AKA: If everyone is super, then nobody is

unironically yes? if a job "requires" a BA/BS, but realistically could be done by the median highschool graduate, that's four years off the person's life for no real reason.

of course, there are other benefits of higher education. but credential creep itself is a signal of waste, not progress.

When those standards cost resources to acquire and maintain without providing a return?

Yes, absolutely that's harmful for humanity in general

The return is a more educated populace, what's harmful for humanity in general is thinking about everything in monetary terms

I think the implication is that a college degree no longer represents progress.

Did it ever represent progress? What I was saying is that the increased baseline of education for the populace is progress, not that a degree represents progress itself

Humanity is obviously a strong-link system.

Astounding to me how deep that movie was for a kids movie, how DIFFERENT it is from the types of morals and values that are pushed in modern films, and how well it holds up today.

Ten years later, we learned that if everything is awesome, nothing is awesome.

Police should definitely be more highly educated, we see the result of them not being so in the US

I strongly suspect the issues you're referring to are much more an issue with attitude and mindset, rather than directly with education. I think there are probably much more efficient ways to adjust attitude and mindset than broad-based college education.

I'm glad I got a broad-based education. It was definitely the right thing for me, but I think it's a hammer being applied to too many problems that aren't roughly nail-shaped.

I think a college education is a great screening tool for determining levels of conscientiousness, ability to communicate, and ability to follow directions. All great things. My worst interactions with police officers all involved individuals that were low on these skills.

A lot of that can go out the window when they are placed in the position of power (rather than the professor) and are surrounded by existing officers. If I remember right, there are some studies about police group dynamics as a factor in the type and severity of force used (group size was positively correlated with level of force).

It's not clear to me that a bunch of psychology grads would naturally be better cops. If anything, police forces would be better investing in more internal training and apprenticeship that's actually related to policing.

Nobody said anything about what kind of degree let alone psychology

Not only does a criminal justice degree already exist but we could even introduce a new BA degree in policing with the kind of training that would result in an improved police force

More educated : Yes.

Have a second-rate college degree to fulfill arbitrary qualification requirement: No.

Education won't fix broken incentives namely a lack of consequences for bad behavior. If anything shrinking the pool will only worsen it.

Police need to be more highly trained -- I wouldn't equate that 1:1 with holding a degree.

U.S. training requirements for police are state-level matters sometimes augmented by local requirements; none of the state requirements, as I recall, are comparable to the more stringent standards required in many western European nations.

People with university educations can very much abuse their power. Thinking otherwise is a liberal fantasy, much like the formerly popular meme that China would magically liberalize its political system because of globalization.

TIL Kissinger and Nixon were liberal fantisists.

Yes? Political liberalism goes well beyond the narrow understanding that exists within the US, wherein the label has grown to be largely incoherent/redefined to mean whatever is mainstream within the Democratic Party.

TIL Kissinger and Nixon were Demorats. Along with apparently Reagan, Bush Sr, W. Who knew.

Hilarious

Considering liberals aren't leftists I'm not surprised

what does education have to do with schooling?

So police have college degrees in other developed countries?

Yes, actually

>Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma

>Maria Haberfeld, professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says: "Some police forces in Europe have police university, where training lasts for three years - for me the standouts are Norway and Finland."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733

Only if you think educated is a useful proxy for thoughtful, mature, and wise. I think it is categorically not.

Getting some 4 year degree does not equate to 'highly educated'. College is an extension of high school for most americans, who didn't learn much there either.

the solution is just to fire bad cops. The future bad cops will get the picture. no way to really pre screen cops other than keeping out known criminals.

I don't think there's anything sane about the Police reducing their job requirements when we see how ripe for abuse the position is and how unstable it has become in the US based on similar reductions.

I also don't really understand how university education is "almost ubiquitous"; I see that the prevalence of Bachelor's degrees amongst adults is under 40%. Is the claim that the demographic of 21-32 would have a percentage like 70% or what?

College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive. Why waste money on them when we could instead give police better police training and resources?

Very idealistic to think that money would be reallocated to give police better training and resources, unless you mean military grade equipment for responding to domestic disputes.

One can dream though...

True, but it’s only idealistic because nobody is seriously talking about it. The two options seem to either be defund or militarize. If more people talk about sensible options regularly then they won’t seem like pipe dreams.

In any case the point here is that college degrees clearly don’t serve as great police training.

There are people seriously talking about it. E.g. the current President of the United States has been talking about better police training since his campaign, and has issued executive orders touching on it. It's just kind of boring, so it doesn't end up in the news and doesn't go anywhere with the legislature.

