This may not apply everywhere in the US, but my understanding is that most cops aren’t paid terribly well. Perhaps it’s ok if compared to a standard job, but when you account for the danger, required over time, and work schedule it becomes very not worth it.
A buddy of mine is a true believer type, he signed up to be a cop, went through a year of training and another year paired with another cop. PreCovid starting pay was $40k, 12 hr work schedule and every 28 days it flipped (so 28 days day shift followed by 28 days of night shift). One day he gets a call and his boss had switched him to a different district with 3x the commute without any communication. Finally a buddy of his caught a bullet in the head (and lived) from some guy who was on drugs and stole a car. He said he thought about it and for the money it wasn’t worth the emotional cost.
Strangely the problem with underfunding cops is who the fuck wants to be a cop? Yeah, after 25 years and multiple promotions you might make an ok or even good salary, but being a new cop is absolutely shit. In a system where the pay isn’t good, the hours are shit, and the risk to your life is high, who wants to be a cop?
The answer is either self sacrificing good guys or people who get a power trip on carrying a gun and using it. Add to it that this system is perpetuated by the type of people who pursue the job you end up with a whole department full of the type who hire these types.
So while you can defund the police, you can send them through training, you can institute new policy, but if you don’t attract a better quality of person then you’re gonna have the same problem over and over again.
Theoretically you could make the hours better (but that will require hiring more police to cover the same amount), you could reduce the danger (similar to London banning guns so beat cops don’t carry them either), or you can pay them more.
I see why you thought that’s what I meant, but immediately following that I list several other potential solutions to overall bad policing. You can certainly defund the police, aka stop outfitting them with weapons of war, but it will not solve the fundamental problem of hiring bad candidates to make bad cops.
It doesn’t help that cops are expected to do so much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not an excuse to do fucked up things to people, but it is probably a contributing factor. Like mental health for being a police officer can’t be good. This is part of the reason so many people want to defund the police; it isn’t about giving them less money, it’s about moving funding to programs that are more focused so police can focus on their job and not try to be a mental health counselor as well.
You’re right though, being a police officer comes with an expectation that doesn’t match your pay. If you’re on the subway, there is a police officer in uniform standing nearby, and a guy attacks you, the expectation is that the cop would save you. However, in 2011 Maksin Gelman had a stabbing spree in NYC that culminated in an attack on Joseph Lozito. The attack occurred on a subway, with Lozito being stabbed in the head and face while police watched from the conductor’s booth. It wasn’t until Lozito had wrestled his assailant to the ground and detained him that the police helped him.
Lozito sued the NYPD for not helping him and the judge decided that it wasn’t the police’s duty to save his life. On the day of the assault the police didn’t even perform first aid on Lozito, it was another subway goer that save his life.
EDIT: I’ll be the first one to say fuck the police, but if you want actually good police then the first step is to pay them to match what you expect of them or else you’ll end up with a bunch of gun toting assholes who won’t do shit.
There is a difference in danger, Construction tends to be one of the most dangerous jobs there is, but getting injured in a construction accident is fundamentally different from getting shot as a cop. Other jobs might be more “dangerous,” but the nature of the danger is pretty important.
Yeah, but that comes back to the same point where pay incentivizes bad cops. It’s not quite that clear cut, but it’s not far from the truth. I don’t begrudge someone working a second job, and assuming we’re talking about good cops not getting kickbacks, police shouldn’t have to work two jobs to make ends meet.
Indeed is reporting that the average starting salary is like $50k, and the average in the US is $60k. Policing also isn’t even in the top 25 most dangerous jobs. That link is also talking base salary, but even in the situation you’re describing, you’re talking overtime in the $20k+ range.
The problem with bad cops comes down to two main things:
well, it’s really just the first one, but keeping that in mind, the system is setup in a way that the only outcome can be a corrupt police force. Legal civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, overly powered police unions (the only time I’ll complain about unions), deliberately low standards in hiring, deliberately not require the police to even know the law they’re supposed to enforce and probably a dozen things I’m forgetting. Police aren’t there for us, they’re there for capital.
