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This has become my default response to any sort of national level "police misconduct" story. I believe it will remain that way indefinitely.
I've recommended the Donut Operator YouTube channel before and I will again. It's a good look into what are far more common situations in everday policing. Specifically, a lot of it is tedious "negotiation" with non-compliant people who are very likely on drugs, in some sort of mental health crisis, or just plain extremely anti-social. The thing is, sometimes this tedium very quickly escalates into a life or death situation. It's impossible for me to write well enough about it. Watch some of the videos. The speed from which we get to 100 from 0 is starling.
The larger culture war angle here is that, much like the military profession, the PMC have zero direct experience with policing as an occupation. Being a police is pretty much the last, best blue collar union job. Like most of those jobs, the pay is OK but not great and, in certain jurisdictions, is not keeping up with inflation. The candidates for these jobs are not all bearing Masters in Criminal Justice with special concentrations in sociology and negotiation tactics. They're ex-enlisted. They're former High School and Div. 3 athletes. Many of them have several cops in their families. It's a job in the classic J-O-B sense (not a "career") for most.
And what a job it is! The saying has been posted around the internet for sometime, but, as a cop, everyone you interact with, you're interacting with on "the worst day of their life." That's a bit of a hyperbole, but anything from a traffic ticket on up is a noteworthy stress event for most people. It's always been funny to me that The Largely Online have a special softness for customer service people and the aggravation and idiocy they daily encounter yet fail to see that being a cop is customer service times ten plus guns and knives.
So what do you get when summing all these things together? An overwhelming amount of peaceful outcomes. This study points to over 60 million citizens having at least one encounter with police in 2018 and this one quotes 1769 fatalities in 2020. Sure, the years aren't precisely the same and staring with the simple 'encounters' number might be too dilutive, but I believe the point remains; most of the time, the Police do a great job of not killing someone.
I think that's close to remarkable given that it's objectively one of the highest stress (and quick to escalate) occupations out there. And that's its staffed by people who have training measured probably in the weeks-to-months range instead of the many-many-years of notably less stressful PMC Jobs.
Everyone once in a while you're going to have a bad shoot. This could be one of them, or it could not, that's for a jury to decide. But think about what the larger narrative is; at the Presidential level, we're going to hyperfocus on a single incident in order to draw wild conclusions about a statistical population that consistently demonstrates in the opposite direction. No, as Scott Alexander would point out, no one is outright lying here, but the manipulation tactics are plain to see.
I personally disagree with ACAB and think that police misconduct is vastly overstated, but I understand and sympathise with the reasoning behind it. I expressed this a year ago on this forum:
For jobs that require the public's trust, even a hint of in-group loyalty or preference is poison. Sure, it's human to feel a kinship with other people doing the same job, but it's an instinct that has to be fought back, not leaned into. And cops as a profession reek of in-group loyalty, and an attitude like "you can't understand what our job is like" only makes it worse.
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It being your first use of the acronym in your post, I genuinely did get confused as to why military contractors who are often hired for just such jobs would be unfamiliar with them.
Now I'm picturing Karen from HR having to hobble around in full plates and kit while J. J. Rambo makes Excel templates on a comically undersized laptop.
Hahaha. Crazy how those two worlds collided in a single acronym. Good catch.
Although, actual former PMCs would be some of the people I would want last as Cops. If you take away the Blackwaters and Triple Canopies of the world (who all recruit high end SpecialOps types) you get orgs like Armor Group .... who often collect dudes who are leaving the military for a whole host of what-the-acutal-fuck reasons. Your median PMC (private military contractor) in the Horn of Africa is always running off safe.
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Well said. At a minimum I am simply not interested in hearing from anyone who doesn't know any cops or hasn't at least done a ride-along. The moral panic about policing is mostly just ignorance, a symptom of our class-segregated society.
When bad actors (like Kamala in this case) weaponize that ignorance, they damage the fabric of society for their own personal benefit.
The “moral panic” isn’t just about ignorance, though for many people ignorance of policing conditions no doubt plays a role. It’s also about a severe lack of accountability for the police who do abuse their positions of authority. When police who steal money are awarded immunity from both government prosecution and private lawsuits, or when police officers who shoot unarmed suspects, charge them with resisting arrest, and publicly lie about the whole thing are told “no biggie,” people reasonably get pretty upset. It’s one thing when a cop abuses his position—that’s bad, but you’ll never get a force that’s made up of 100% moral, upstanding officers. It’s quite another thing when a cop abuses his position—and his department, the local prosecutor, and the courts all protect him from punishment. That’s the sort of thing that reduces public support of cops, no different than how the Catholic sex abuse coverup led to greatly reduced trust in bishops and priests. Every time a cop abuses his position and gets a nice paid vacation out of it, protected from any legal or personal financial harm, while the taxpayer pays to settle lawsuits on his behalf, people look at it and say, “The system is broken.” They don’t need to have ever ridden in a squad car to know that.
But what about all of the times when a Cop abuses his power and is absolutely punished for it?