(edit: I don't want to litigate whether POTUS's preferences for better training would actually improve things, I only want to point out he's been talking about it).

In that case, I guess I’m not being idealistic, just reasonable.

Domestic Disputes in America very often involves guns now. So yeah it seems like if you were a copy and you were told to handle a bunch of yelling from an apartment upstairs in the US, you might want to go with at least a vest on, if not helmet.

Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer. I sure wouldn't want to show up to a couple fighting in a bad neighborhood without backup and guns because some suburbanite is squeamish about violence. Especially for like $50k a year or less.

> Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer.

Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing [0].

From the 2021 data [1] for on-the-job police officer deaths:

• 73 were Feloniously killed (only 7 total in responding to all disorders/disturbances (e.g., disorderly subjects, fights, domestic disturbances/violence))

  - 61 of those 73 were killed by firearms

  - 44 of those 73 were in the South

 • 56 Accidental deaths (32 of which were crashes).

If we check individual case reports at [2], we can see how many of the 7 total responding to disorders/disturbances were Domestic.

[0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work... [1]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight... [2]: Comprehensive data tables about these events and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/

>>> Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking

The difference is that everyone who works on those jobs has roughly the same risk. A cop who has to respond to a disturbance in a bad area is fat more at risk than someone in the crime lab or the evidence room. If you look at the risk of injury to cops who are out on patrol all day, it's more dangerous.

Sure but can you cite or estimate more accurate stats? I read ~68% of officers do patrol, so as a decent approximation that's most of them.

I take your point about cities/areas/zipcodes/states. To me one pattern that keeps jumping out is that the South (LA, MS, GA, TN) has incredible levels of (gun) violence.

Ideally we could quote police officer injury and death rates, per-capita population, by region, by circumstances of incident.

>>> can you cite or estimate more accurate stats?

No, sorry. But I don't know if the stats would fully capture what I think the difference is. Like, I remember a case of a cop who shot a teenager who was running away from him in an alley way at night. I think he had been armed but threw the gun away, not sure now. But the discussion about these incidents usually lead to the stats about how being a cop is not that dangerous in aggregate. That may be be true, but the distribution of danger is very peaky for cops and it's not just a question of whether they are patrol cops, but its also a question of the circumstances they're in in a given moment (which I didn't really mention in my previous post).

If you're called to investigate a group of armed young men in an alleyway at night, and you end up chasing one of them in the darkness, alone, you are in far more danger than the stats would imply.

From brief searching & skimming, I'm seeing that US police kill around 1000 people per year, while around 250 cops are shot. I deliberately compare shot to killed because police are usually far more accurate and effective at shooting than the average criminal. Needless to say this doesn't include all the time that police are shot at or attacked with other weapons that would justify shooting. So while yes they are not in as much danger generally as the people who attack them, it's certainly not a trivial amount of danger either.

I've thought about this a fair amount. I think a big difference is psychological. I've done logging (just family gather firewood for winter stuff, not commercially). It can be scary, but the trees and machinery bare no malice towards you, and you can minimize risks just by being alert and understanding the risks. That is, a lot of injuries are 'your fault'.

In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you, they run to evade capture, etc. Even if the total risks of logging are higher I can imagine it is very hard to treat the risks in police work in the same dispassionate way the logger does. Tree leaning while cutting it vs suspect's hands maybe going towards their pocket. Even if the stats in those two situations are identical (I suspect they are not), I think very different emotions are going to be triggered, and without a lot of training those emotions are going to make situations go sideways either at the time or later (treating every person you meet as dangerous scum, etc). You don't hate the trees, you don't fear walking amongst them when not cutting them, you don't want to cut them a bit harder next time to teach them a lesson, and so on.

Anyway, I think all of that results in the 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.

I'm sure the psychological factor is huge. That said, I did come across a few relevant stats [1]:

>>> 2,744 officers were assaulted with firearms; 6.1% of these officers were injured. 1,180 officers were assaulted with knives or other cutting instruments; 9.7% of these officers were injured. The remaining 11,760 officers were assaulted with other types of dangerous weapons; 16.8% of these officers were injured.

That same year (2021) US police killed 1048 people - less then half the number of cops that were attacked with guns, and less than 1/10th of the number attacked with other dangerous weapons.

I wonder how this compares with European countries, i.e. the ratio of people killed by police to how often they police are attacked in a serious way.

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/dallas/news/pre...

> In contrast, in policing people really do shoot at you

Definitely, some people do. Some don't. Some are trying to commit suicide-by-cop. Some are unarmed and not even a threat. Your post makes it sound like anytime an officer decides force is necessary, that it necessarily must be. Let alone, lethal force. Sometimes police get that determination wrong, whether by accident or intent. Sometimes police abuse qualified immunity. This stuff almost never goes before a jury, and on the occasions it does, if there's no bodycam and no other narrative (i.e. the other person's dead), unlikely to result in a conviction.

