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Notes -
How did American police end up there? Funding misallocation? Workplace culture? Lack of traditions?
It's not like Euros have a lot more money or time to throw around.
I buy the idea that American cops are more twitchy because everyone is potentially packing, but you'd think that would make them want to train even harder.
A few main things -
1.) Lots and lots of smaller departments, where a combination of nepotism/corruption and just a need for bodies create lower standards. I think while there are some specific pretty terrible big city PD's, the worse police departments in medium and small towns and cities across America, where they truly are unaccountable and incesteous, while having immense power.
2.) A non-professional culture - From what I've seen, European's treat the job of police as yes, something admirable, but it's still a job and one you need the right qualifications and training for. In the US, as I think somebody said, it's basically a place where non-college educated men can make good wages and be respected in society, and not much else. Obvious, there's the matter of the number of guns, but looks at the difference between the median UK or European police officer's uniform and a US police officer's.
3.) Post 9/11 worship - People might forget/not know this, but there were police scandals in the 90's and some pushes for reform, and the median view of the police was something like NYPD Blue - there were good and bad cops, and so on. 9/11 meant it became basically impossible to question anything any cop did for a decade plus, and then another five years for said questioning to reach a critical mass, due to social media.
4.) People like having the thugs around - You sometimes see this in this place, and just in wider America - people who don't think they'll ever have to deal with cops don't mind the proles getting what they deserve, including at times, other proles.
You know, it would be interesting to at least entertain some of there structural differences as possible reforms to the American system. I know some towns love the local control of their police -- ticket revenue, quiet suburbs with fast response times, and so forth. What would folding them all under (partial?) state-level control look like? Or standardizing the training and professionalism? Intentionally shuffling officers around might improve uniformity and make corruption more difficult (although I suppose that didn't work for the Catholic clergy). Or enforcing weekly gun training -- not just firing and handling, also rapid decision-making.
But I also realize that I'm not knowledgeable enough to have confidence in any of these. Is there literature or trial studies for making these sorts of changes?
Somehow preventing cops with bad records from just transferring to the next town over would be a great start, but the details would need to be thought through carefully and the implementation would be tricky. Having a special state prosecutor investigate all incidents of suspected police misconduct would probably also help, since local police departments and local prosecutors’ offices usually have fairly incestuous relationships.
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I think a reasonable assumption of the presence of firearms in every encounter, due to the US being the US, means there's inherently higher tension and more reasonable cops get deterred from the career.
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Looks pretty similar, except for the high visibility vest, but do you have less superficial info than me?
Random US: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-c4635ee41d8d1fb890d78a62d15268a7-lq
Random UK https://spf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/B_15674-scaled.jpg
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