The police video shows Boyd talking with an officer who was seemingly trying to reach an end to the stalemate. As he picks up his backpack, Boyd tells the officer to keep his word, and not to worry about safety.
"I'm not a [f———] murderer," Boyd says.
Seconds later, a flash-bang grenade is fired at his feet. Boyd then stands facing the officers — and as he turns away from them, at least two officers open fire. Boyd was struck by live rounds, stun guns and bean-bag rounds — some of which were fired as Boyd lay on the ground saying he was unable to move.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/12/376767254/alb...
Warning it's graphical, naturally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tpAZObNZfI
To summarize, indeed he says 'Im not a murderer' while picking up his bag, just standing around. They fire the grenade, tell him to get down blabla. He never steps forward in any way, charges them or attacks, while the officers close in and put a dog on him. Seconds later he turns away and gets shot multiple times.
From this point on he's not moving at all and just laying there. They shoot him a couple times with bean bags and put the dog on him again.
I don't hear him saying he's unable to move. It just looks like he's unconscious or dead at that point. He's just laying there still while they're deliberating whether to put the dog on him (and do).
Edit: Replaced incorrect use of 'weapons' with 'firearms'.
To put this in context, over the four years from 2008-2012, police officers in England and Wales opened fire on 18 separate occasions, killing nine people.
In a country of 55 million people, that's about 5 shooting incidents, and 2 people killed each year.
http://www.channel4.com/news/police-fatal-shooting-trigger-h...
Ultimately, I don't believe the problem lies with the firearms but with the culture. As an Australian visiting or moving to the US, you will inevitably be reminded that if a US police officer pulls you over you should not get out of your car. I've had people tell me that if you do get out of the car, the officer will draw their weapon and take aim. Perhaps that is exaggerated, but to me that is an absolutely ludicrous reaction. It paints a picture of US police as having an extremely paranoid, "us vs. them" mindset. What I read in the news and have witnessed since I moved here seems to confirm that.
If the US police were so gun happy I would expect way more people to be shot per year/day.
> If the US police were so gun happy I would expect way more people to be shot per year/day.
There are, though.
A couple of articles on the subject:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-the-p...
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/another-much-higher-count...
But if we use the FBI's number of ~400/year[0]it's still ridiculous. In the two decades between 1989-90 and 2010-11, Australian police fatally shot a total of 105 people.[1]
Looking at those figures, Australia has ~0.25 fatal police shootings per million people per year. The US has ~1.25 fatal police shootings per million people per year. Five times more. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't believe that's solely due to gun control policy in the two countries.
[0] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/c...
[1] http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/rip/21-4...
If you stay in the car you have a much easier time dealing with a person who can't easily get into your personal space and limiting the options you have to protect your self.
> As far as getting out of the vehicle most police don't like surprises so if things go step by step according to the person with the gun things go much better.
In Australia I can get out of the car and go talk to the officer and everything's fine.
In the US I can't - I accept that reality.
Both officers are carrying guns, though.
And if he does? Your argument has excluded half of the (rather important) outcomes.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/08/ahmed-merabet-m...
> Merabet, who according to officials was 40, was called to the scene while on patrol with a female colleague in the neighbourhood, just in time to see the black Citroën used by the two killers heading towards the boulevard from Charlie Hebdo.
> “He was on foot, and came nose to nose with the terrorists. He pulled out his weapon. It was his job, it was his duty,” said Rocco Contento, a colleague who was a union representative at the central police station for Paris’s 11th arrondissement.
> Another policeman, 48-year-old Franck Brinsolaro, was killed moments earlier in the assault on Charlie Hebdo where he was responsible for the protection of its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the 11 killed in the building. A colleague said he “never had time” to pull his weapon.
See also the NYPD cops killed recently - definitely armed - who were shot regardless.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-hebdo-french-satirical-m...
"the first two officers to arrive, who were apparently unarmed, fled after seeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons and possibly a grenade launcher."
This is also the same "source" which claimed that both suspects had been captured and a third killed according to "US intelligence sources" (still unnamed). Turned out that that wasn't true at that point in time or since then.
They're like the Daily Mail of the US, just peddle utter shit all of the time...
This tells me nothing. Are the facts presented by parent's post false or not?
In short most military rifles are single shot due to the fact that you may engage targets out to a few hundred yard to a couple of meters.
tldr; Automatic rifles for military applications, not all that great.