Angelo Quinto [0] was an unarmed, non-violent, non-criminal, 30-yo mentally-ill Filipino-American veteran killed in his own home by Antioch PD, by kneeling on his neck, while handcuffed. His mother was the person who called 911, and noone asked for the police, she only asked for medical. He apparently wasn't even committing any crime, just having a psychiatric emergency. But the police killed him.

Antioch PD didn’t disclose Quinto’s death to the public for nearly a month, then only after public requests. And there's no bodycam of his death. None of them were fired or charged, and there's no public mention of disciplinary actions. In response Gov Newsom signed eight police reform bills.

The level and frequency of police use-of-force in the US is also too high. It needs to be reduced.

> 'feel' of police work in regards to danger to be quite different than logging or fishing, and ignoring that will lead to the police acting in ways we really don't want.

Equally, ignoring all the above also leads to bad consequences too.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Angelo_Quinto

especially because there's a pretty high chance that the abuser is another cop.

> College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive

Sorry, but can we try to talk in facts?

In Canada, since 2000, there have been 704 police-involved deaths [0].

Let's take a conservative population of 30M for Canada (which will inflate this stat) - then we get: 704 / 22 / 30M => 1 in 1 million Canadians die at the hands of police per year

On the other hand, in the US, there were 1022 police shootings in 2022 alone [1].

1022 / 331M => 3 in 1 million Americans are SHOT by police per year.

There's already a >3x discrepancy while using only US police shootings vs all Canadian police-involved deaths, and I'm sure the police killed plenty of people with tasers, beatings, and negligence in the US in 2022 too.

So, in general, I disagree with your claim that university education hasn't done anything to make Canadian police better than US police, and it's unlikely you'll change that opinion unless you bring some statistics into this conversation.

[0]: https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/police-involved-deaths-ca... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

Erm, your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all. You’re just saying Canadian police shoot less people than American police, which nobody is disputing.

> your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all

What I'm saying is pretty obvious, but I'll spell it out for you.

1. Canadian and American cultures are extremely homogenous

2. Canadian and American police have few differences, but a critical one is the Canadian-only requirement of university degrees

3. With no other clearly-defined drivers of police culture differentiation across the border, we see that US police are probably 4-8x more lethal than Canadian police per capita

So, since the police is clearly not about to properly train their people, let's not dismiss the value of a university degree as a filter, since it appears from a high level view that a university degree could serve to make a police officer 1/5th as likely to kill a citizen compared to a diploma.

Will you propose a different reason why US police are so much deadlier, related to crime statistics or otherwise, or will you just continue to say "the police should train their people", not hold them to account for not training their people, and also excuse them for dropping educational requirements that served in lieu of that training?

This butchering of statistical reasoning is so poor I have to assume it is a troll

But in case it’s genuine, consider vast differences in gun ownership, homicide rate, and… honestly so many other things it’s just annoying to list them.

> consider vast differences

I did.

Gun ownership is about 32% of individuals in USA vs 25% of individuals in Canada.

Homicide rate is about 2.5x higher in the US, which means US cops are outperforming this statistic vs US civilians.

> so many other things

It's not just annoying to list them, it's ridiculous; these countries are the exact same place. Across the board, everything you can think of has a lot of statistical homogeneity between these places. But Canadian cops are way better educated, and kill way less.

Around the world, cops that are better educated kill way less.

So why exactly are people excusing reductions in education requirements for police? It makes no sense. There's no supporting evidence that that's a good choice, and literal mountains showing that it's a bad one.

This thread is bizarro world.

Have you considered handguns as a factor?

Handguns are the most interesting statistic here, with the US being a serious outlier (58%! vs 12% in Canada), it could be related

I still don't see how you deny that more educated officers are less violent when I've made multiple links supporting that argument

Your analysis is just dumb. You’re implying this is the only difference. You’re implying the entire outcome difference could be due to this one variable. You have shown no evidence to suggest this relationship exists at all. Like, for example looking at other countries. You’re implying that one thing has to account for the entire effect as a linear relationship by saying homicide rate being 2.5x is not important or that they’re “over performing in spite of it”. But you want one? Fine. Cops killed on duty. About 10x in the US. That settles your desire for a linear relationship on a compelling alternative story. Is that actually a sufficient analysis? No.

You get an F for intro to stats. And an F- for being confidently wrong.

There is no “excusing” reductions in education. You have not demonstrated a relationship between these two things as important.

