I have been telling people that the police in the United States had way too many officers whose political beliefs were fascistic since at least the late 1960s and that they seriously needed to be de-Nazified for the safety of the population. So I'm not in favor of going easy on the police when they do wrong. And neither should they be. If you are going to take on a responsibility that includes the ability to get people locked up for long periods of time, not that infrequently unjustly and the ability to shoot people, even killing them on the basis of your judgement, you shouldn't expect that doesn't come with the responsibility to do it well. I think in too many cases in the United States policemen and individual police departments, especially where police unions have become quasi-fascist political entities, the cops can get away with murder, literally doing what they're paid to prevent.
In other cases, when it isn't a matter of intentional wrongdoing, the placement of responsibility might not always be as clear cut but there is also wrongdoing by the police based on incompetence. Incompetence in this case should be either not thinking through a situation, not taking clearly needed action, not using what resources they had effectively or any number of other things. The police should be answerable for that if bad outcomes are a result of not doing what they should have done well.
But I am entirely against going hard on them when what happened is not their fault. Someone I e-mail sent me a link to a piece critical of the RCMP for its handling of the terrible mass killing in Nova Scotia on April 19th. The headline - which is all so many people read - goes very hard on the RCMP,
A former resident of Portapique says she called the RCMP to tell them the future gunman assaulted his domestic partner and that he had illegal weapons. The police took no action.
which is the fashion in the Canadian media but the substance of the article doesn't support the headline. It's a lot less cut and dried. I don't think the RCMP's failure to have prevented the mass shootings in Nova Scotia in April was their fault, I think those were a result of a number of things including the failure of the killer's girlfriend, one of his victims, to press charges against him. The police couldn't do much unless she or someone else were willing to do that. Even if someone in the public tipped them off that someone was dangerous and had illegal weapons, they would have needed a legal reason to investigate.
It's the easiest thing in the world for an anonymous tipster to give them false information that could read to them doing things that the journalists would then call harassment. Read the article and notice that though the headline faults the RCMP for taking "no action" over and over again, the civilians, other than the person who is anonymously narrating her story to the reporter, took no action, either. What the hell were the cops supposed to do with what they were given? Sometimes "the public" is the source of the inability to act.
I think there are three very serious problems with the police, one is the incredibly low level of training and education given to them before they are given the responsibility of enforcing the law and their even more serious responsibilities of protecting people and keeping the peace. I don't think even the legendarily rigorous training of the RCMP is enough to equip them for what they are expected to do. That's even with the on-the-job training that I would guess would theoretically be considered to be part of their training.
It's insane to give someone an effective license to judge when they have to shoot someone and to do that without them having the amount of training that you need to become a dental hygienist or veterinary assistant. That's putting an incredible burden on them without giving them what they need to just get into the entry level of on-the-job learning. No one should be able to become a cop who wears a gun without at least two years of college-equivalent level training, it would be better if a four-year post-high school level of education and training were required.
That, of course, would mean that a lot of those who should never even have the idea of becoming policemen would be weeded out of the profession. There are lots of good people who go into police work but the percentage of good ones to mediocre or bad ones are more or less on a hit-or-miss basis. Four or even two years of training would go a long way to giving those who weren't really suitable for it to either be discovered or to come to that conclusion on their own. I would expect it would weed out the worst of the ones who were in it for personal power and sadism. It might also include a lot more training in how to handle the stress of the work.
I've also said that making it more of a service profession than a para-military entity would make it a lot better and a lot safer. Some of that might be inevitalbe, considering that the police, like the military, carry weapons and are expected to use them if they have to. Otherwise, in 2020 the police still being modeled on the military is quite insane. It's also insane that given what they're expected to do, that they are burdened with non-essential responsibilities that pale in comparison to their public safety and crime prevention functions. Like the public schools, the police are given an impossible range of things they're supposed to do. If they had the resources and numbers of professionals that would be needed to really do everything that is demanded of them, the police force would have to be a lot bigger with far more resources than people want to support.
That the police in many places CAN'T POSSIBLY do what is asked of them, what is demanded of them is a direct result of demanding that they do what is demanded with inadequate training of inadequate numbers of professionals who have the equipment that they would need to do it.
The police, as presently constituted in North America are set up to dissatisfy the needs and demands of the public which they are supposed to serve. It should be no shock to anyone that they don't do it well and that there are enormous problems that flow from the results of that lack of training, the extreme range that runs from admirably conscientious professionalism and public service to sadistic and homicidal criminality.
All of that said, it pisses me off to no end how journalists, newspaper and online scribblers, online, broadcast and cabloid babblers never, ever consider that they are not helping things when they go down that well-trodden path of journalistic slamming of the police when, with absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever really thought about it - in the absence of criminality or even a suggestion of it, they fail to do what is demanded that they do on those occasions when the journalists or babblers approve of what they demand. Which is often quite arbitrarily decided.
The police failed to prevent a crime such as the one which rocked Nova Scotia on April 19th. The RCMP is being slammed for not having stopped a guy because legally they couldn't have stopped him before he went on a mass murder rampage. If they had acted in the way that the journalists type out from their keyboards or babble on TV, or lawyers of the civil liberties industry, the same journalists would slam them for taking action WHEN NO CRIME HAD BEEN COMMITTED.
One of the things that makes it impossible to prevent crimes, even among those who the police know about, are the laws and legal rulings that set up very high bars for the police to do anything to people who have not broken any laws that the police are allowed to investigate fully. The extent to which the law prevents the police from taking preventative action is the extent to which they are powerless to stop SOME crimes that might have been prevented. Even some of them terrible crimes which have terrible body counts.
In many cases, by law, the timing of when a person becomes the legitimate target of police surveillance or action is in the hands of the person who commits a crime, either one that won't get into even the local press or a mass murderer who goes on a rampage that will be covered world-wide.
And those laws that prevent that are sometimes good because they are there to protect the rights of people to privacy. The police could probably prevent a lot of crimes if they could do things that no one in a democracy would want them to do.
This reminds me of Barney Frank talking about why politics in the United States has gone to hell, he said something that I think surprised a lot of people, talking about how bad politicians could be he said, "And sometimes the voters are no bargain, either." Which is a dangerous admission for a politician to make. But it's true in more ways than Barney Frank meant to say. We The People are implicated in the failures of government and its different functions, including law enforcement. And there is no part of the public which is less of a bargain in that than journalists who report on the nonfeasance of the public and then blames the results on the police. "Nonfeasance" isn't technically the right word for it because the public acting responsibly isn't codified by law but if they want the police to do their job better, that's not going to happen unless they do the right thing, too. That goes for journalists, especially.
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