[Itse]

Originally Posted by New Era

Having been on the inside of law enforcement in the US there is a lot of racism involved. A LOT. A disturbing amount to be honest. The narrative of the police being the best and the brightest that society has to offer is just that, a narrative, and a false one at that. The problem is the police are hiring the wrong type of officers and wrong type of personalities.

While I was working on my doctorate I completed an internal study on the history of department I was at and the failure to transition from the professional policing model to a community oriented policing model. The failures were many, but recruitment, training, and forced attrition were the biggest contributors. Senior leadership adopted the appropriate mentality, but they did not fix institutional biases towards certain personalities and change training to prepare offices for the street.

The problem begin at recruitment. The police are on the lookout for people who already have experience with, or the propensity to accept, working in a rigid chain of command, willing to accept and act on orders. This means a lot of ex-military, who are not trained as peace keepers but trained as brunt instruments of violence. For some reason they also look for people with certain skills in combat sport, again leaning toward people with a propensity toward violent confrontation. To make matters worse, the rigidity of the psych profiling was softened so more individuals would get through screening and into the academy, meaning that the process to filter out those with propensities to violence and psychopathic tendencies was eliminated. So now you had to rely on training to change behaviors.

Behavior modification does not happen quickly, and during a high intensity seven to twelve week long academy behavior modification does not happen. While observing the academy it became evident that behavior amplification was happening more so than behavior modeling. Certain personality traits were encouraged, and not those that included compassion, communication, and cooperation. This was where things consistently fell apart. The people who did display the behaviors needed for success in community oriented policing were being filtered out by the training lieutenants and the candidates who displayed a willingness to use controlled violence were passed through. When training regiments are focused primarily on confrontation and means to control those confrontation through uses of non-lethal force (means that can can be used for lethal force if pressed) you put a certain mindset on the street.

Community oriented policing requires people who display behaviors associated with compassion, communication, and cooperation. These are more type B personalities unlike the uber type A personalities that make up most law enforcement organizations. To adapt to this model you need to attract and put more of these type B personalities into the mix, especially in leadership roles. You still need some of those blunt instruments, but they must be led by those who understand and can use compassion, can communicate effectively with their constituents, and then work with the community through a cooperative effort to police the community. There are too many authoritarian LEOs out there, and too many agencies that rely on the "cracking heads" way of doing business. When you couple this with racial bias it becomes a very dangerous mix and what we are seeing around the United States right now.

The bolded part is to me kind of mind-boggling, because one common issue I see with basically all of these US police brutality videos, is just how [B]bad the average US cop seems to be at use of physical force. They are often clearly just pathetically unskilled considering use of force is their job.

Obviously the properly committed takedowns don't get shared in social media as police brutality, but it's still amazing to me. I would actually imagine that's one big reason why they're so prone to go for their guns or tasers. If you know you're about 50/50 to come out on top in a wrestling match, you really need to avoid them.

As I've sometimes mentioned, I drove in a cab in a nightshift in Helsinki for many years, and have seen more than my share of police taking down people for various reasons. Men, women, big guys, drunks, addicts. I've had to call the police to remove an aggressive client a few times. Seeing an experienced patrol officer wrap up a guy coming at them in a second never seizes to impress me.

But of course, every Finnish police officer has trained for years. As a result they're generally super good at what they do. They're also consistently the most trusted profession. (There's a national ranking every year.)