Law Enforcement should be a profession, just like doctors and nurses.
Formal education. Licensing with a college whose role is to protect the public. Malpractice insurance. Requirements to remain current, and eligible to practice.
It is, in most of the civilized world anyways
I wouldn’t necessarily call it civilized world, but yeah for basically every country that belongs to the so called “1st world” except the US it is and it takes a few years to become a police officer.
Like where?
UK, Germany, France, Ukraine, Spani, Italy, … should I go on?
Germany
deleted by creator
You just described law enforcement in most first would nations.
Ah, so not here in the US.
How would you feel about police making $200,000 {or more since they will need hazard pay} a year to drive around and or sit in a car. There is no way a city could afford to hire enough cops to patrol a city. Yes they should have to learn the laws they enforce and carry liability insurance but there is no way we should force them into doctor/nurse level education without equal pay.
How much do you think nurses make?
Why on earth would you assume 200k? I’ve seen a lot of misused rhetorical terms but this is a textbook strawman falicy.
Police officers make anywhere from 43k to 63k based on a quick Google, getting massive pay bumps as they are promoted up to over 100k for police chiefs, not to mention hazard pay and usually amazing benefits. Nurses make 56k to 88k, also generally with really good benefits and a lot of overtime. It would only be a 10-20k pay bump and I would love that if it meant fewer cops with much more professional training.
These are some really low numbers, probably from tiny towns with no resources. Police officers (and RNs) in cities make six figures easily.
Police especially are public servants and their pay is public. Just look it up in your area. It’s very common for regular officers to make six figures with overtime.
Teachers need a 4 year degree and a state license, and they don’t get $200,000 or hazard pay.
Yeah but for teachers it’s not a problem for the sort of people who want that particular job to actually get it. For cops I’d rather the people who inherently want to be cops to be outcompeted by a larger applicant pool and have to get some other job.
eh, i dont think you know what youre talking about here - education recruitment is a nightmare.
I’m working with the premise of the above comment that it’s fine, to disagree with another aspect of what it says. You’re right that I don’t know anything about the state of education recruitment, but I don’t think that translates into an argument that cops don’t need to be paid much.
Meh, where I live police are paid a little bit over the median wage, and they have to get a bachelor’s degree (~3 years) in law enforcement before they can work as a police.
Law enforcement shouldn’t be a profession.
If you’re curious about the downvotes, I imagine it’s because you didn’t really state why you stand by your stance.
As really it’s a pointless comment that adds nothing to the discussion.
The setup is rigged so that you have to pay a lawyer to fix any issues.
Rather, it’s set up so that you can’t afford to pay a lawyer and become a slave to the system.
I mean they’re not wrong - I wouldn’t expect every policeman out there to be Phoenix Wright, but at the very least they should actually have to learn the laws that they’re supposed to be enforcing
Can you stop resisting? Look at what you made them do!
Police generally dont think the law should apply equally to themselves and civilians. That’s most cops; a group within that thinks they should be able to create the law on-the-fly.
Should they go to school to be better at this? Irrelevant. They have a gun and the idealogical highground.
I’d argue they also have technological high ground as well.
Fucking baffling to me how the most armed country in the world doesnt train their officers. German police tends to suck ass, but to become a policeman you have to study for 3 years. And you have to pass a lot of law exams.
Where I live, the police are lazy but they are more trustworthy and are more community-oriented, unlike the American police.
At first when I heard the ACAB slogan, I thought it was rather judgemental. All cops are bad? Then I learned that the American police are hired primarily on having low IQs and receive only few weeks of training. Now I understand why Americans hate them. Not all American cops are bad, but majority of them probably are. What can we expect from hiring low IQ folks with minimal training and arm them to the teeth? No wonder the American cops are memes themselves.
ACAB as an actual term is a bit more ideological in nature, specifically, in regards to the task the police actually do, which is primarily protect the state and private property, no matter whether it’s good or bad.
If the state tells the police to disrupt a protest about climate change? Then that is their job, and if they don’t do it, they’re effectively not doing what they’re supposed to.
You’re a bit off in the ACAB definition. It’s not that the state makes them do bad things (they do, but that’s irrelevant). It’s that all cops protect bad cops, making themselves bad cops as well. If a department has 30 cops, 3 are “bad” and 27 are “good,” then the bad ones should be forced out. That doesn’t actually happen though, so you have 30 bad cops.
This system is also heavily self reinforcing. If you add a 31st good cop that tries to do something about bad cops, they are either forced out or intimidated into compliance. That still leaves you with all bad cops.
Here in the US, good cops don’t last very long. They either die suspiciously or get bullied off the force.
At first when I heard the ACAB slogan, I thought it was rather judgemental. All cops are bad? Then I learned that the American police are hired primarily on having low IQs and receive only few weeks of training. Now I understand why Americans hate them. Not all American cops are bad, but majority of them probably are. What can we expect from hiring low IQ folks with minimal training and arm them to the teeth? No wonder the American cops are memes themselves.
And when they do get things wrong, they rarely get punished.
The slogan probably wouldn’t be quite as prominent if the police that made mistakes like that were held accountable.
I once asked an elementary teacher what was to stop cops from breaking the law whenever they wanted and she told me that any cop breaking the law would receive double the normal punishment. I nodded my head as that made complete, reasonable sense to me. Then, as an adult, I learned THAT ISNT TRUE AT ALL! Not only do cops NOT automatically receive double the punishment, but 99% of the time the entire system will rally around to protect them if they commit a crime.
Police is the executive, not the legislative power of the power devision.
