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Emerg Services Confusion Over The Hate Of Police By Some Veterans?

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Not to fan the flames, but why has Colin Kaepernick in particular pissed you off so much? I mean, I see that you don't agree with what he's doing and think he's hypocritical, but the nger you seem to have directed at him is pretty intense. Celebrities and athletes say and do stupid crap all the time. Hell, some of them do a lot worse than Kaepernick. So why has he ticked you off so much? Why devote so much energy to slamming him? It seems like you're taking something personally. (I'm really not saying that to cause offense or fan the flames here, just wondering, as this is a PTSD forum, and I know that when I personally get ticked off by a celebrity or some well-known figure, there's usually a deeper reason for it than me just not liking what they're doing)
 
I support his right to protest.

In one generation we've gone from a nation who spit on returning vets to one where if you don't get down on your knees and suck the proverbial cock of every vet as a sign of worship, then you're unamerican. (Damn, I miss that old website!) I have military in laws but I don't respect what they do. I am a pacifist at heart who does not support war in the least. It's kind of sick that if you don't support the killing of foreigners in the name of "freedom" then you're unamerican. I was born a generation too late. I would have loved the peace/love movement of the 60's where human life was actually valued.

Sorry for getting graphic, but I HATE this f*cking nationalist attitude that society has adopted. If you're not with us, if you don't support war and killing, you're not an American, you're sub-par. This country was built on such freedoms, the right to free speech, the right to protest, and so on. I don't agree with forcing citizens to support the military. I never will.
 
@EveHarrington I agree with you completely about the freedom to be able to express any kind of protest peacefully without being slammed.
The outrage over his Un American behavior is the opposite of what our country stands for, the right to freedom of beliefs.

The massive divide @Ka-9 mentions regarding the financial rewards between police officers and football players is a huge part of the problem.

Maybe people have seen my posts that I have a really hard time with cops and probation officers. I work in an area where I have to watch them interact with people and provide details for reports. I've heard them talking when they think its private. My issue is separate and probably has something to do with a trigger. It doesnt effect my opinion on this.

I've always held the firm belief that the problem is that its a high risk job with salaries that are way to low for whats expected of them. Thats the number one problem.
Like K-9 said, we as a society value our sports players and entertainers more than we do the people we expect to save us from harm and prevent us from being victims. Because of the bad pay, it attracts people who want to be in that profession for the wrong reasons. I can spot those and there are more than a comfortable percentage in the S.F. Bay Area.

The other problem is training and screening. When you have a police officer that is capable of killing an unarmed person, that is laying on the ground, by shooting him in the torso 4 times, while the officer has several back up people standing there watching, it means the guy doing the shooting is incompetent.

What I just referred to is the shooting of Dylan Noble. An unarmed 19 year old kid in Fresno, who was white. The video of the shooting is horrific, I cant add it as a link from the tablet I'm on, I hope you watch it if you haven't seen it.

What I wonder, is how that shooting would have been described by the cops, if a bystander wasnt hiding and filming it.

When the statistics and the logic behind cop shootings are being discussed in terms of race issues and cops overwhelmed in large cities, those are broad generalizations.

I know that when I watched that video of Dylans last minutes, what I was watching was a murder. There is a police brutality problem. That doesnt mean all cops are dangerous. There are race issues, but that isnt whats wrong. Seriously, if you're in a city burrow that is 90% black, of course the bad cop is going to
probably kill a black person when he loses his cool, because he was there. That doesnt make it a race issue.
 
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Ka9
the guy really has touched your insecurity - that you feel the need to denigrate/criticize him, his origins his career, his pay packet... and inflate your own.
 
Honestly, I've always felt that the problem was just as much about training as it is about race. I worked as a police dispatcher in Chicago for years, and I realize Chicago may be an exception in the fact that it is a bit more dangerous than some other cities, but the police were trained to be absolutely terrified. That was the main focus in all the training - I know because I had to go through much of the same training. In every separate training exercise, the instructor would stress how anybody you stop on the street may very well stab you in the face or shoot you. The instructors really drilled that into everyone -- "Expect everyone on the street to want to kill you." They would show videos of the aftermath of attacks on police, at times very gruesome videos of slain officers. They were ultimately trying to make officers aware of the dangers they face, but they also created this us against them mentality instead of encouraging officers to try to relate to people. I feel like that is a huge problem.

Obviously, race plays a big role too, but I think that if training were done differently, it might be handled a lot better.
 
Thanks Coco,
none of this is personal to you - you touched on some really interesting points though
@

The massive divide @Ka-9 mentions regarding the financial rewards between police officers and football players is a huge part of the problem.

Footballers pay is a market price - the price to recruit the players who people will pay to come to watch, and that TV companies will pay football teams and leagues to film playing - because lots of people will watch those screened games and advertisers will pay handsomely to show all of those viewers their names, their products and their services, in the hope that the viewers will choose to buy some of them.

What should the pay of cops be?

For people who work to provide security and investigation services in the private sector, the answer is easy - it's the price that it takes to recruit and retain the people with the necessary skill to provide the level and quality of service that the customer both wants and is willing to pay for (and freely choosing customers do pay - as shown by private sector security in the united state of all levels and abilities outnumbering the state sector by three to four times, and those people range from humble mall and store security people, to the highest levels of fraud detection and tracking down stolen valuables and offenders.

