Defund the plumbers!

Many also make a lot less than plumbers. That is another big barrier to reform. Plenty of places need cheap cops.

National median plumber salary is $50,620/yr, national median police officer salary is $61,800/yr. Police officers are also much more likely than plumbers to have pensions.

Wouldn't those stats be heavily influenced by the work description? A police officer would still be a police officer as they advance in the ranks. A plumber would stop being a plumber when they get a new title. Or does the US differ between police and police officer?

I'm not privy to how they calculated the numbers but typically title changes are accounted for.

What kind of career ladder are you imaging for plumbers, here? There aren't that many boilermakers or steamfitters around these days.

Well yeah, if a plumber screws up and hits a pipe the wrong way they could get sued.

As someone who grew up in a small town we also have to remember that police jobs need to be easily accessible for the sons/daughters of affluent, town-running families in order to provide “respectable” positions for them. Gotta hide the shame of how they barely passed high school and were too sheltered to join the military like their elders did.

The state protects its enforcers very well so from the cops' perspective there's not much benefit into investing in more training.

Follow the incentives...

Seems like someone has a lot of bigotry towards plumbers and their training. 9000 hours of on the job training, coursework, tests, certification/licensing to become a journeyman.

How about "Engineers/programmers/teachers receive less training than plumbers"?

4 years of full-time undergrad is not far from that. It certainly varies per university but where I'm at you have to take 5 classes per semester, 2 semesters a year for 4 years to get an engineering degree, with the expectation each class will take 8-10 hours of your time a week (predictably very few students finish on time), for 17 weeks each semester, for around 7000 hours of work.

You then need 2-3 years of supervised work before you are considered to be a full engineer.

On the computer science side if you don't go for engineering, you have just as many classes, and you're generally not considered to be a real, productive software engineer out of college.

In another country I studied in, to get a CS degree you need 5 years of specialized postsecondary education, and 6 for engineering (highschool ends a year sooner). That's 8500 to 10200 hours of full-time specialized postsecondary education, only for you to be considered barely useful when you come out.

I think it's less about bigotry towards plumbers and more about prejudice towards cops.

"Prejudice" means literally "to judge before". I would describe this attitude towards cops more as "postjudice".

I want to live in a world where the people legally allowed to kill me in the street are the high bar on education.

They are only legally allowed to kill you with good reason. And in many countries, the same rules apply to you.

Non police are also legally allowed to kill others who pose imminent harm to themselves or others. You don't lose rights when you take the job of a police officer.

Probably for the best. I'm very skeptical that police training decreases misconduct. If anything, it probably increases it.

> it probably increases it.

Why would you think that? I'm assuming the sort of police training we're talking about is "if you're faced with this situation, you should do..." The most famous case of police misconduct in recent history is George Floyd, and I don't think it's controversial to say the responding officers just didn't know what they were supposed to be doing in that situation, did the wrong thing, and it resulted in a death. Better training would definitely have alleviated that situation - it definitely wouldn't have made it worse.

>Why would you think that?

The purpose of police training is to indoctrinate recruits into police culture.

https://twitter.com/KatieSponsler/status/1619341593827487744

> I don't think it's controversial to say the responding officers just didn't know what they were supposed to be doing in that situation, did the wrong thing

I think if you polled 100 police officers, you'd find that that is a very controversial issue, and that many of them support Chauvin's actions. They even had an officer testify that his actions were justified at his trial.

I looked up if there are any studies about this. I found this one from 2014: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/109861111452204.... Paywalled but referenced elsewhere as "more in-service training police had, the fewer cases there were of police misconduct."

Everywhere around the world it does - because police is a civil service everywhere, and national laws and regulations exist to set their standards and procedures.

I think it's also worthwhile to point out that federal departments like FBI (which require a bachelor's degree) tend to have lower rates of misconduct. There's at least a small amount of self-control and critical thinking needed to graduate university, which presumably weeds out some of the more unstable candidates.

Your opinion is ill-founded. I doubt that anyone in military or law enforcement agrees with you.

Take the Tyre Nichols incident for example. The arresting officers failed to employ several fundamental tactics that would have resulted in a better outcome.