But yes they need proper training. (Dangerouse half knowledge ahead) not the few weeks/days training they get in the USA and then they are done
attorneys aren’t legislative, they are judiciary.
legislative = make law judiciary = judge law executive = execute law
Prosecutors are executive branch and they are required to be attorneys. Attorneys have to go to law school
Bro law and order explains this to five year olds, you should know how dumb that argument is.
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.
Implying that the executive doesn’t need to know law is crazy, every branch of government utilizes the law but one can only make law and the other can only enforce it.
Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse from the law unless you work for the government and then reasonable mistakes are somehow reasonable to make. Ie. The government can get away with ignorant criminality and use it as a defense but you and I cannot, that’s not ok.
In the case of cops, not knowing the law is actually a benefit. They’ve been allowed to enforce what they believe is law, and if they find something actually illegal in the course of enforcing imaginary law, then it’s still valid.
It’s a benefit for the government not the people, they get to extract more from people who don’t know better, it’s abusive. It may exist but I don’t enjoy it.
Implying that the executive doesn’t need to know law is crazy
Its not entirely crazy.
Police exist to follow a very particular set of orders from their commanders (not unlike soldiers in the military). They get told “Keep people away from this building” or “Point this radar gun down the highway and don’t come back to the office until you’ve cited at least 10 people over the speed limit” or “Keep anyone who looks suspicious out of this neighborhood” and they’re graded on that task, not on the overarching capacity to enforce all laws.
In the same way you don’t need to give a guard dog a chemistry degree, you don’t need to give a cop a law license.
The guard dog isn’t expected to do chemistry, it is however expected to know it’s job ie. Where it is and isn’t supposed to be and to be fair if a guard dog kills the sheep the dog don’t survive the night. Probably not a good example on your part.
to be fair if a guard dog kills the sheep the dog don’t survive the night
Thanks @KristiNoeme for your input.
But I more meant to say that a dog doesn’t have to explain how smells work or why the thing it smells is illegal. Its job is to point and bark.
Street cops aren’t expected to analyze the legal angles of their orders. They’re just expected to follow orders. Hell, your admission to the police force is often predicated on underperforming intelligence tests.
You’ve clearly never owned a guard dog or worked ag. Stop pearl clutching shot that’s been done since the dawn of domestication.
They don’t, they do however have to know what they’re doing what smell is good, what is bad, what is uncertain and react accordingly and suffer consequences from bad choices. You’re argument is for more specialization in policing which I’m for but I don’t think you actually know your arguing for it.
No one is asking them to, but when like 70% of officers do not know thev4th amendment, how it applies and when it does not. Yes, they’re willfully stupid, we get that, it isn’t however something to accept it’s something to change.
Give power of life and death over others in an environment were they de facto are judged less strictly and punished less strongly than other people, to people with 3 weeks training.
What could possibly go wrong???
If only it was a question of “3 weeks training”. The real brain rot of being a police officer happens as you’re jumped into the street gang that is your local sheriff’s deputy division.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
Its a real Learn By Doing situation. And what cops learn over time is that they are utterly unaccountable save to their immediate superiors, who all have their own political and financial agendas that diverge starkly from the ostensible job of policing.
3 weeks? It’s more like 20 weeks, which yes, is low compared to other countries. I have two friends who are cops and they went through 20-25 weeks of training before they ever went on patrol, and then it was with an experienced partner. I’m not sure what academy is doing 3 weeks of training, but yikes.
If any one would hear that in my country it would be the fiasco of the century. (we have had one) You aren’t even allowed to go near the studying line if you have any criminal record. When the police make an mistake in my country, there will be an investigation. And the investigation is done by a party not in the normie police force, which can and does lead to convictions of the members police force.
Instead, Americans: here is your gun, go shoot and kill anything that moves, you are unimpeachable.
Also, in my country, if a member of police force fires a weapon, this alone means there will be an investigation to determine if the action was really necessary. The police cannot fire weapons without paper work, and are thus reluctant to do so.
Where is that utopian country and whats its name?
Sweden.
Oh, Sweden, how’s your problem of gangsters with explosives (and thus explosions) going on? We have had some, but those have been mostly directed towards tincan cops. (i.e. traffic cameras, fuck those.)
I don’t know why you’re downvoted. Unfortunately explosions and gun violence have increased exponentially. Now the news frequently talk of police officers befriending criminals or criminals joining the police force. It’s a shithole.
Finland. You can punch a cop in the face, and the only repercussions is that your are a violent moron with an pricey after math. You can avoid the pricey after math, if you give up before punching the cop in the face. :) (It’s temporary jail time in both cases)
Teach them that law school is about finding loopholes, studying court precedent, and writing legal correspondence
They only learn the laws that have fines/generate revenue for the county/state, or that give them the ability to physically harm someone. The amount of times I have seen a cop run a stop, turn/merge without signaling, or speed without the lights or siren on has taught me that.
The kid knows what’s up. Still, to better explain to them, a good analogy IMO would be that cashiers don’t necessarily study finance.
That’s because cops aren’t here to protect you, sweetie. They’re here to protect property, now go to bed.
Castle Rock v. Gonzales for anyone curious about the SCOTUS opinion that says cops only have a duty to protect property.
And for those interested in is police really have to protect and serve, look up “Police duty to protect” online and feel free to start on the wiki. It’s astonishing how little police actually have to do. As someone trying to become a cop, this is one of my biggest issues with the field outside of blatant racism.
that happened
7 is old enough to have this type of thought.
It happened to Edgar Blackmon.
Platon designed a system. We never listened him.
