08-28-2020, 08:25 AM
(08-27-2020, 10:25 PM)Crazyjdawg Wrote: I think the simplest way of "weeding out the bad ones," as it were, would be to make being a police officer a generally desirable job.
If you look at policing on the whole, it's not a very desirable job, especially in the current political climate. The pay is mediocre at best (and in a lot of cases, below average), it's relatively dangerous, you have to deal with a lot of really shitty people (drunks, addicts, criminals etc) and, more recently, you're treated like you're corrupt even if you aren't (at least actively corrupt. They are all to blame for the blue wall of silence.)
Like you said, one of the only perks of being a police officer is that you get to have authority over people. Which, to be honest, isn't supposed to be a perk, it's supposed to be a responsibility. And "with great power, comes great responsibility" definitely should apply here. But what ends up happening is that the low benefits outside of this added authority makes the job more attractive to people who should not be given authority.
This has led to a pretty tricky situation nationwide. Essentially, the low desirability of the job has made it hard to hold a standard for police. Over the last decade, recruitment is WAY down and the attrition rate for police officers is higher than both nursing and teaching, two groups that constantly get attention for how few of them there are. And that's not to mention the fact that, in addition to the mental requirements for being a police officer (training, stress, responsibility in the form of authority), there are physical requirements as well, as you must be fit to be a police officer (at least in theory).
All of this leads to one of the main causes of what's going on today: Shitty cops are not being fired.
Look no further than Derek Chauvin. That guy had at least 18 separate complaints filed against him, according to internal affairs. This guy was, as a co-worker described “the guy not everybody liked or wanted to work with.” but yet was tasked with training two rookies...
The lack of staffing and applications to the police force allows people like Chauvin to remain a police officer even with all these blights on their records.
Logic would stand that, if you aren't replaced or fired for misconduct, then you would not be concerned with whether or not you are performing your job properly.
So, in order to increase the attractiveness of the position, I would recommend increasing salaries, increasing required training (a degree in some form of law or law enforcement should be absolutely required) and, as a result, increase the ability to actually remove police officers who are not fit for the job, as there would be people standing in line for the opportunity to be a police officer.
It should be a prestigious role in our society, but misconduct and lack of accountability has turned it into a place where too many of the people least equipped to do the job stick with it over the long term.
I acknowledge that I am kind of in the opposite camp as most lefties (and some of them may even disown me for this opinion XD ) in that I think additional funding would fix the police as long as it was used appropriately, as I said above.
If that doesn't work, then the entire policing system may just be irreparably broken in America, I dunno haha.
In actuality, the only real benefit to going into Police Work were the pensions. You work shitty hours for mediocre pay, but at the end there were fairly decent pensions. Most departments have gone away from those pensions now, so there is really no attraction to the job. I did it for decades, and steered my son away from it because I saw where it was going. Having authority over people is definitely NOT a perk, because every time you use this authority to take away someone's freedom you are subject to lawsuits. You have to be right every time, or your either dead or sued. I was lucky enough to get through my whole career policing in the inner city without having one lawsuit against me. That said, I had complaints. You cannot do that job without receiving complaints, because by the nature of it you are always pissing people off. So you can't really look at the number of complaints, you have to look at the number of complaints that were justified.