Most NATO militaries have increased the amount of training in urban environments. I'm pretty sure(or overly optimistic) they have decent training/drilling experience as the political backlash from having soldiers get way to aggressive in terms of resorting to military tactics vs police tactics.
The Australian military is generally lauded as being excellent at peace-keeping operations, yet during officer training, it was hammered into us that policing was a much harder operation, and that our hierarchy would never accept policing missions.
Semi-automatic is not automatic, and has no burst or rapid-fire mechanisms. All semi-automatic rifles shoot one bullet for each pull of the trigger, and in 2015, that's the norm for just about every patrol rifle in the world, except for those needing long-range accuracy, which is a fairly niche application nowadays.
If I had to guess, I'd say they would prefer using the weapons they are accustomed to, which are probably not the same that LEO's use. Now I don't know much about the French military, but where I come from, I doubt the military even has appreciable amounts of semi-automatic rifles, as even the military police always use the same assault rifle everybody else does.
That said, I have no idea what the French Miliary use. I would guess a lot of H&K stuff. In the U.S. at least, swapping out from an M16 to an AR-15 is pretty natural, but I have no way of knowing what the transition is from or to in France.
A large contributing factor is the military industrial complex spewing out death tech at an absurd rate, and with nobody to blow up with it all it just goes to police forces at auction. So you end up with towns of a thousand having swat teams and tanks and you wonder why the culture shifts from protecting and serving to war, death, and extortion.
Sometimes not even sold, but given. There are government programs where police departments can ask for used military gear and get it at no cost (i.e. no impact to their budget). This makes the departments especially eager to acquire as much "death tech" as they can.
> So you end up with towns of a thousand having swat teams and tanks and you wonder why the culture shifts from protecting and serving to war, death, and extortion.
This makes me very sad. I was born in the 70s so I grew up during the coldest part of the cold war. We were taught in school that (sorry to Godwin) Nazi Germany was pure evil, Stalinist Russia was pure evil, Italy under Mussolini was pure evil, China under Mao was pure evil, and so on. Yet here we are becoming just as militarized on a local level as those regimes, giving our police forces nearly carte blanche to oppress the citizens at will. It's disgusting and disturbing, and I say that as a former law enforcement employee of 14 years.
That scares the shit out of me, and I don't even live in the US. Maybe your government is nowhere near Mao or Stalin, but all the required pieces of oppression are being rapidly put into place, so be very hopeful that two elections and a terror attack from now someone won't decide to actually use those tools.
This was the point I was trying to make. No, we aren't there yet, but we're on the slope and it's getting more slippery every day.
The DDR aka East Germany ended in the 90s, and the Franco regime in Spain ended 1975 with Francos death.
It is debatable if one should also count the Yugoslavian/Serbian government which existed until the mid-90s as oppressive - I certainly do, Miloševic rot in pieces.
Oh, I almost forgot the rest of the Soviet block... so you basically have oppressive regimes as low as 20-30 years ago, leaving a LOT of people with first hand experience.
But typically, the sort of people who blithely compare the US to a police state do so by invoking the Nazis. I wasn't going to credit such arguments with that much subtlety or self-awareness, since they seem to come from a sense of prejudice and knowledge of pop culture rather than history. Although you're right - there are a number of recent police states and dictatorships which the US does not resemble.
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Maybe the difference was never as black and white as it seemed to me at the time, but I still believe we have been drifting away from the protection of basic rights I was once taught were so important to who we are as a people.
However when most people complain about military gear finding its way to police I have to laugh a little bit. When automatic grenade launchers and .50 cal machine guns start appearing then there are problems(too late at that point I guess).
MWRAPS and armored personnel carriers, those are okay. Dressing in all black(A horrible tactical color BTW) or camo now your just doing that to look upsetting.
The armored tanks are not so bad as it provides something that police can feel safer and less threaten in so escalation doesn't need to happen so fast.
If you turn up in an armoured tank, you have just escalated the situation.
If your dealing with against a threat with a firearm I'm going to assume there are going to be more cops with guns in the majority of the situations. Those are the folks you don't want to set off!
So if you can feel a little bit safer in a little ole MRAP you might not be inclined to start a shooting gallery as quickly.
Calling it an armored tank is exaggerating. It's basically a mobile barrier that can carry a bunch of officers. There's all kinds of nice stuff you can do with them, and frankly I think it would be kind of embarassing for a town if they couldn't get a robust all terrain vehicle to some location within a reasonable timeframe.
Why?
