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.