> You might want to look at the demographics of who police shoot in the US

Canadian police are also quite racist, but if you're arguing that "less educated American cops are more racist", that tracks pretty nicely with "please don't accept less educated cops"

> you are actually claiming that the reason American police shoot more people than Canadian police is because Canadian police have college degrees and American police do not?

Do you have a different explanation?

> Do some research on what percentage of US police have college degrees

According to [0], the breakdown of US officer max education of no college/college diploma/undergrad/grad is:

* 49/20/25/5

> and what percentage of Canadian police have college degrees

And, according to [1], for Canadian officers, it's:

* 19/51/29/1.6

Quite a disparity. Especially when you consider sources like [2][3], which argue that:

> "Studies have found that a small proportion of police officers – about 5% – produce most citizen complaints, and officers with a two-year degree are about half as likely to be in the high-rate complaint group"

Overall, I believe there's lots of evidence suggesting more educated police are better police and citizens, and none suggesting the opposite - that less educated police are better.

Across the board, Canadian police are significantly better educated, with the exception of less Graduated degrees.

Across the board, Canadian police are less deadly to their citizens.

Not a coincidence - go ahead and say some more stupid shit though.

[0]: https://www.nu.edu/blog/law-enforcement-education [1]: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2015001/article... [2]: https://theconversation.com/5-reasons-police-officers-should... Source of the quote [3]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... Source of the info behind the quote, paywalled

> Will you propose a different reason why US police are so much deadlier

Guns. 1.2 per American, 0.35 per Canadian [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

That's not a very good argument - those guns are concentrated in the hands of about 32% of the US population [0], whereas in Canada it's probably closer to 25% [1]. [1] says "[t]he overall rate of firearm ownership is at least 241 per 1,000 population and is comparable to ownership rates in other countries where hunting is a significant activity"

[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own... [1]: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/jsp-sjp/wd98_4-d...

Seems like you don’t know there’s a difference between handguns and hunting rifles.

Crime rates, prevalence of firearms, etc are major differences which could account for the discrepancy. Many police in the US are required to have 60 credits minimum in college education (associates degree equivalent).

If you want to really look into this, legitimately, the best thing to do would be to compare use police to each other based on education. This is likely hard to do. However, state-level requirements and deaths could be compared between states with similar crime/murder rates.

Compare Canada to Vermont, NH, Wisconsin, Montana and Idaho and see if your difference still holds. USA is a big place, with very different cultures and outcomes. Once you compare Canada to states that are culturally like Canada, your university hypothesis doesn't look to be correct.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/police-kill...

Can you provide more sources that show Police education by state? While I don't disagree with the premise you are suggesting in and of itself, the link you've provided is entirely insufficient to make the calculations about police education and per capita police violence rate

I found [0], which in Appendix F has a state-by-state breakdown for only some states. Cross referencing it with your data source is useless, all the top states for per-capita police killings have their data omitted from that table.

[0]: https://www.policinginstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10...

"yeah yeah yeah drop the college requirements for everyone", who is saying this?

It's like most of the comments on the page you're looking at.

Neither of those things are being said here. You're just amusing yourself.

I'd prefer police officers with EMT (and preferably paramedic) training to those with four-year sociology degrees.

Knowledge of DNA and computer forensic methods and necessities, though, would probably improve their chances of getting promoted, as would legal training. However, those skills could easily be learned at two-year community college progams.

All in all, I think this kind of focus would lead to a more professional police force.

I disagree. Having done a minor in criminal justice, officers, lawmakers, and others involved in the justice system could absolutely benefit from exposure to sociology and academic CJ. The American "justice" system is a travesty and continues following methods that we've known not to work for many decades. To fix the system we need the folks inside it to understand the system.

Part of that is education. Part of that is hiring officers who understand the system and want to improve and protect rather than a jobs system for those who want to exercise power over others.

>> To fix the system we need the folks inside it to understand the system.

Nope. The American justice system does not control itself. It is bound by laws and codes of practice dictated to it by outsiders, those good-idea people who's entire understanding of law comes from a highschool history or civics class they barely remember. It is as bad as it is because the general public honestly want it that way. Rough and violent justice is baked into American culture as much as guns and alcohol.

>>Part of that is education.

I agree, but it isn't the people in the system that need an education. It is the voting public outside who need the better understanding.

> those good-idea people who's entire understanding of law comes from a highschool history or civics class they barely remember

Who are you referring to?