We don't have shootouts with drug lords going on. My city has suffered exactly 3 officer deaths on duty in the last 25 years and only one of those was by gunfire (15 years ago). I utterly reject the reasoning that my city's officers need to be made to feel safe by the acquisition of ex-military hardware.
Let me be as clear as i can, that vehicle does not make me, the citizen, feel safe. I've seen them deploy that vehicle for something as common has a home robbery. This is not Afghanistan, criminals are not enemy combatants. When you have that kind of hardware sitting around, you will find a use for it.
I don't know what kinds of 'nice things' you are referring to, i'd love to hear examples. Lastly i reject that euphemistic description of that troop carrier as a 'robust all terrain vehicle'. This is a well paved, suburban, low violence city; not Kabul.
In most situations a rifle is going to be able to penetrate through almost every part of a police/civilian vehicle. If someone is shooting at you the only proactive thing you can do to keep your self safe is to return fire to either take the enemy out of the fight or suppress them.
If you have a vehicle that can stop small arms fire the immediate need to start shooting back is slowed down to a degree.
They also make nice rolling barriers in case you need to move to someone that is injured with out the need for suppressing fire.
Also psychologically it slows people down due to the fact that they will have less of a chance to be able to harm/pose a threat to police.
On the other hand if they start using turret mounted automatic weapons such a MK19 then that's going to be a problem.
When folks throw around escalation when bringing in an armored vehicle I in my mind I'm thinking the bad guy is going to get MAD due to having a harder time killing a police officer.
I guess we can all take a vote with the knowledge that police get killed in the line of duty. Let's pretend we are all police here. Who want's to be the last cop killed before we achieve societal and world peace?
What cops really need is better and more substantive training, not equipment to hide behind.
I'm not saying that you should give them armoured troop carriers though. You want them to feel safe, not invincible.
If we're worried about officers prematurely killing people how does giving them military-style tools make that any better? If they were going to prematurely kill people before, they're still going to do it. The definition of 'safe' simply moves to a new place. If the OP demonstrates anything, it's that if you give law enforcement these kinds of 'toys' they will find any and every excuse to use them (all under the fake banner of 'officer safety').
Edit: Taking some words from your comment, I guess what I'm arguing is that law enforcement is already pretty invincible.
Fair enough. What I'm arguing is just that LE officers are humans too and they both need and deserve to feel safe in their job, which involves risking their own lives for the safety of the public. But I definitely don't think that they need to go full-military for that. They indeed are pretty safe already.
If all that can happen is the armor getting dented up your not going to feel compelled to shot back so quickly. You will have much more flexibility in responding too. Your initiative is going to get taken away if you don't need to immediately react to a threat.
I do however thing that the carriers should get painted blue or white that someone resemble police colors. The all black and super tactical looking equipment is even too much for me as former military.
When I went to high school in this general area (15+ years ago) they used run-of-the-mill SUVs just fine.
Several years back, near where I lived in NJ, there was a police officer killed on duty. He was reacting to a complaint about drag racing - while he was driving an SUV. He attempted to pursue one of the drag racers, and rolled over his vehicle. Trying to chase a drag racer while you're in an SUV is stupid.
Police should value their own lives higher than that of people behaving aggressively towards them, but that's speaking in a degree. And they shouldn't behave like dangerous paranoics (because of lack of training, or because they are dangerous paranoics).
I´m not sure I articulated that all that clearly, sorry...
An uparmored Humvee, on the other hand, is problematic.
Simultaneously, the terms of the sale dictate that they must use those military items within a year of purchase, or they have to return the items.
This is why the police are increasingly using military gear in situations for which they are not warranted.
I don't like this source, per se, but I've seen it posted elsewhere, and this is the handiest one right now, so here it is.
http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/tanks-on-the-streets-...
If there were plenty, why are the bad cops never arrested?
To be sure, the media crows about this as the problem. But I think that's more a sign of a dysfunctional media than a real insight.
[1] www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595586431/
Also to be intellectually honest in the subject, one can't use media coverage as a proxy for actual data. Lots of anecdotes doesn't necessarily provide evidence. There are thousands of arrests daily. I haven't seen thousands of news stories -- generally only when there was an angle that would elicit ratings. A white man getting shot by the cops doesn't generally make national headlines just like the over 2000 shootings of (mostly) black victims in Chicago barely warrants mention.
My point isn't to argue if cops are racist. My point is that knee-jerk claims of racism ought to be quantifiable.