For a night watchman on a construction site, the pay needed to recruit and retain him is not very much, the guy has very few alternative options and they're not likely to be well paid - to get him, you just have to offer him slightly more than his next best option.

To get someone capable of performing as a security manager for a big banking corporation - you'll be recruiting from a far smaller pool of people who have lots of other options of where and who to work for at lots higher wages. you'll have to offer him more than his next best option too.

But what about the public sector? - how much should "society" pay to have someone shake down motorists for fines, to harrass pedestrians for jaywalking and jogging, to bully people into turning out their pockets (and sometimes their underwear and genitals) incase they have certain bits of certain plants in them?

The answer to that one is that society as a whole cannot "think", only individuals can think and choose.

There is no where that prices are "given" they can only be "discovered" by the process of people voluntarily bidding to recruit the services (or goods) of other people, and choosing from the full spectrum of goods and services on offer to them.
There are no "intrinsic" values - materials, goods services are only valued for the use that they can be put to by freely choosing individuals (for an intellectual work out on this see http://home.uchicago.edu/~vlima/courses/econ200/spring01/hayek.pdf and https://www.mises.org/library/economic-calculation-socialist-commonwealth )

without having freely choosing customers (remember the individuals who most of us abstract from and refer to as the institution of government don't give you an individual choice about how much you pay or what services you can choose - they get nasty with you if you don't cough up what they demand from you - and the people who are sent to get nasty with you are cops - the supposed "protectors of peace and private property" are sent to relieve you of your private property, by force) how do the individual bureaucrats or politicians in a city council or a government decide what level of services to provide, what sort of people to recruit, in what numbers and what to pay them?

The answer is - they don't know and cannot know
someone in private sector provider has a bottom line in its financial accounts to tell it whether it is using its resources efficeintly and pleasing customers - if it's doing those well it makes a profit - if it's doing those things badly it makes a financial loss

Someone in a government has no such information - but it does have special interest lobbies pushing it in their directions, police unions, political donors, the local temperence society...

it also has other calls on its resources - the nice civil engineering contractor who has secretly promised a nice big financial kickback to the bureaucrat if he gets to build a completely un necessary road bridge over the river, the teachers union which has promised a walk out if they don't get a 30% pay rise

So how does it decide how many cops of what levels to try to employ and how much to pay them?

the answer is - someone makes a guess, based on political considerations.
I've always held the firm belief that the problem is that its a high risk job with salaries that are way to low for whats expected of them. Thats the number one problem,
actually cop is no more dangerous in terms of injuries and fatalities per man hour than other utility workers. In the US Agriculture has more than twice the fatality rate,
Mining, quarrying and construction are higher than cops too (IIRC the BLS stats show about twice)
and forestry and commercial fishing are about 8 times more dangerous in terms of fatalities per labour hour.

so yes, state sector cop is more dangerous than sitting in an office, but it is no more dangerous than utilities work and it certainly isn't as dangerous as a large swathe of activities which we don't hear whining or claiming that they need to beat up and shoot other people with impunity because they're ever so special.

and the pay in those other sectors is sufficeint to attract people with the required abilities into them, even with the risks.

Like K-9 said, we as a society value our sports players and entertainers more than we do the people we expect to save us from harm and prevent us from being victims. Because of the bad pay, it attracts people who want to be in that profession for the wrong reasons. I can spot those and there are more than a comfortable percentage in the S.F. Bay Area.

You're touching on an interesting one there, and that's what model the state sector cops should operate on (at least while we still have the idiocy of a state and its chubby blue whine)

should they be strutting (loitering) in an entitled manner around the vicinity of the doughnut shop, harrassing people and trying to look busy?
or should they be like a fire brigade - only reacting - if they are actually called upon?
 
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I agree with you for the most part, and I hate when people try to claim all cops are bad. But on the f...
That's any job. Pedophiles also.like to work where kids are. Some bullies and killers like to work where they can do just that. Doesn't make them ALL that way. I will never understand why people don't get that.
 
C'mon, It's a freaking literal warzone. 530 murders SO far, thousands shot, tens of thousands of shootings, and the police are called to each one. Then politicians sit and blame the police so they can save their collective, puckered, shuddering, asses.
Sorry, but it's a more complicated situation than that. You should read the link @Changeling posted - the article is very fair and accurate. Chicago has had some bad shoot and kills. No, not all of them. But ignoring the bad ones for the sake of defending the good ones isn't going to help, any more than over-emphasizing the bad ones is.

This is a pretty great project, on first glance - I'd encourage folks to give it a read. It's a data project that the Guardian has initiated. On the surface, at least, it doesn't seem to be driven by an agenda aside for the search for information.

About The Counted: why and how the Guardian is counting US police killings

but...1 bad cop can out do the great work of 100 good cops...so I understand part of your feeling.
I just want to add - it's not about the feeling, so much as the fact. It is a fact that one bad cop can outdo the work of 100 good ones. That's why there needs to be reform.

Defending the entire institution isn't going to make anything get any better, no matter how passionate or well-intentioned it is.
 
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