4 Ways America can Fix it's Broken Policing System
Given the recent events, I thought I would write about ways Americans can work together to make policing better. While these ways might not fix the entire problem, they would be a huge start. Before people start attacking me and calling me anti-cop, I'd like to state that I believe policing is a necessity in society, however, to say there is nothing that can be improved upon is being willfully ignorant.
1) Change the Training!
Fact: In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.
Before you come at me and yell, “But America is different than England!” I know that, however, you can't deny the vast differences in number of fatality shootings. I believe this has to do with the training. In all other first world countries, the police are trained to use their weapons as a last resort only. It is ingrained into their being that they are there to protect the civilians and to always deescalate the situation. It is the complete opposite in America. American police are trained from day one to never take a risk, and be on high alert at all times.
The results speak for themselves. When you have a police force on high alert at all times, you are going to have these kind of results. Police are trained in this country to escalate the situation. Just search, “Cop freaks out” and I'm sure you will have plenty of examples of my point. Is this because there are so many loose cannons in police forces in America? No, the training cadets receive is to enter every situation with their hand on their gun. There is an old saying that goes, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.” America needs to get on board with the rest of the world and change the way it trains it's police force.
2) Hold Police to a Higher Standard
Since 2005, research shows that only 35 officers have been convicted of a crime related to an on-duty fatal shooting.
Bob Dylan has a song titled, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” It's a song that recounts the true events of a maid that was killed by her very wealthy employer. It's a pretty horrific song as the listener listens to verse after verse of awful details. The chorus reminds the listener that, “Now's not the time for your tears,” until the last verse where we find out that the wealthy man only gets a six month sentence.
This song can totally applied to the police force in America.
The disturbing part is I can rattle off the top of my head countless examples of police murdering unarmed civilians and having no consequences. This isn't by chance or luck that all these police officers have gotten away with literally murder. It's because the bar has been set so ridiculously high, that it's next to impossible to get a conviction of murder.
Part of the reason for this is the laws drastically favor the police officers. Two Supreme court decisions: Tennessee v. Garner in 1985 and Graham v. Connor 1989 have laid the foundations of how we judge our police officers. In laymen's terms, these rulings set the standard that a police officer can use whatever force they deem necessary.
These two rulings have left police with almost complete immunity. They are allowed to kill with little to no repercussion. This gives the police officer a tremendous amount of power over average citizens. Anybody who has read about the Stanford Experiment has a pretty good idea of what happens when a group of people have power over another group of people. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
3) End Frivolous Laws
Arrests made in 2016: 10,662,252
Violent Crime arrests – 5%
Low-level offense arrests – 80%
This hits one of the main points of my whole article. We need to evaluate what we want our police force to do. A couple years ago an ex Baltimore police office by the name of Michael Wood came forward with an inconvenient truth. He revealed what most of us had long suspected, that the police prey on the poor. In this interview, he explains that when he was a police officer he'd have to make arrests to keep his numbers up. He was told not to arrest middle class or rich people because they can hire decent defense lawyers. So instead he would arrest the poor and disenfranchised because those were the cases that would most likely lead to a conviction.
If America really wants to fix its broken justice system, we need to take a very long and hard look at what laws are on the books, and if we really need them. The way the current system is designed, police are not there to help, they are there to make an arrest.
4) Militarization of Police Should Probably End
Here are some pictures:
Ever since Eisenhower warned us about the, “Military Industrial Complex” America has been making a ton of weapons. We've made so many weapons that even after we sell a lot of them to questionable regimes, we then give a bunch to our local police. This again brings up the saying I used at the beginning of this article. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail.
A big problem with giving military equipment to untrained military people, is that they have never been properly trained on the equipment. Although the police model themselves after the military, they are not the real deal... nor would we want them to be.
We also have to ask ourselves, “If the police are gearing up to go to war, who are they going to war against?” The police are here to police the civilians, not go war with them.
And finally...
Lastly, we as a country have to accept that there is a problem. There is a big percentage of the country that think there is not a serious problem. I myself didn't realize police might have a little too much power when I had a little run in with them a couple years ago. When it comes down to it, it's really a matter of paying attention to our lawmakers, and the laws they are making. The police are only as powerful as we let them be.
Take it easy, but take it.
NickelNDime out!
YouTube[](https://coil.com/p/NickelnDime/No-Warrant-No-Problem-/Npv0lvrB)