Of course, 100% innocent until proven guilty; I'm not saying we should convict/target people without merit based purely off of race/age/obesity/hair color.
EDIT: Like any mutual fund manager will tell you, "past performance is not a guarantee of future results." Police policy is barking up the wrong tree if they think that blackness/race are the variables to watch, much like anyone would be amiss if they solely looked at TTM rate of return for an investment option, and that is to say nothing of the positive feedback loop that racial profiling creates. Poverty, education levels, and the availability of social mobility are the variables that should be watched to create sane public policy in the USA.
Of course, the entire discussion we're having is invalid if we work with the premise that more policing = more convictions, by virtue of the crime being everywhere (across boundaries in whatever criteria you wish, e.g. race) regardless, and convictions being a simple byproduct of policing and not of said underlying factor like race, obesity, education, socioeconomic status, or hair-color.
No-one doubts that police officers have a tough job. But that truth doesn't give the police the right to execute people, bomb houses and act as judge, jury and executioner. That scenario just makes the police the biggest, best funded gangs on the street.
"If she hadn’t been selling illegal items out of the home, no warrant would have been served," he said. "What you call extreme, we call safe."
She sold some beer and food illegally. The police through a bomb into her house. Real safe.
I'd submit to you that both of these are arguably true, once the all too routine decision to take "direct action" has been made:
America is a legally well armed society, and these home invasions are indistinguishable from ones done by Official Criminals, especially since the latter are known to pretend to be police.
That "the death of the targets is" entirely "acceptable" should be evident to any unbiased observer of these direct actions. Especially since the Badge Gang, as some are taking to call them, are almost never held to account; if ever there was a case to do that, the one of Bou Bou's maiming should have been.
What makes you think flashbangs contain thermite? From what I can tell they contain a small amount of explosives[1].
The filler consists of a pyrotechnic metal-oxidant mix of magnesium or aluminium, and an oxidizer such as ammonium perchlorate or potassium perchlorate.
Edit: I worry I may be incorrect. Thermite seems like a very odd thing to put in a flash bang. Perhaps it is only a thermite mixture but the reaction is different?
If you replace the iron oxide with another oxidizer, it's not really thermite (since no iron metal is produced) and it turns it from a very exothermic reaction into an explosion (with the right oxidizer).
They do make thermite grenades, but they are typically used to destroy equipment, not make a loud sound (as flashbangs are).
If the police were using thermite grenades for raids, that would be even more horrifying than it already is.
I'm just going to throw this bucket of gasoline and a lit zippo into this room before I enter it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kajhu7qgojU
They barely deserve the salary they get now with all the incidents going on, but they won't get more intelligent people applying until the wages are increased.
Probably best to start with the teachers so theres a larger pool if educated people to hire from.
Yeah... you solve that with employment contracts, not discriminatory hiring practices.
I really don't see how saying "smart people will get bored and quit" is any different from saying "African-Americans are lazy and will eventually stop showing up on time", or some other nonsense.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/S...
[2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Protective-Service/Police-and-detecti...
[3] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Education-Training-and-Library/Kinder...
Unless you work for some hick department, a cop will easily make more than 80% in coders outside of the Bay Area, and unlike in software, you don't get nuked when you get old. That said, it's a brutal job that takes a toll on you.
Here are more details from the BLS about 'Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers' for 2013: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm
mean annual wage - $58,720
50 percentile - $56,130
90 percentile - $90,700
New Jersey mean wage - $88,220
California mean wage - $86,040
San Francisco mean wage - $99,000
mean annual wage - $82,710
50 percentile - $79,190
90 percentile - $126,320
New Jersey mean wage - $121,670
California mean wage - $122,680
Oakland-Fremont-Hayward - $139,980
New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ Metropolitan Division - $110,580
San Francisco mean wage - $134,600
For "Software developers, Applications" see http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm :
mean annual wage - $96,260
50 percentile - $92,660
90 percentile - $143,540
California mean wage - $112,180
Washington mean wage - $111,380
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara mean wage - $131,270
San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City mean wage - $114,400
Seattle-Bellevue-Everett mean wage - $112,990
For "Software Developers, Systems Software", see http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151133.htm the wages are higher:
mean annual wage - $104,480
50 percentile - $101,410
90 percentile - $150,760
California - $119,180
New Jersey - $114,630
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara mean wage - $132,030
Oakland-Fremont-Hayward - $119,810
1) "Cops make crazy money"
I don't know what "crazy money" is, but it's clear that only around 15% of first-line supervisors of patrol officers, and only a handful of patrol officers, make 120K/year. Your relative is on the very high end of a lieutenant's base salary, and probably lives in one of the major cities.
