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3 hours ago, Decoy73 said:

Sorry for the confusion.  I should have been more specific.  I'm definitely not agreeing that there are no good cops out there.  Earlier when I believe BlitzFirst was essentially suggesting a "code" or "Brotherhood" exists among police that makes it difficult for good cops to call out bad cops.  Well, the situation in Buffalo, NY is a perfect example.  The following  questions are not directed to you personally, because for all I know you could be a great cop.  You need not answer them, but can if you want.   But these are some of questions I and probably a lot of us (non-LEO's) have.

 

Why didn't any of those cops help that man or confront the coward who pushed him to the ground.  Why didn't those other three officers stop Chauvin from killing George Floyd.  Why do other cops witness bad behavior like an officer shooting reporters with rubber bullets and do nothing to stop it.  Why when my burglar alarm went off two years ago (false alarm) did it take the Omaha Police 32 min to respond, but when a "help an officer' call goes out, Cops seemingly come out of the woodwork and are all over the place.  Why did the first responding OPD officer to the Von Maur Shooting refuse to go in alone, citing a then dept policy of waiting for backup.  A couragous Douglas County Deputy then went in on his own, because people needed help--Police depts need more of those guys.  

 

I have a very strong opinion that too often police are more concerned with protecting their own than serving the public.  I would say this much more rampant in large municipal departments than smaller ones, but that's just a guess.  There's clearly a systematic failure here.  Bad leadership?  Existence of Police Unions?  Major changes need to happen.  I used to trust Cops,  now I'm not so sure.

 

Why didn't any of those cops help that man or confront the coward who pushed him to the ground.

If you watch the video you can clearly see that one of the officers wants to help, but he's quickly pushed away by one of his colleagues. My only guess is they were given STRICT orders by their commander of EXACTLY what they'll be doing and if they stray from that they'll be disciplined and/or fired for not following orders. I do NOT agree with pushing that old man and I'm NOT okay with what I witnessed in that video. Terrible to watch. 

 

Why didn't those other three officers stop Chauvin from killing George Floyd.

2 of the 3 officers were rookie cops with just a few days on the force and were in field training. They had graduated from the academy already, but probably didn't really know how to do the job. From my understanding one of the officers mentioned several times that they needed to reposition Mr. Floyd and their Field Training Officer, Chauvin, refused to do so. So my guess is they thought he knew what he was doing, he's a 19 year veteran officer so who are they to question the "choke restraint" technique that the Minneapolis Police Department has in their policy and procedures, in their minds. I ran an experiment last night with one of our rookie officers who's in field training. I told him I didn't want a political answer, I wanted an honest answer. I asked him what he would do if this situation happened here and he said, "I might say something, but if my field training officer says, we're not doing something, I'd probably back off!" I asked him why and he said, "because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm assuming my field training officer does so who am I to question them." It was interesting to see and something I'll be keeping in mind moving forward as I'm in charge of training for my department. I did advise him of the correct way to handle this and to never stand by while another officer does something that in his gut he thinks is wrong. 

 

Why do other cops witness bad behavior like an officer shooting reporters with rubber bullets and do nothing to stop it.

I can't really answer this question, I don't know if it's a culture thing or if they're getting caught up in the moment thing, and I suppose it really is up to how each situation went down. I can tell you that during training with rubber bullets you are told to not shoot in the head as that is a huge no no. 

 

Why when my burglar alarm went off two years ago (false alarm) did it take the Omaha Police 32 min to respond, but when a "help an officer' call goes out, Cops seemingly come out of the woodwork and are all over the place.

You'd have to ask OPD that one, my guess is they were on other calls as they're a fairly busy PD, as far as officers coming out of the woodwork for an officer needing assistance, we get ALOT of false burglary alarm calls, we don't get false officer needing assistance calls, so while that's not an answer you may want to hear, it's the reality of it. We get lulled into "it's just another false alarm call" from time-to-time unfortunately.

 

Why did the first responding OPD officer to the Von Maur Shooting refuse to go in alone, citing a then dept policy of waiting for backup.  A couragous Douglas County Deputy then went in on his own, because people needed help--Police depts need more of those guys.  

In reference to active shooters, it's a nationwide standard to NOT go into a building alone as an officer to deal with an active shooter. Now we tell the officers they can go in by themselves if they choose to, but no one is expecting them to as active shooter situations are such an unknown and stressful thing to deal with you really need two officers to deal with that. Sounds like the first officer was doing what he was trained to do, and the second officer was doing what he was born to do. I'm an active shooter instructor and while I tell my officers no one expects you to go in alone, I also tell them, "I'd rather die a hero trying to save lives than live and be known as a coward because I hesitated" 

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3 hours ago, JJ Husker said:

@BIGREDIOWAN Just wanted to say that I appreciate you participating in this discussion even though some are making it difficult and probably making you wonder why you’re doing it. I know you’re getting asked a lot of questions and having BS accusations lobbed your way. Sorry about that. But I have a question. If you’ve already fielded this one, I’ve missed it. What suggestions do you have for the best way to solve some of these issues? Maybe just 2 or 3 ways you see that would help fix/correct the systemic culture in many of these police departments and the best ways you see to drum out the bad cops and attract good ones? Okay that’s more like a few questions :lol: but you’re sort of the resident expert here and I’m guessing you have more knowledgeable insight than most of us armchair would be reformers.

Whoa, I'm just a simple cop and the answers to those questions should probably be answered by someone smarter than me! :lol:

 

Community Outreach programs are a long process and don't seem to be having the desired effect that we'd like and obviously it's not something that happens overnight. Somehow we have to come up with a program that gives us more of a result on a faster timeline that has more understanding with it. Sometimes I feel like ALOT of police departments do programs because they feel like they have to or so they can say that they're doing a community program. You have to WANT to do that as a police department and be genuine about it or it kinda falls flat. The community has to WANT to be involved too and do things better on their end as well. 

