Isn't there a bit of a chicken and egg here with this?:McParadigm wrote:All jobs that you should try paying more before blaming society.Lord knows how many fewer cops we have now along with firefighters, ferry boat workers, snow plow drivers, etc.
If you’re asking people to police the most heavily armed society on earth, pay them like it. Pay them well enough to live in the city they patrol. It’s silly to act like the quickest way to improve recruitment problems, retention problems, and candidate quality problems isn’t an increase in pay.
If you want to advocate for the police, advocate for that. People’s attitudes are never going to change as long as stories like this one keep happening. And stories like this one keep happening until we pay cops better and hold them to a higher standard. Without that we are stuck in a perpetual loop, and will still be doing this twenty years from now.
I mentioned in my response to bi that these stories always have a “has a history of…” portion to them. It seems like most of these headline incidents were forewarned by previous violent behaviors, and were only not prevented due to a need for reliable and capable staff. So pay for one?
You can’t come in here and tell me that nobody wants to be cops because the community didn’t choose to like them enough. What do you think you’re going to resolve with that argument? What is actionable about it? People’s attitudes towards cops will not change until stories like this are less often, less brutal, and less obviously preventable. You’ll never scold them away from that.
Here’s what immediately pops into my head whenever I hear “so-and-so has 17 prior complaints filed against them for unnecessary use of force”: a complaint isn’t filed every time it happens. In fact I have no idea how many times it happened. So many other cops must’ve seen it at some point. Seen and not done or said a thing. If good cops can be that at ease with bad cops, then there are no good cops. It’s like saying “she was a great teacher, other than helping to cover up whenever a colleague touched a kid.”
Now, I don’t really feel that way. But every time I hear a new story about a cop with prior reports hurting someone, you bet your ass I do for a few seconds. Every time.
That’s why the way to advocate for cops is to advocate for ways to stop these things from happening. That’s why people’s attitudes can’t change until the stories stop feeling like they are a part of our routines. None of this can stop happening until the people with 17 prior complaints are rendered unemployable. The people with 17 prior complaints won’t be unemployable until the job pays competitively. The resolution you want starts here.
B wrote:Bammer and Bi_3 a point. This sort of thing never happened until the pandemic shrunk the work force and police forces had all the funding they asked for. It's probably just desperate hiring practices.
Heh, I laughed a little when I implied that police forces don't currently have all the funding they ask for.
Who is going to be successful going around telling predominantly Black communities that we need to pay cops more when the chattering class still all in on BLM?