2) "Unless you work for some hick department"
I don't know what constitutes a "hick department". The 75 percentile for patrol officers is $73,710 and the 75 percentile for first-line supervisors is $102,600. There are about 6 officers for each supervisor, so I'll say that non-hick cops make around
(73710*635380 + 102600*101320) / (635380 + 101320) = $77,683/year.
It's hard to say what overtime might bring in on top of that. I don't know how many police officers get overtime.
3) "coders outside of the Bay Area"
I don't know what you mean by "coder". I chose "software developer" in the above. There's also "computer programmer", but the BLS says that there are only 6,000 computer programmers in the Silicon Valley area, and 28,980 "software developer, applications" (and a further 23,810 "software developer, systems software"). There are other categories as well, but those seemed the best fit for your statement.
The BLS doesn't list "outside of the Bay Area", but it does show that California pays the most of any states, and it lists the total number of software developers (I'm using the "applications" one) in California, in the US, and their mean wage. This is enough to figure out the average non-California mean wage:
(643830*96260 - 95510 * 112180) / (643830-95510) = $93,486/year
I trust that this is a close enough approximation to your statement?
4) "a cop will easily make more than 80% in coders outside of the Bay Area"
That does not appear to be the case. While certainly some cops will make more than 80% of coders, in general, coders will make about $15K/year more than police officers.
Again, overtime may change these numbers, but not enough to say that "cops" as a general category get paid "crazy high" income compared to software developers working the same number of hours without overtime.
5) "unlike in software, you don't get nuked when you get old"
The BLS doesn't have those numbers. The career paths are different. To get the $120K/year job requires being at least a first-line supervisor. A software developer is not a supervisor.
For example, a software developer might become a "Computer and Information Systems Manager", which has a mean wage of $132,570, and the 90 percentile is above $187,199/year. (It's off the BLS charts, which stops at $90/hour.) The mean wage for the 10,660 such managers in Silicon Valley is $183,870.
It's therefore very hard for me to figure out the career numbers. I would love to see the analysis you did to draw your conclusion.
- Overtime. In many cases, police overtime exceeds base salary. Example from Schenectady, NY, which is city of 50-75k people in upstate NY. ( http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Schenectady-cop-s-pa... )
- Actuarial value of pension. Even using the BLS base salary data without overtime of $58k, you need to valuate the cost of a $30k annuity for 30-40 years, as most police have 20 year retirement options at half pay.
- Actuarial value of healthcare. Most jurisdictions provide no-cost healthcare for retirees, at least until recently.
When I say "crazy" money, I mean that being a police officer is a very well paid profession, both in terms of salary and total compensation with pensions & benefits. It's one of the last really good, broadly available blue-collar jobs. That said, the trade-off is that it is a very stressful job where you're exposed to significant risks.
On the flip-side, software developers are rarely unionized and get a lousy deal. How many software developers are paid overtime? Almost all police are.
That was enough to establish that your relative is in an unusual situation to start with. As overtime is a function of the base pay, and most officers are not in a supervisory position, your example doesn't really reflect the typical police officer income.
Pointing to an overtime example from New York (the state with the highest base salary), and a record-setting overtime pay as well, is not useful as an average indication of what a police officer makes. Your position concerned average, non-"hick" officer.
It would be like me pointing to an instant millionaire software developer who won the startup lottery and saying that's typical.
You make good points regarding pension and healthcare. I also didn't include stock options in the software developer income, but none of my options were ever worth the paper they were printed on.
Remember too that your example was for a supervisory position. Most police officers are not in that situation.
I took a different meaning of '"crazy" money". I would have used the term "well-paid" for your definition. "Crazy" implies there's something extreme, no? What term would you use for police officers making $500K/year in base pay?
I think software developers should be unionized, but to start with, I think the programmer exemption for overtime pay should be abolished. Only software developers making less than $27.63/hour or $55,260/year have the possibility of getting overtime, which is about the 10 percentile for software developer income.
Now adjust for cost of living and taxes which hammer the Bay Area coder's the disposable income and things don't look nearly as good as you might think.
Spooky23 specifically excluded the Bay Area ("coders outside of the Bay Area") so your point doesn't apply.
Sure, the bay area is a very expensive area, but so are NY and DC which also have lots of software developers. Police are paid more in high cost of living areas, but they are also far more widespread spread.