Every community meeting, every political rally, where crime is used as a wedge. Every pundit who says that person X is "soft" on crime and person Y is "hard" as if that makes any difference. Every idiot out there who wants drug dealers locked up for life yet is unable to address their own addition to prescriptions. Every armchair lawyer who will spend hours outlining how judges should rule on hypothetical cases, but has never spent a day inside an actual courtroom. Every idiot who thinks his speeding ticket as important as a murder trial. And every one of the to-be sovereign citizens at YouTube university. After than, then we go after the flat earthers.

> community meeting, every political rally, where crime is used as a wedge

Have you been to these? I have, in states red and blue. It's rarely a rah rah. Instead, people have complaints about specific categories of crimes, usually ones relevant to the community. The question is less locking people up than catching them. Policing. Sentencing is a separate system from policing.

>> Sentencing is a separate system from policing.

Again, not in reality. Absent unlimited resources, street-level police determine which crimes are "policed" based on the severity of associated punishments. Change the punishment for drug dealing from a prison sentence to a minor fine and police will all but stop hunting drug dealers. Start sentencing jaywalkers to prison time and you will see cops at every pedestrian crossing. Sentencing is the guide by which police determine which crimes the public most want to see policed.

I think a few things happened in 2020 that show that at least some of the general public are unhappy and want changes...

Hiring people from a sociology/social justice background would just mean the same abuses of power, but different targets.

Policing has gone in this direction in the UK, and now you have mothers being arrested in front of their children after “misgendering” someone online: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/i-stand-with-kate-scotto...

> St Albans Magistrates’ Court found her guilty, under the Communications Act (2003), of using a public communications network to “cause annoyance, inconvenience and anxiety”.

Fortunately, she eventually won on appeal and her conviction was overturned, but the process itself was the punishment.

Police need less power, not more sociology degrees.

Americans are normally the ones to myopically reduce the world's issues to their own, but sometimes the British are not to be bested!

I’m an American aware of how this idea has played out elsewhere.

That sounds more like a problem with the law than with the police.

Policing isn’t independent of the law or legal culture.

There’s also the entire issue of “non-criminal bias incidents”:

https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/opinion/columnists/5238...

The US has a fairly large political contingent that believes in retributive justice, not rehabilitative or restorative justice. In a lot of places the police have a culture of the "warrior mentality" and well-meaning new officers are either brought in line or driven out of the profession. This is compounded by the huge numbers of private and illegal/black market firearms on the street which make policing extremely dangerous. The combination reinforces the warrior and the retributive justice cultures alike.

Note I don’t believe policing is in even the top 25 most dangerous jobs in the USA. I’m not sure the “extremely “ dangerous applies when driving a truck or most construction jobs are more dangerous.

This is similar to the issue with statistics around shark attacks. Sure, policing overall is pretty safe because 99.9% of the time you're not trying to arrest an armed and dangerous suspect. Sharks are safe too because 99.9+% of the time people aren't even in the ocean where they might encounter sharks.

But if it's your job to go out into the ocean and interact with sharks face-to-face, those encounters are way more dangerous than the general statistics would have us believe. Same goes for police when they have to deal with an active shooter situation. That's what I mean by "extremely dangerous". Compared to Canada or most of Europe, the US has vastly more active shooter situations, and at least some of that can be attributed to the availability of firearms.

Mixed feelings... police in the US are woefully/tragically undertrained relative to police in Europe. 3-4 months is typical for a police academy in the US. Plus 6 months or so with a field training officer for basic on-job training.

Compared to 2.5 years of the same in Germany.

College may not be the right answer, but the current system of very little training isn't working.

If they could put the money and time they spent on college into actual on-the-job training/academy maybe it would. State law enforcement academies are really only using college degrees as a filter that the person is capable of attending class, learning, and passing exams. That's what graduating high school used to show. But now nobody doesn't graduate high school, unless they drop out.

Also, tragically, people go to college wanting to get into law enforcement are working at cross purposes to what police departments want to hire: less intelligent cops. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/

Being a cop in Germany is much easier and less risky job than in US, because they have 50% more cops per capita while having something like 15% the crime rate of US. This means that, as a very rough estimate, there is something like 16 times more crimes per cop in US than in Germany. This is made even worse by things like US criminal being much more insane and erratic than German ones (Germany has a more collectivist, order-oriented culture, and will institutionalize miscreants much faster and for much less serious offenses than US will), and case overload forcing US cops to focus on the worst cases and worst offenders first.

For this reason, more people in Germany will put up with strict credential requirements and low pay than in US. To make police force more professional in the US, we first need to stop most crime, and for that, we need to hire a lot of police (to bring the crimes-per-cop ratio closer to low crime countries), and massively increase incarceration of repeat offenders, who are responsible for the bulk of the crime. It will be extremely hard to both hire more police and also to make standards higher: you’ll end up with highly professional cops who are too busy to help you unless you’re being actively murdered.

