Disarm most police:
Even in countries where the police doesn’t carry guns, the equivalent of the Swat will always do.
But Swat teams must be aware that Swatting is a thing, and should have no expectation when they break into a house to find fully rational people. It’s not a crime to be drunk at home, or to have taken sleeping pills and to not respond quickly to a bunch of guys shouting orders at you in the middle of the night.
Policing is also becoming a lot safer, despite the rhetoric that things are getting worse and police are increasingly “under attack.”
Having to prove racial discrimination in jury selection is an absurdly high bar, and usually impossible.
As the thread below noted, it's not fair to have historical conditions that produced winners (white men, countries with colonies, etc) and then make things more equal by saying "That's all over" and failing to recognize the results of previous injustice that are still embedded in our lives.
I could have offered other suggestions. I specifically said 'juries that roughly reflect their communities in racial and sexual senses'. I don't feel that's an unreasonably burdensome ask in pursuit of Justice.
http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D13...
Edit: Or just downvote and move on, that says something too.
At this time, this comment has positive karma. At any rate, complaining about down voting distracts from your very good point.
A more fruitful approach might be to try to make the pools more balanced. Getting more community participation in the justice system seems like a very good thing at multiple levels.
I'm all for throwing people in jail if they don't want to serve on a jury.
1) Do you think this is politically feasible? Being seen as "tough on crime" is almost never a bad thing in any kind of election, and what you are proposing feels decidedly the opposite of that. Further, even if you aren't disarming existing officers, they have unions and a fair amount of political clout.
2) Do you think you could find enough people willing to do this job unarmed?
3) I definitely see how this would lead to less escalation in a lot of situations (escalation seems to be the default behavior of police now), and it could prevent some of the high-profile police shootings that have been in the news lately. But it also seems like a high percentage of them (the one in this SWATting situation, Michael Brown, the 6 year old in Bexar County last week, Aiyana Jones) would be handled by armed officers anyway, so that only solves part of the problem, right?
Having said that:
1. Yes, I think it's feasible. Not in DFW or Maricopa County, but test cases in places like Madison and Columbus? Remember: big cities already have people like this --- parking enforcement, traffic direction --- and most cities are facing pension problems due to the assault forces they already have.
2. Clearly we can find the people to do the work. TSA staffs unarmed people at checkpoints designed to catch armed terrorists. Big cities already put unarmed officials in adversarial contact with citizens.
3. It only solves part of the problem. But I'd hope that by gradually relegating assault officers only to those scenarios where escalation was known to be required going in, we'd eliminate the kinds of snap-judgement mistakes police make in routine confrontations that end up with firearms deployed.
I guess the one part I remain a skeptic about is whether or not people are going to be ok with it, much less demand it. It feels like the underlying attitude towards policing is the sticking point - the same attitude that lets police literally get away with murder would also prevent people from demanding unarmed police.
Perhaps I overestimate how pervasive this attitude is, especially in big cities. It is definitely something I'd love to be wrong about.
As to 3, the UK police do escalate sometimes, and I think some of their behavior is disgusting, but at least it results in non-lethal harm (and hopefully disciplinary action) when there are no armed units involved.
Exactly. Expecting police to go to an active shooter / hostage situation unarmed seems rather flawed. That said, I think many other situations police officers are in don’t warrant being armed.
Like many I watched Die Hard and Die Hard 2 over Christmas, and it struck me how deeply the rogue, trigger-happy cop is embedded as a folk hero in American culture. The real life John McClain is George Zimmerman or Mohamed Noor. You guys have got to stop making these movies if you want to make any progress
Then I remember seeing 24 and thinking the entertainment industry wouldn't make that mistake again.
Also note that Hans Gruber is not exactly an example of average citizen and was shown committing several murders (not to mention a row of other felonies including hostage taking) before McClane has even a chance to encounter him. This is exactly the case where police officer is justified to use lethal force - unlike, say, woman in her pajamas calling the police because she heard a strange noise in her backyard. Constantly confusing these two is exactly the reason why no sensible discussion happens in US public debate about it - it's either "police can do no wrong" or "always blame the police, even if the other side is Hans Gruber".
Come on, one of the main characters in the Fast & Furious franchise is a rule-breaking cop. The archetype is alive and well.
It is actually the entire society that is happy to side with police.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/196610/americans-respect-police-...
Consider many people in the US owns gun, maybe it's because of those officers are fear of death (It's very normal) so they tend to act first to save themselves?
As an outsider, I don't think it's a good thing to allow people to own a gun. Because people are different in general, some easy to anger, some more likely to hurt other. It doesn't mean they are naturally bad, they may just need longer time to cold themselves down. And gun is too quick and lethal, ripped than chance from them.
If people need to protect themselves, maybe allowing them to own a taser instead?
All my friends who have guns own them because they hunt, like shooting them as a hobby, and/or like the feeling of power it affords.
Besides the above, how did that recent uprising in Catalonia work out...
Tweet, hold signs, vigils, hashtag whatever.. Without the blood of sacrifice and guns to make it painful, those people were really just pissing into the wind.
When we look back on these incidents they seem horrible, but if you give someone a gun and give them a reason to believe their life is in danger you're probably going to get deadly consequences. It's obvious to us that the cops life wasn't in danger in the instances you mentioned, but people are fallible and they may have brought past trauma or prejudice to the incident. It's probably extremely rare that a cop actually wants to murder someone and is looking for the right opportunity.
That said, if cops had better non-lethal alternatives to guns, we could save lives. Something that is more effective than tasers and works immediately at a distance. The cops objective in a potentially deadly situation should be to immediately incapacitate rather than kill.
I don't see police accepting this, and it is hard to not feel kinda hopeless about the situation, since it is linked pretty tightly with the 2nd amendment.
An incredibly difficult - but more possible - response is to raise accountability for police officers and their actions. As it stands now, it is virtually impossible for a police officer to face serious repercussions for shooting someone, no matter how bad it was.
Seven years ago, in Detroit, a SWAT officer threw a flash grenade into the wrong apartment and hit a sleeping seven-year old girl with it, then shot and killed her. He was cleared of any wrongdoing and is still a police officer. In the case of Michael Slager murdering Walter Scott, there was video evidence of him shooting an unarmed man who was running away, then planting evidence on him - jurors refused to convict him, and it wasn't until he pled guilty to other charges that he actually had to serve time.
It feels like these things happen on a weekly basis, and judges and juries are perfectly happy to side with police no matter how egregious the shootings are. We, as a society, have basically said the police can do no wrong when it comes to shooting someone, and the consequence is that a lot of innocent people are getting killed. Until that changes, I don't see how the police will change their practices at all.