What about all of the times a case falls apart at trial for what are really, really minor technical errors usually in evidentiary handling? If I see the killer of my husband go free because there was "reasonable doubt" about how the pistol recovered from the trunk was found, do I get the same level of sympathy as these "taxpayers paying to settle lawsuits."?
More importantly - what if the truly heinous abuses of police power represent <1% of all cops while the other 99% are just trying to get home safe and not fuck up their cases.
(Side note: You cited Catholic clergy sex abuses and the up-the-chain indictment of Bishops and Cardinals. Do you feel the same way about public school teachers and administrators where the sexual abuse rate is multiple times of the general public (which, itself, was multiple times of that in the Catholic church)?)
You're making kind of a wild argument - Cops should be incredibly close to perfection and, if they fail, we should feel justified in indicting the entire system of policing for multiple years at a time. How do you expect positive changes to be made?
If I'm a police Commissioner and I discover real malfeasance, hold a press conference and say "Yeah, I'm totally going after these crooked cops" but then you stand up and say "It happened on your watch. You should resign, maybe be prosecuted. This whole department is suspect" .... when does corrective change actually occur? Everyone seems to be too busy indicting the entire system into oblivion .... despite it's working so incredibly well most of the time.
But I suppose you have history and precedent on your side. This all ends with "defund the police" which has resulted in a murder rate among the most vulnerable demographics skyrocketing.
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I’m on board with this. It’s a problem for all kinds of reform projects— you don’t know what that job is like and want to reform it based on silly ideas from academia that only work on people who behave in statistically correct ways.
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It's a little unusual for a wealthier family in my filter bubble to have a son enlist or go to the police academy, but not that weird.
You’re a red triber from Texas, where the police and military are presumably still considered respectable, medium-to-high-status career paths. Of course it doesn’t seem that weird to you. To see the class divisions, you need only look at how many well-off blue tribe sons join the military or police.
Wealthy red tribe families aren’t exactly unusual, though, and I’m not sure that red/blue segregation towards the top of the ladder is that comprehensive- presumably the PMC still likes country clubs.
Could be wrong though, I’ve only been at country clubs to fix things. Servants entrances still exist.
This is an area where I think the typical American approach to class distinctions—defining class solely by income—falls short. (Scott also talked about some of the shortcomings of our usual definitions several years ago.)
I don’t admittedly have as much experience with wealthy blue tribers as I do wealthy red tribers, but based on what experience I do have, I’d say the blue tribers would find it acceptable though perhaps mildly disappointing if one of their children became a schoolteacher, musician, or humanities professor, but they’d be confused and upset if one wanted to become a cop, soldier, or clergyman. Vice versa for the red tribers.
The clergy is a high status career in the red tribe, and not something seen as potentially disappointing- unless of course that clergyman winds up in a scandal.
Likewise, high status military careers, even enlisted ones(like special forces, helicopter pilot, sniper etc) are totally acceptable for a red tribe boy from a well off or even elite family. Cop, tradesman, etc might be mildly disappointing if the family is wealthy, although it is respected; prison guard definitely is. A girl is probably not going to be encouraged towards those careers, of course. Teaching is an acceptable career path for both sexes, although a boy might be advised to pick a career which pays better. Indeed there are lots of red tribe teachers, they’re just a lot more likely to quit when they get married. Musician is not even viewed as a real career, but humanities professor is an acceptable normal job assuming you’re talking about something like history or English- gender studies would not be.
In any case I was assuming that there was enough red/blue mixture at the top end of the ladder through rich people stuff that running into eg a marine officer, pilot, pastor, or policeman in the fringes of one’s social circles isn’t implausible for a wealthy blue triber, just like running into a symphonist or whatever is plausible for a wealthy red triber(although probably not a poor one).
The devil is always in the details and the PMC loves to build its special statuses.
Pete Buttigieg joined the Navy through what's called a Direct Commission Officer program when he was 37 years old. Specifically, he joined a Reserve Intelligence Officer program that is notorious for being the place that politically or just generally striver minded over-acheivers go to tick off the "military service" box. That Navy program has an insanely high proportion of Harvard grads, lawyers, masters degree holders etc. And they often are commissioning in their mid 30s whereas your normal ROTC grad is in at 22 with enlisted being 18,19, or 20 usually.
And it's a Club Med of an assignment. First off, it's the reserves. When they do deploy, they're treated like retarded children (because they are). I won't get into the Mayor Pete Afghanistan stories (plenty to Google there). But it's all basically a farce.
Elite Blue Tribers understand that military service (especially post 9/11) has a ton of bipartisan cultural cache. So they've done what they always do and created as special carve out that, to the general public, looks great. This is actually the same thing that the Harvard Kennedy School does - they admit anyone, or give them some sort of status as a Fellow or something.
Contrast this with a kid at Harvard, Yale etc. who, on day one, goes for a NROTC scholarship with a signed contract for active duty Marine Corps ground officer (which likely means he ends up in infantry, artillery, etc.) That can and will get Mummie and Dad-da out of their recliners in Montpelier and on the train to the dorms. Think about the ssssssscandal if junior had deferred his entree to Yale and enlisted as a common phoot-soldier in the Army. Perish the thought.
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