Yes, clearly the officers were just confused and trying their best when they beat him to death. If only someone had told them not to do that.

Police are bad at their jobs, but we should not teach them to be better at their jobs?

That would be great, but it's not the option we're presented with. Police training emphasizes escalation of force, it frames interactions with the public as a battle, and spends an inordinate amount of time on firearms and combat.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220128201854/https://www.washi...

There's no sense in saying that's what police training is when clearly it could take many different forms

If the police are doing the wrong thing, then they need to be taught how to do the right thing. Cops have a lot of extra scrutiny and protocols than moat other professions, and they obviously want to avoid ending up in jail. Good training should teach the correct way to react to situations, and then actually put them through those situations

Even something simple like "how to cuff someome who is resisting without using nonlethal weapons" would have helped a ton. This is a task that you actually need to practice rather than just read about in a book

I will certainly agree that if police training were completely different, then it might be helpful to have more of it.

You think with more training, they would have been able to give him a non-lethal beating?

I think they would eagerly have followed a better course of action that didn't lead to getting fired and then prosecuted

In New York City, the police take citizens back to the stationhouse and brutally beat them where there are no cameras.

JS-free archive link:

https://archive.today/8NPM0

Police are morons, by design. https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

I mean, how much training does is take to be a paid thug?

Like how to know exactly when they can seize people's money and stuff like that? That seems like an hour long class.

It’s not obvious that policing should require more training than plumbing. Significant plumbing is required in almost all property, yet plumbing mistakes can cause massive, often irreparable property damage. Plumbing is involved in almost all hydration and hygiene, yet plumbing mistakes can poison and harm people in a variety of ways. A hot water system big enough to supply a domicile of a given size is also a potential bomb big enough to demolish most of that domicile, if the system is improperly installed. Plumbing has to be installed almost everywhere and is expected to function continuously for decades with minimal maintenance. It’s plausible that plumbing is genuinely harder than policing.

A good friend of mine is a retired Army Green Beret. After retirement he went to the police academy and got a part time policing job more or less “for kicks”.

He was absolutely horrified at what constituted “training” at the academy. An interesting thing about the Green Berets - while they’re certainly very capable with weaponry there’s a lot of “finesse” that goes into their role (to the point he called SEALs, Delta, etc “door kickers”).

At the academy the training on everything from de-escalation to weapons and tactics ranged from completely wrong to outdated, dangerous, etc.

Granted this is through the lens of someone the US government easily spent millions of dollars training but in discussing this extensively with him he offered several suggestions in the training regimen that seemed very simple, obvious, and likely of little increase in cost/time.

He's described several occasions from his (11!) combat tours when they had to be very strategic and calculating in "going to guns". Given the training and experience they would be relatively calm, capable, and measured regardless compared to (as one example) lesser trained units that hammer and nail. He's alive in large part to being able to talk/persuade his way out of things.

It's not a stretch to imagine a lot of the most serious issues with policing in the US (police shootings) come from very poor training all around, putting themselves in disadvantaged positions, and escalating to the point of "go to guns".

>to the point he called SEALs, Delta, etc “door kickers”

US Army Special Forces have completely different mission sets from SEALs/Delta etc, in which the latter does mostly kill/capture. SF does a lot more integration with host nation forces, training and so on. Not the same organizational goals, which is intentional.

Exactly. He wasn’t speaking of the “door kickers” pejoratively, just pointing out the difference in mission. They drop in to kill/capture as you say and GTFO (SEAL - Sleep, eat, and lift).

Also there’s a bit of controversy in the SF community as they’ve spent more of their mission “door kicking” lately…

In terms of training, he’s Hispanic and with his language abilities (at least three fluently) travel anywhere SOCOM sends him he more or less blends in.

At certain times he’s described his mission as “teaching little brown guys how to fight”. That said he’s also described really dicey standoffs (literally weapons out and trained) with local militias, etc where finesse and nuance was the way to “win” (stay alive).

Point still being, police academies in the US train more “door kickers” (and poorly) than they do SF - which is what we need.

To be fair, plumbers have to deal with a lot of shit.

less than hair stylists

Yeah we can tell

Not that surprising. Can’t taser a pipe to bend.