Finally, police funding and increasing the number of cops has almost nothing to do with crime rates which is what calls to defund the police actually mean. Police are basically systematized violence where pretty much the only tools in their literal and metaphorical toolbelt are increasing levels of violence. The call to defund the police is more about funding the things that actually reduce crime – better education, economic outcomes, and people trained to deal with the types of issues that police are probably less qualified to deal with than the average retail worker like mental health crises. Advocates for defunding the police are instead advocating for spending to be allocated to people who are qualified to actually deal with these problems.
Anyway, tl;dr – if we offer cops better pay and better hours, we’re just going to be getting more expensive cops stealing our shit, incarcerating us at one of the highest rates in the world, and murdering people with less consequence than the cashier at Target gets for not upselling credit cards enough because while plenty of good people* become cops, policing as an institution in the US is corrupt.
Of the responses I have gotten I feel like you have the closest response to the truth. Having good cops comes down to trust. If we had a police force of non-opportunistic saints who will go through anything to do the right thing then we might have something which meets the public’s expectation of the police. Short of that they are people who put their own lives and well being above that of the public. Police aren’t out there to save you, they aren’t really out there to stop crimes. They are out there to charge people with committing crimes. I feel like some understanding should be out there for the public though, police aren’t there to save you, they are there to charge people for having committed a crime. Ideally they will stop a crime as it is occurring or by their presence prevent a crime from occurring, but if you think the Police are there to save you then you’re wrong.
That’s the average scenario. That’s the Uvalde cop looking on as a school shooting occurs. The idea of a cop running into a school shooting is the “BEST” scenario.
Unfortunately the norm for police is far less than that, because the pay doesn’t incentivize better people to want to be police. It comes down to those the factors: pay, work life balance, and danger. Pick 2 of 3, low danger, high wages, or good work life balance.
Just for clarities sake, there is one big sticking point here that I want to make clear. Pay, hours, etc cannot incentivize a fix to this system because it’s not about attracting good people or bad people or dumb people or smart people, it’s about the system. If cops made $120k starting with 5 weeks of vacation and only had to work 32 hour weeks, we would not see significantly different outcomes because it is simply the institution and systems and culture that are the problem. Honestly, that would probably only increase the problem since it just further removes police from the normal humans they’re policing. Probably also instead of attracting people that are mission driven, it attracts mercenaries, basically. This is how we get billionaires; they’re mostly not evil, just so far removed reality and doing one of the most human things possible – rationalizing our own behavior for our benefit.
The idea that there are purely good or purely bad people is mostly a myth. There are people that we could objectively define as purely good or purely evil, but they’re the outlier. Nazis for example. The truth is even scarier than the myth. In most of our depictions, nazis are homogenous blob of pure evil. While nazi’s certainly had some purely evil people, the truth is the vast majority were just average people exposed to a system that creates an evil outcome. Of course, there were also purely good people in that as well, but the system often led those people their graves, or they had to be the right combination of good/smart to resist and stay alive. But most people just participated or closed their eyes and went about their day.
The problem is not the people, it is the system and pay and benefits aren’t going to fix it.
Now all that said, the Uvalde cops clearly over-index on little tiny dick bitch ass cowards and kinda blow a hole in my thesis. I wouldn’t call them evil, but just speaking statistically you would think even one of them out of the scores of cops there would have had even an underdeveloped backbone. The cowardice shown here should be something that lives into myth and legend and the way people say “Benedict Arnold” to mean “traitor” they should say “Uvalde cop” to mean “coward.”
Care to elaborate? I won’t argue that funding for the department isn’t a problem, but at least in my own anecdotal relation of an individual experience that seems to be the problem.
There’s lots of places in the US where cops are paid significantly above median wages for the region as their base pay and then they’re also eligible to earn time and a half in nearly as much overtime as they could possibly want on top of being allowed to work extra side jobs in uniform for third parties.
They’re also typically one of the largest parts of most major cities’ budgets.
Fuck cops. They are overpaid if anything for what little they fucking do.
