Excellent story on Darren Wilson

Most cops *never* fire their guns in the line of duty in their entire career.

 

That article was about a lot more people and circumstances than just Darren Wilson.

 

I just finished the article. Very well done.

 

I don't think it glosses over them at all. I think the story is quietly damning, which I prefer to the usual hot-blooded polemic.

Let me be clear: Darren Wilson seems ill-equipped to have been a cop and appears to possess a teenager's grasp - at best - of complex moral issues. This line:

"There’s a lack of jobs everywhere. But there’s also lack of initiative to get a job. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

Is rank naivete and plum lemon-headedness. It's numb on a literal plane, because Wilson appears to be indicating blacks in Ferguson just turn down jobs on sheer principle of laziness. It's also rank in the sense that, even after all this, Wilson's framing of the issue hasn't altered one bit, it's shook nothing inside of him, he hasn't considered that, instead of explaining away job issues with some broad "initiative" brush stroke, he could consider the immensity of the problem is perhaps beyond something as simple was fucking "want-to." The guy's a moral manchild.

He's not a corrupt or wicked cop, but that doesn't absolve him, really, of anything but the kind of guilt that lands you in jail. If anything, it's more unsettling, this guy, carrying a gun, having primarily been trained as a cop on how to shoot that gun, which he'd never shot, as opposed dealing with people, which is mostly what he did do.

This line from the story:

A recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum revealed that cadets usually receive fifty-eight hours of training in firearms, forty-nine in defensive tactics, ten in communication skills, and eight in de-escalation tactics.

In other words, cadets spend most of their time training for a damn action movie. Not service work. Not grasp of complex emotional issues. Gunplay and fighting.

The problem at hand includes racism, but it's much bigger than that. The rookie cop who stops you because of a taillight has been trained to expect you're the enemy. The cop has spent hours on end preparing for a fight you never intend to start.

 

Alma, I agree, but a lot of the training is meant to help keep the cop from getting killed.

Not an easy job at all. And becoming more and more thankless.

 

Without offering any justification for recent officer-involved incidents, I will say it's been frustrating to see so many people gloss over the reality that being a police officer in this country is an incredibly dangerous job -- especially in an environment where even the most righteous shoot will be second- and third-guessed to the high heavens.

While I do agree that officers need more training in conflict resolution and de-escalation, the firearms/self-defense training they receive is critical to giving officers the best possible opportunity to do what those of us in far less dangerous professions do: clock out at the end of a shift and go home in one piece.

 

It is made much more dangerous by carrying a gun.

No gun, less fear from everyone, less threat of violence.

All that said, there were 117 officer deaths last year, or one more than 1914.

1,106 people were killed by police last year.

So a 10:1 ratio.

You get guns out of their hands, everything gets better.

 

You want the average cop to be unarmed?

 

Tyranny of the seen. How many more non-cops will die because the cops aren't armed?

 

If I'm a cop, and you tell me I can't carry a gun any more, then I've made my last traffic stop, that's for damned sure.

I don't like that police killed more than 1,000 people, obviously. But "you get the guns out of their hands," everything doesn't get "better." You'd just have a lot more dead cops. And probably dead bystanders, too.

 

That's a fair question to which we don't really know the answer in America.

But is that argument you want to make? That police are armed to prevent the deaths of innocent civilians? I mean, that's an OK argument; based on the above training standards, I'm not sure that the safety of others is really the point.

American police, for at least 30-some years but I'd argue longer, have a mindset of "let's troll around and look for people doing illegal shit," the thinking being - probably accurately - that a broken taillight/gun under the seat stop potentially prevents something worse from happening. But this mindset, along with guns, has wiped out the trust between cops and citizens. There isn't a lick of trust in black communities. The Dubose death was almost like watching a self-fulfilling prophecy. He was afraid that cop was going to fuck with him, and the cop did, by shooting him in the head.

Hey, I'm against the death penalty for the same reason. Take death out of the hands of the state.

 

In Chicago, the charge they always stuck everyone with was "mob activity." I'm not sure if they still use it, but in the records I've examined from the '90s, that's charge after charge after charge on teen-age gang-bangers' records. Entire areas of the city were essentially cat-and-mouse games between the police and the local trouble makers. It seemed to me that a murder investigation wasn't so much a hunt for the murderer as it was an opportunity to get someone off the street.