There is an active political element in the U.S. that believes that “defunding” police is the answer. While they may have some valid arguments, they don’t see things from your perspective at all.

We had city-burning protests for months for a career criminal high on illegal drugs committing crime. In a few days after, there were worldwide protests and political statements (GF portraits on the Berlin Wall?!?). Those that support this obvious push towards more chaos and police oversight have deep pockets and international reach.

Real change in the US comes from tragedy and money.

I agree with ur first paragraph. But u intentionally skip the getting killed by the police without due process part. And the killing by the police and abuse of the power never stopped for one seconds.

U r just biased like the ones u criticized isn't it

Due process started with the liquor store rightly calling the police about receiving a counterfeit bill from an intoxicated individual and the police questioning the suspect. When your culture tells you to resist, and you do, you have given up due process.

the society you get by deciding that tired jocks with guns and a 2-4x of baseline rate of domestic violence and an unstoppable union should get to decide what due process is bad. law enforcers should have to follow the law. also I am willing to bet you don’t know much about due process because there is no way you’re an attorney but I’ll eat my shoe if you show me where you’re licensed to practice law.

So u r saying he deserves to be dead? And by culture u mean u r a racist right? Btw do u know white ppl r killed too?

Thanks for saying the quiet part loud, that's all we need to see ;).

I originally wanted to comment that crimes rate and racism police are different problems, but this reply display gp do not care haha.

> When your culture tells you to resist, and you do, you have given up due process.

If not due process if it’s possible to “give up due process”.

It’s very difficult to compare numbers between countries like this because of different definitions. In the US are INS or FBI agents cops, what about secret service agents dealing with counterfeiters or protecting the president? How about dispatchers etc. This is why you will see wildly different number of how many cops there are in the US generally it’s between 600k and 1 million but there’s many different counts.

Similarly the US often uses firefighters as EMS personnel while other countries lean on police officers.

Wild to suggest that the US's issue is not incarcerating enough people considering we are near the top of the global leaderboards on that front. Specifically in comparison to Germany, the incarceration rate is almost 8x higher in the US.

You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. This has all sorts of negative repercussions. It helps escalate crime because cops are now more dangerous and less predictable, so people will go to greater lengths to avoid arrest or interaction with police. It also makes the cops' jobs more difficult as the community becomes less likely to cooperate in stopping or preventing crime. Hiring more cops can make matters worse because it can necessitate lowering the bar to find enough people to hire leading to even less professional behavior. It also creates more interactions between police and the community which as I mentioned, is often an adversarial interaction due to this unprofessional behavior.

Simply hiring more cops and throwing more people in jail isn't going to fix things. That should be obvious because that is all we ever seem to attempt in the US and the situation isn't getting better.

It was a popular counter culture bumber sticker back in the 60's:

The Police are armed and dangerous.

Not much has changed.

> Wild to suggest that the US's issue is not incarcerating enough people considering we are near the top of the global leaderboards on that front. Specifically in comparison to Germany, the incarceration rate is almost 8x higher in the US.

Yes, we are not incarcerating enough people, as clearly evidenced by the fact that we have a lot of repeat criminals, who commit a lot more crime than Germans.

> You are also ignoring how the unprofessional nature of police contribute to the problem. Their behavior creates an adversarial relationship with the public. (…)

This is a problem, but it’s not what’s causing criminals to rob stores, carjack random people, or do drive by shootings. If we made US cops as professional as German cops, we’d still have huge crime problem. In fact, having grown up in Poland (which is very low crime society), my experience tells me that prosecuting and jailing criminals is significantly more important than professionalism of police force, as Polish cops are significantly less professional than American ones.

> Simply hiring more cops and throwing more people in jail isn't going to fix things. That should be obvious because that is all we ever seem to attempt in the US and the situation isn't getting better.

I strongly disagree. We did start mass incarceration around early-to-mid 1990, and it did, in fact, solve a lot of crime problems. As the percentage of population in prison steadily went up, the crime rate steadily went down. As we started reducing incarceration rates in early 2010s, the crime rate started going back up again, and this greatly accelerated starting from 2020, with the growth of anti-policing and anti-prosecution movements.

Just to emphasize this: the incarceration rate is down a lot from its peak in ~2010 or so. It’s down by more than a third. We no longer just throw people in jail, we do quite the opposite in fact, and the situation is getting worse than when we just jailed criminals.

I think that throwing more people in jail technically is a solution, but it's a very expensive one that does nothing to address the reason why people are committing crimes.

There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate. Not to mention the fallibility of the justice system, and the ramifications harsher sentences has on people who were falsley imprisoned.