I took some time in thinking about your response, I want you to know that. That said, “There’s lots of places in the US where cops are paid significantly above median wages for the region as their base pay,” doesn’t mean much in the context of my original statement. My original statement said very much the same in fact. Cops, on paper, get paid above average and have tons of opportunity for overtime. What your response misses is the danger associated and the expectation of overtime.
It’s one thing when you can have unlimited overtime and another when you are expected to take unlimited overtime. There is also a disconnect when that overtime comes with an expectation of being shot and killed. With those expectations it’s no surprise that police are the largest portion of a city government. If you have a group of people that you expect to work long hours, work extra overtime, meet the municipality’s needs, and potentially die in their duty, then they should command a large portion of the budget.
If you don’t want to pay people to do these things then you can’t be upset that they don’t do those things. You get the cops that you pay for. I’ll be the first to say Fuck the Police, but I’ll also be the first to say we get the Police we pay for.
Funny thing that, European countries haven’t lasted nearly as long as the US on average: revolutions, conquest, coups. Only a couple of monarchies and even those had some big changes in the way the government is structured like with constitutional changes. The US, though, has a ton of new laws but is fundamentally unchanged.
I tried to wait for it to finish, but after a couple hundred more repetitions of JzH it just stopped abruptly without a closing parentheses, so I think I’ve been had.
funny because, this is actually closer to what “The Method” really is than any of the weird shit you hear about (a way of analyzing text into small compartments of meaning and what their transitive emotional properties are and then considering the impact those words would have on another person when said with different intentions, and picking one based on surrounding context clues also found in the text)
I don’t like this spread of hate Europe vs US. I think both benefit from each other and non constructive comments about it ar just Chinese/Russian propaganda to break social relations between the two.
Both US and Europe have their caveats, but we are stronger together and that’s the way.
Well and adding to that you are biased af so your opinion is basically irrelevant, all your posts are anti-US. Which you call “America”, which already shows what levels you are on.
One of the ways the state maintains capitalism & white hegemony is through information warfare. The US state has the largest and most advanced propaganda apparatus on the planet. Revolutionary left wing tendencies do not exist for long in the status-quo. This is by design. Ignorance to left wing prefigured politics maintains the status-quo’s legitimacy. The state is incredibly effective at coopting narratives to reform its image.
Define country, because the American government is actually one of the oldest continuous governmental systems in the world. Certainly the oldest republic that isn’t a micro-state.
Now if you want argue that France, for example, is an older country than America because there’s been a fairly stable region largely called France for several centuries you can, you’d just be wrong.
Now if you want to start talking about nations that’s different, but also a much, much blurrier subject in general.
I’m using the term to mean more or less the collectively agreed upon “identity” of a state. Not merely a single contiguous government (for the same reason you just bring up, people still consider France to be France even though the government has changed fundamentally many times over the years), but I’m not using it to just mean “nation” either, since were France to be completely conquered and annexed by a foreign power, the French nation, as in the group of people, would still exist, but the country would not, at least until such time as it could be recreated, or for a different reason, that one can have a national identity split between different states, or a state involving different such groups.
It was the same with the original development of the country.
The difference is apparent when compared to Canada.
In Canada the pioneers were led or joined by the police, the newly created Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Law and order arrived either before or with the new pioneers.
In the US, it was the other way around. Pioneers went west without any officials, police or law enforcement. Pioneers dealt with everything by the force of a gun. Whoever had a gun was the one with power and controlled everything … you could be a good moral person and lead a community or you could be a gang leader, decrepit, immoral and unjust, as long as you had a gun, you could do whatever you wanted.
Yeah. The US is a huge area with a relatively low population density and abundant natural resources. It participated in both world wars, and was nearly the only country to not take any real damage from either of them.
There hasn’t been a war on US soil since the US civil war. There has barely even been any damage to a US state. In WWII they bombed Pearl Harbor before Hawaii was a state, invaded the Aleutian Islands before Alaska was a state, and one floatplane launched from a sub tried to set fire to the forests around Oregon and failed.
The countries that had been superpowers in 1900 were recovering from mass casualties and massive damage after 2 world wars.
It’s no surprise that in Europe one of the only countries not to participate in WWII was Switzerland, and they’re also rich today.
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