a session where public servants vested with the authority of the state are taught how to conduct their job.
+ Police driving down the road with facial recognition devices scanning the faces of all the private individuals walking down the street and allowing them to pull up records on any of them.
One of these things is not like the other (and the second is a current reality!)
I'm not saying I consider them to be equal, and I will note that the specific thing I have a problem with is recording them with the intent of catching their private conversations and then reviewing it for comments you think might indicate poor behavior in the future. I know the second one is a reality and I am fairly vocal about being against that, but it's awfully hard to get rid of :(
Hmm, fair enough. My sense was that "off the cuff side commentary" meant perhaps things said by an instructor during the intermissions, and that the intent was more to prevent them from saying anything they wouldn't be comfortable saying to the general public, but I realize that's due to my not following the thread of the conversation closely enough :)
You are the one who injected the straw man argument saying we should record professors and students, and now you go even further to claim we're somehow arguing to record all people all the time to audit them? Why are you going outside the bounds or scope of our arguments?
> You are the one who injected the straw man argument saying we should record professors and students
I did not.
> now you go even further to claim we're somehow arguing to record all people all the time to audit them
I mean, if you look at the what was posted:
> Have all classes and training sessions recorded so there's record for review of how accurately curriculum is being followed, what off the cuff side commentary might be made, etc - to weed out bad instructors, bad role models.
This does in fact seem like you're recording them all the time while they're in the classroom, is it not?
I don't think so. Being sarcastic and amping it up until it's detected seems to be fairly common across cultures in my experience. (But then again, I am American.)
The solution to countering the worry you stated through sarcasm is to organize, know who your trust network of reasonable people are, and rally towards educating. If there was such one or many trusted network hierarchies plugged into systems like Twitter, where people could filter based on these networks for their guidance, then things would be much cleaner than they currently are.
Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police.
Mandatory regular empathy training.
Mandatory training to quickly distinguish between real and imagined threats, and to abort quickly force escalation if a threat turns out to be imaginary.
Clear rules of engagement for use of tools like batons, Tasers, and firearms.
Detective units need punishment for declining to pursue cases when resources and evidence are available. There should never be a rape kit backlog.
Reward good behavior. Officers should be proud of statistics like "greatest % of arrests this month without injury to the suspect."
Police simply don't need to handle everything. Welfare checks, mental health emergencies, and drug emergencies need a social worker involved and on the front lines.
Policing is an extremely hard job. Police academies are not preparing officers for it correctly because police departments have no incentive to actually conduct policing correctly. It all starts with political oversight and breaking down the blue wall of silence.
> Unarmed martial arts such as BJJ, with mandatory minimum qualifications, recertifying every few months. The ability to subdue and control an assailant, without using a weapon and without injury to the attacker, should be made a cultural point of pride among police.
I see this suggested a lot, and I want to reiterate that having studied these sports -- being able to subdue an opponent without hurting them is a point of pride already. All reputable instructors will instill this. We can't allow the excellent reputation of these sports to influence our understanding of how police operate.
Police are not good-faith participants in the goal to injure fewer people via policing. If you teach them more BJJ, they'll use those skills to establish a dominant physical position. A practitioner of BJJ will take this opportunity to de-escalate the situation and escape without injuring anyone else or themselves. A police officer will take this opportunity to use weapons like mace and tasers, or stomp on necks and gouge eyes. They only escalate and when given the opportunity, they brutalize with impunity.
I believe we can influence the the amount of harm done by police by removing the tools they have available to do that harm. Take away all their weapons, and I believe they will more wisely evaluate how they decide to engage with citizens. Hold them legally responsible for any injuries sustained in the process of an arrest and they'll need to purchase insurance -- officers who do more harm will be uninsurable (or the expense of the insurance will make them unhireable).
Didn't California just significantly reduce the police's budget. They need to increase the budget, if they want better training. Most people don't realize how poorly funded the police is and how much this has contributed to the current issues.
Give a man to a gun and never teach him how to fight, guess what he uses at the smallest hint of a threat?
I don't think there is. A fair bit of police hardware is allocated, not purchased. My understanding is that the discretionary budgets for things like training is fairly thin.
This is why police have so much military hardware. They were able to get these things for free due to 1033.
It’s funny how copyright and privacy are often used to block inconvenient disclosure. Same in medical. They sell data back and forth but as soon as you request something that’s inconvenient, they use patient privacy as excuse to not disclose.
Making the association to K-12 public education, taxpaying parents cannot easily access all of the curriculum their student has/is/will engage with in a K-12 public school. The legislation (if any) and auditing process varies by state, but from a business perspective, K-12 publishers do not want to be on the hook for any real-life outcomes. Their customer is the school/school district, not their constituents. Being able to see everything would open the cultural (relevance) and academic (rigor) floodgates of advocacy.
In addition to protecting the business model, I imagine these training companies do not want their educative materials associated with real-world police misconduct, or subject to any standards around what should or should not be taught.
I would argue freedom of information is more important than copyright claims. If you do work for the government it needs to be able to be pretty open what is done. I can see that there might be some exceptions but I would not think copyright is one of them.
If you want to claim a copyright, then good luck with the in the private market, but if you want that big, fat juicy government contract (i.e. taxpayer dollars) there should be concessions.
Puts the company in a weird position where they want to charge for access to their material, but laws are requiring them to release it publicly. Assuming good intent, it would make their business model challenging
I don't really see how this is any different than books. Anyone can pick a book up and read it for free at the library, and intellectual property laws guide most entities to either lawfully borrow, rent or purchase a copy, and not bootleg it.
It’s like the musician challenge where piracy and streaming made it harder to charge for the music itself, so bands began relying on live performance out of necessity
Shaking down some kid for violating copyright or trademark law doesn't scale and is bad PR. Lawyers would have a field day if municipalities started bootlegging their clients' intellectual property en masse.
Well, all the more reason to applaud hacker groups like DDoSecrets for file dumps like Blueleaks that are revealing how much utter BS and how much institutionalized corruption exists in Law Enforcement. Moreover, I'm pretty disappointed Jack Dorsey let someone at his company just ban their account [1].
A lot of good was done in having them publicly advertise what they had released. Hopefully this has a Streisan effect instead.
While I don't disagree with the California law, it is reasonable for a company to hold copyright over it's materials and products. I'm not sure a California state law can just hand wave away a federal statue and break the copyright, presumably violating the contract the police agencies made in the past with these companies. If they do so, the companies will probably sue the state, and they may win a bunch of taxpayer money.
To me, it seems like the California agency is the one in the wrong here, they need to be using training courses that are able to comply with the above law, rather than just slapping up a "we cant comply sorry" message.
Sorry the police and government generally do not have free reign over us. In an era of so much police brutality its perfectly reasonable to ask how they were trained and what the training materials consist of. Lots of things at the library are under copyright but I can check them out and read them for free. Why should police training materials be different?
Now of course rules would be put in place to limit numbers, disallowing slots to be filled with affiliated persons, providing safety equipment should the course requirement for students, and a copy of all printed and electronically distributed material.
Rules to protect students and teachers from disruption could however include no electronic devices, phones, tablets, or such and professional dress and demeanor. Anyone auditing would not be allowed to interject during any class not interact with students. Observation is a powerful tool in itself.