As a previous commenter said, the US has tried the "tough on crime" stance many times in its history (e.g. war on drugs, Bill Clinton), and while it is an effective strategy for easy results to report in time for your next campaign, the problem has not been solved, merely swept under the rug.

I personally am glad that the US is at least attempting to find a solution that addresses the root cause rather than the symptoms of crime. But I would agree that we have not found that effective solution yet.

> I think that throwing more people in jail technically is a solution, but it's a very expensive one

It's not, compared to the costs of the crime. Tangible costs of crime are big enough, and the intangible costs are bigger still. Cost of imprisonment is really nothing compared to the economic and social damage done by repeat offenders.

There is also big heterogeneity in the cost of imprisonment. Places with high prison costs could just send their prisoners to places with low costs. The reason it is not happening is, I suspect, precisely to argue for reduction of imprisonment, based on its high cost.

> that does nothing to address the reason why people are committing crimes. There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate.

This is very much false, and in fact, it is honestly quite insulting to tens of millions of desperately poor Americans who'd never turn to crime, or, for that matter, to billions of people in foreign countries, who are much poorer than pretty much everyone in US.

Nobody in US is actually so desperately poor that they have no choice but to steal basics. Supermarkets here don't put bread behind locks, they put alcohol and Tide, because it's easy to pawn off on black market. Carjackers are not desperate for transportation. Urban shooters are not desperate for places to practice target shooting. Assholes setting sawzall against your catalytic converters are not starving contractors unable to land a job.

It boggles my mind to see people suggesting that crime in US committed out of desperation. This might be believable if we talked about crime in the slums of Lagos or Sao Paulo, but not about the types of crime and its perpetrators as it actually takes place in US. I grew in a place that was (and continues to be) much poorer than the American crime hot spots (or, really, almost entirety of the country), and crime was basically nonexistent.

> As a previous commenter said, the US has tried the "tough on crime" stance many times in its history (e.g. war on drugs, Bill Clinton), and while it is an effective strategy for easy results to report in time for your next campaign, the problem has not been solved, merely swept under the rug.

If the strategy effectively and persistently reduces crime, how is it not solving the problem?

> I personally am glad that the US is at least attempting to find a solution that addresses the root cause rather than the symptoms of crime. But I would agree that we have not found that effective solution yet.

With this attitude you'll keep searching forever, and always remain mystified as to what makes teenagers in some of the wealthiest and most full of opportunity places in the world so desperate that they are forced to steal cars at a gunpoint, only to joyride for a few hours and then abandon in a ditch. Is it hunger? Lack of shelter? We might never know.

So, you’re arguing that Americans are just more prone to crime than Germans or Brits or Canadians? And that out incarceration rate naturally should be orders of magnitude higher than peer nations?

Sorry, I don’t buy that. There has to be something else at play.

The way we incarcerate creates criminals for life, so it seems cheaper to fix that first.

Are you perhaps assuming that such a sociology curriculum will always be a modern woke one you agree with?

What happens when bigots get that curriculum changed to suit their agenda?

What happens in countries where the current social norm is "gay people don't exist" ?

I honestly believe 90% of our police in the U.S. could not pass an EMT course.

if a job has specific knowledge and skills requirements then it needs to have an objective test that people pass to be able to do the job.

that is the only way to eliminate the systemic discrimination that the university system and degree requirements propagate.

almost all serious jobs already have objective skills tests and licensing requirements for employment: doctors, lawyers, financial services, heavy equipment operators, etc, etc, etc.

adding degree requirements on top of those licensing requirements cannot possibly add any additional benefit but it is obviously discriminatory against many marginalized groups.

I'm 100% on-board with requiring an actual med school degree for my doctor rather than a skills-based test.

Hard agree, I'd rather not leetcode-ify* the health system. Nor do I want to see swaths of businesses dedicated to cracking the medical leetcode interview.

*because it really feels as if some companies translate leetcode skills to actual skills

I find this to be a slightly weird argument. Med school degrees do have varying levels of quality. Moreover, in the US, you cannot be licensed without residency -- residency is practicing under supervision, essentially a skills-based set of active tests. Then after the residency program many physicians go for board certification, which is additional study and tests (run by a professional cabal that makes a ton of money off of questions about beaver fever, for instance).

Well, anyhow, you already do require skills-based assessment if you are seeing licensed physicians in the US. They don't let ppl practice with only book learning.

How would a degree be a stronger signal of competency than a standardized skills-based test?

GP seemed to be suggesting replacing the degree requirement with a skills-based test.

