"Black Lives Matter" and Bernie Sanders

[s_stabeler]

I didn't mean that racism wouldn't be an issue if you stopped cops from shooting people unfairly. Nor did I say that racism shouldn't be addressed. What I said was that it would be less of a problem if cops were less inclined to use lethal force. (basically, racism in the police would be less of a flashpoint issue if it was merely false arrests, for example. still an issue that needs addressing, but not quite as bad.

or to sum up: there IS a racism problem, however, there is ALSO a problem of police being too quick to resort to lethal force. The two happen to co-incide in quite a few cases, however, of the two, one is a more immediate problem. yes, address the racism in the police. However, you should also probably emphasize in training when not to resort to lethal force.

[Gravekeeper]

or to sum up: there IS a racism problem, however, there is ALSO a problem of police being too quick to resort to lethal force. The two happen to co-incide in quite a few cases, however, of the two, one is a more immediate problem. yes, address the racism in the police.

All police precincts have escalation of force guidelines and other supporting policies. But they are unevenly enforced and followed based on the race of the suspect. So no, its not the more immediate problem. If you haven't noticed there's a running theme to cases where a black person ends up dead at the hands of police where the officer in question is skirting one policy or another. Then the blue wall closes around them afterwards.

Black people are disproportionately the victims of violence and harassment at the hands of police. To an alarming degree. Its also nothing new. The only reason its coming to a head these days is because everyone has cameras and social media now. Its been going on away from the public eye for decades prior to this.

[Hyena Dandy]

Improving the way people are trained will be very important. There are a lot of policies, but there is not a lot of TRAINING. You get a hundred hours of learning how to react with your gun, and maybe a couple days if you're lucky of de-escalation. In addition to black people, mentally ill people also suffer disproportionately at the hands of untrained police officers, because, again, they aren't trained to de-escalate. They're trained to 'Fight the bad guys.' Not 'Protect the good guys.'

Our culturally influenced depiction of black people is frequently criminals. Which will influence you subconsciously, the same way the way that police officers see themselves as 'Stop the bad guys.'

When it comes to the problems in policing minority communities, though, it does go beyond that. The people who killed Freddy Gray weren't all white, because, as it has been said, 'This isn't a black vs white problem, it's a black vs blue problem.' The best way I heard it put, is to remember. The officers smacking around black people in the '60s were not in the force's special "Racist Asshole Taskforce." They were regular duty officers, and they go on to train the ones in the 70s, and 80s, who train the ones in the '90s and 2000s, who train the ones today.

It's a complex issue. There's a serious cultural problem in police departments. The way they're taught to see all issues, the way they're trained for us-vs-them. Better training in de-escalation will help, surely. But it's not the ONLY solution.

[Shangri-laschild]

Improving the way people are trained will be very important. There are a lot of policies, but there is not a lot of TRAINING. You get a hundred hours of learning how to react with your gun, and maybe a couple days if you're lucky of de-escalation. In addition to black people, mentally ill people also suffer disproportionately at the hands of untrained police officers, because, again, they aren't trained to de-escalate. They're trained to 'Fight the bad guys.' Not 'Protect the good guys.'

Agreed, training needs to be better up front and continue throughout the career. This is true no matter how good of a track record the department has. It also needs to be more standardized. We had several officers go to training to be the training officers for new hires out of the academy. Despite only a couple of months in between, they were taught different things. And I do get that things adapt and methods change but this is a common problem. It's easier for things to slip between the cracks when no one is on the same page.

It's a complex issue. There's a serious cultural problem in police departments. The way they're taught to see all issues, the way they're trained for us-vs-them. Better training in de-escalation will help, surely. But it's not the ONLY solution.

This is definitely very true as well as what Gravekeeper was saying about the wall closing to shield the officers who do something wrong. I hate that mentality so very much. If you can't trust someone to not shoot an innocent person or get into domestic disputes or things like that, then how do you trust them to have your back? So the argument of shielding them because of that is crap. When people deal with the bad cops, it makes things harder to de-escalate later situations for cops that aren't bad. We had an issue come up with a schizophrenic woman who had run away from her caregiver and was headed to campus. It wasn't a safety issue for the school, it was just an issue of trying to get her to stay put so her caregiver could come get her. Because of past issues with police, the second he found out that I was in that department and that the school was closed so no one else could go look for her, he stopped talking to me and hung up. Because of past issues he was worried that me sending officers to check for her and convince her to wait would make her so agitated that she would get arrested. I don't know if he found her, I hope he did. And really, when it comes down to it, the most important reason why it shouldn't happen is shielding the cops who shouldn't be working is the wrong thing to do. You can't protect people like that and help them stay in the job and be innocent of it yourself. I really wish that the mentality would change. Those who can't safely do their job shouldn't be hidden and protected. Coworkers need to speak out more and bad officers need to be removed.