 

Unfortunately culture changes aren't something that'll happen overnight either. You have to have the right leadership in place with the right mindset that can capture the officers attention and gain their trust for them to get behind you as a leader. Then somehow you have to cultivate that leadership to continue in your lower command staff once you leave as a Chief. We have too many "bosses" in law enforcement instead of leaders. Leaders effect change more efficiently rather than it being ordered by bosses. The wrong officers often times get promoted for the wrong reasons rather than for their leadership potential. We need to inspire the officers around us and not allow them to lose that inspiration SOMEHOW! 

 

We need to do a better job of taking care of our officers. I don't mean that the way you're taking it, but this job changes you. It just does, you can't see the things we see, the things we deal with, without it changing you psychologically. We're human beings, we aren't machines, we can't be programmed to deal with things and that's the end of it. Our profession is dealing with mental health issues from the effects of seeing the things we see and what society thinks of us. So officers sometimes turn into the monsters they hunt unfortunately. The culture of law enforcement doesn't allow you to really speak out in the open if you're dealing with something serious. Some of us are wired differently so we can handle some of things better than others, but it all eventually adds up and it's called cumulative PTSD and it's a problem. I'd like to see us expand the mental health care aspect for officers. Require them to see mental health professionals 3 or 4 times a year so we can see problems before they come up later down the road with a huge situation where an officer just snaps. 

 

Lastly, getting some of the bad ones out will happen through attrition. The problem we are having is recruitment of new officers. People simply don't want to do this job anymore. When I first got into law enforcement you'd have 700 people apply for 18 positions so you were lucky if you got hired. Now..............we might have 30 people apply for 2 positions IF we're lucky. I think this is a HUGE thing for us to overcome and I don't think anyone has found a tried and true method that's going to work. Unfortunately hiring standards are being lowered across the country to hire folks to be officers that have no business being officers to be frank. We can't lower our standards or some things are only going to get worse! 

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This is a really comprehensive study of police stops:

 

A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States

Quote

To date, we have collected (and released) data on approximately
221million stops carried out by 33state patrol agencies, and 34million stops carried out by 56municipal police departments, for a total of
255million records. In many cases, however, the data we received were
insufficient to assess racial disparities (for example, the race of the
stopped driver was not regularly recorded, or only a non-representative
subset of stops was provided). For consistency in our analysis, we further restrict to stops occurring in 2011–2018, as many jurisdictions
did not provide data on earlier stops. Finally, we limit our analysis to
drivers classified as white, black or Hispanic, as there were relatively
few recorded stops of drivers in other race groups. Our primary dataset thus consists of approximately 95million stops from 21state patrol
agencies and 35municipal police departments, as shown in Fig. 1 and
described in more detail in Supplementary Table 2

 

In particular Figure 2 shows how black people are stopped much more often during daylight, from the caption:

Quote

Fig. 2 | An illustration of the veil-of-darkness test for stops occurring in three short time windows in a single state, Texas. For each window (19:00–19:15,
19:15–19:30 and 19:30–19:45), we compute the percentage of stops that involved black drivers for a series of 10-min periods before and after dusk. The
figure is based on 112,938 stops of black and white drivers (35,270 during 19:00–19:15, 38,726 during 19:15–19:30 and 38,942 during 19:30–19:45), with
points sized according to the total number of stops in each bin. The vertical line at t= 0 indicates dusk, at which point it is generally considered ‘dark’; we
remove stops in the ~30-min period between sunset (indicated by the left-most vertical line in each panel) and dusk, as this period is neither ‘light’ nor
‘dark’. The dashed horizontal lines show the overall proportion of stops involving black drivers before and after dark, with 95% CI. For all three depicted
time windows, black drivers comprise a smaller share of stopped drivers after dark, when a veil of darkness masks their race, suggestive of racial profiling.

 

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Seriously, you can't make this s#!t up!

 

Police Board President: Officers Struck Me 5 Times With Their Batons During Protest

 

Quote

Chicago officers struck Chicago Police Board President Ghian Foreman five times on his legs with their batons during a protest on Sunday in Hyde Park.

 

“It hurts bad,” Foreman said, adding that the pain of the bruises paled in comparison with the pain felt by his wife and mother when they learned he had been injured by police.

 

daa-2019-ghianforeman-500x500.jpg

 

Man who trains San Jose police about bias severely injured by riot gun during George Floyd protest

 

Quote

A community activist, who has worked for years to promote understanding between San Jose police and the public, was seriously injured by a riot gun in the George Floyd protest.

 

"I really just couldn't watch it anymore," Sanderlin said. "And just kind of made like a parallel walkover, put my hands up, and just stood in the line of the fire and asked them to please not do this."

The video shows the officers' training their riot guns on Sanderlin.


He stood a good distance away, made no aggressive motions to police, yet they fired on him several times, one round hitting him in the groin.

"I pause for a moment like maybe this isn't, maybe this doesn't hurt and falling afterwards is like the most painful experience," he said.

 

6234237_060520-kgo-6p-activist-img_Image

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I posted this already but I think it belongs more to this topic.

 

Going off of 2018, drug related arrests make up 16% of all U.S. arrests. 40% of those are due to marijuana (and most of those are possession only). So, 6.4% of arrests are due to marijuana. 

 

Additionally:

8937611669_68b12e22c2_o.jpg?itok=vfTOP5p

 

 

Blacks and Whites use marijuana at the same rate, yet Blacks are way more likely to get arrested for it. 

 

I think we should simultaneously legalize marijuana and reduce police presence where a large proportion of arrests were of Black people for crimes related to marijuana.

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