For doctors, I'm perfectly comfortable requiring both and do not accept the replacement of a degree with a skills-based test.

getting a degree is nothing more than passing a series of tests over a period of time. medical licensing is residency, exams, board certifications, etc. it is all tests. the question is who is setting the rules for those tests and whether or not private corporations get to charge you 100s of thousands of dollars to take them.

medicine is way out of my field, so i don't have personal experience and can only go on what i have read, but i would guess that it is a lot like most other highly specialized fields: pre-med is a waste other than basic bio/chem, medical school is mostly information you will never use, residency is where you learn how to actually do the job, and then you get into a specialty and learn that specialty, and what you learn for your specialty is the only thing you really use.

I don't need police to be highly educated necessarily. I do need police to be psychologically balanced and show calm restraint. Is there a way we can put that in the job requirements and use it as hiring criteria?

I'd say that's part initial screening, part training, and part willingness to fire people that turn out to be unsuitable. All of that is helped by having access to a broader candidate pool, such as by not imposing arbitrary education requirements.

Something related that's often discussed in law enforcement and military is the idea of being able to hire directly into some upper specialist positions without the person having to rise through the ranks. This is sort of the opposite, admitting that some senior positions do not need an arbitrary field experience requirement. In both cases, it's about better matching the requirements and subsequent training and career progression to what's actually needed for the job. This kind of rationalization is the upside of a tight labor market.

I don't need police to have a 4-year degree (or a 2-year degree), but I would like them to be highly educated and trained.

Have you ever had interactions with police? Did you find them psychologically balanced?

The answer to this may vary heavily by country, local jurisdiction, and certain demographic characteristics of the person interacting with police.

Systematically, I think the answer is no. Whether or not this is a encouraging or discouraging answer depends on the extent to which you expect systems to solve human problems.

It's a trend towards lower wages. That's all.

Lower wages without crippling student loans is a net positive for most people

It's Goodhart's law in action.

If having a four year degree becomes just a checkbox, there will be easier and easier ways of getting that checkbox. There will be rent-seeking entities that will facilitate this like degree mills and dubious online programs. It no longer becomes a qualification that the person has gained any skills, but only that they were able to finance paying tens of thousands of dollars to participate in a few discussion threads.

It was only a matter of time for people to realise that requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need them is just cargo-culting.

I'm worried that the same logic might cut the other way: "the easier it is to get that piece of paper, the worse you look for not getting it."

It's not just degree mills. It's mainstream colleges and universities. They are all staring a demographic "enrollment cliff" in the face and are having to drop admissions standards to keep their enrollment numbers up. Academic requirements are going by the wayside; if you can't complete an assignment, you'll be given more time, or an alternative. Nobody fails anymore unless they just absolutely don't show up, schools can't afford to lose students.

Not all. I definitely believe large numbers of liberal arts schools are having problems. But my school (University of Waterloo) has only seen dramatic surges in enrolment over the past 5 years. They're putting up new buildings like crazy just to accommodate all of them! And we're not talking sports centres or rec complexes, we're talking about big lecture halls and buildings full of classrooms and study spaces!

I don't know Waterloo's situation but I know that money for new buildings is largely decoupled from need for capacity and is mainly tied to government make-work projects. I remember during the 2008 "economic action plan" universities got all kinds of buildings. It was entirely because the government was giving free money away to stimulate growth.

This phenomena doesn’t apply to elite institutions.

We have a bimodal distribution. Elite universities whose prestige is already established have an "embarrassment of riches" in terms of applicant pool, whereas middling and low ranked universities without a moat are facing enrollment cliffs.

Applicants are trying to go big or go home (and learn online instead)

I'm not sure a drop in admissions standards to address the enrollment cliff and a surge in admissions are necessarily mutually exclusive.

Soooo...education beyond the 3rd grade is irrelevant?

I know I'm being snarky, but c'mon man! It wasn't that long ago the same could be said (and was said) for education past the 3rd grade, then the discussion moved to education past the 8th grade, and now it's moved to education past the 12th grade. It's just a rehash of the same, tired argument justifying a poorly-educated populace which makes for a poorly-educated electorate, which tends to be more susceptible to populism.

This is a false equivalency.

The demand for higher education has outstripped the supply of students capable of making real use of it, and so standards have been lowered. The value of the education provided — and the value of the degree received — has dropped precipitously.

Up until the 50s/60s, education past the 12 grade was the exception, not the rule. A degree was valuable because not everyone had the capacity to attain it.

I’m just going to say it - the statement “ The demand for higher education has outstripped the supply of students capable of making real use of it” is an extremely ignorant and short-sighted view of education. I expect better from the folks on HN.

“Harrumph! You’re ignorant!” says nothing at all. What am I ignorant of? How am I wrong?