Consider Virginia: Northern Virginia has higher cost of living and a disproportionate share of developers. The police in that area are also paid more to compensate, but if you look at things state wide you’re going to miss out in a massive cost of living discrepancy.
As to pension numbers I don't know of a good way to calculate that. http://ballotpedia.org/Public_pensions_in_West_Virginia EX: Deputy Sheriff Retirement System lists $113,574,000 for 954 active members. So 100k per person. But there are active inflows and outflows of cash it's not directly calculable with those numbers. Per the U.S. Census, in FY 2011, employer contributions to West Virginia state and local government pension plans were 5.01 percent of all state and local government direct general spending. http://ballotpedia.org/Public_pensions_in_West_Virginia#cite... So pensions being ~10-20% boost to base salary seem to be in the right ballpark on average, but Police get early retirement so 20-40% of base salary seems more appropriate.
I did not restrict myself to state-wide numbers. I also listed information about the metropolitan regions with the highest officer, first-line management of officers, and software developer salaries.
I am unsure as to what your point is. Should I have included cost-of-living adjustments? That seems unduly difficult for the point I was trying to make, which itself was an order of magnitude above the written effort by Spooky23 in making those statements in the first place.
The numbers I reported already seemed tilted since I excluded the two highest paying states (California and Washington). Even then, software developers were still making 15K/year more than the 75 percentile of police officers (patrol and first-line). The full analysis would also have to define what "hick" means; I arbitrarily decided it was the bottom 20 or 30% of salaries. I strongly doubt this is true.
There are 954 people in the Deputy Sheriff Retirement System of West Virginia. this is essentially confirmed with https://www.wvretirement.com/DSRS.html which says "DSRS currently has approximately 990 active members and 299 retired members."
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_wv.htm#23-0000 says there are 3,500 "Police and Sheriff's Patrol Officers" for West Virginia, and 410 "First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives" with median wages of $37,830 and $54,910, respectively.
You can see that Deputy Sheriffs don't make much ( http://woodcountywv.com/page/page149.php says Annual Salary $32,603, http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Berkeley-County-Sheriff-West... says $36K, http://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/tri_state/west_virginia/... says $36,048.)
Thus it cannot be that most of the police officers employed in West Virginia retire in the Deputy Sheriff Retirement System because some 75% of the police officers are not deputy sheriffs.
As a further refinement of your numbers, https://www.wvretirement.com/DSRS.html reports "Active members contribute 8.5% of their gross monthly salary pre-tax and the Sheriff's Office contributes an additional 12.5% of the member's gross monthly salary... A member is vested after completion of 60 months of covered employment. ... A regular retirement benefit, paid in equal monthly installments, is an amount equal to 2.25% of a member's final average salary multiplied by the member's years of credited service." This is in line with what you estimated.
I then went to https://www.wvretirement.com/Forms/2012-CAFR.pdf . On p187 it says that 1 pensioner made over $60K/year in pension, 1 made over $48K, and most (168 of 272) made under $24K/year. It also says that plan is set up to earn 7%/year. The math to see if that all works out is not something I want to do now.
Under my earlier numbers, I estimated a software developer salary of $93,486, which is about 20% higher than the officer salary of $77,683. With access to the same pension savings fund, doesn't that make the two salaries roughly equivalent, and give the software developer a chance to retire after 20 years?
Of course, there are no software development unions in the US to oversee such a retirement fund. Our loss.
IMO that's really the point. A police officers base salary is significantly lower than a software developers base salary. Add in pensions and there reasonably close. Add in Overtime and the officers may in some cases make more. Granted, a tiny fraction of software developers end up making far higher salarys, but the total/hour worked gap is not exacly all that huge.
PS: Of course some developers also make tiny salary's.
How many software developers retire as software developers? How many police officers retire as a first line supervisor or higher?
However, I seems like a lot of officers retire early and either just retire or take a side job with higher pay and little benefits or just something to pass the time.
Honestly, I have no idea what the average is, but there are probably some interesting trends.
http://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm#overview
(The OOH uses OES data: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/about/occupational-information-includ... )
It specifically does not include overtime:
http://www.bls.gov/respondents/oes/payterms.htm#overtime_pay
You'd think the BLS would be able to get anonymized IRS data.
While this sentence is technically a correct description, it conveys the impression that Doraville is a rural town which it certainly isn't (Doraville is "ITP" - inside I-285).
I think in some ways, this is a result of our fondness for the second amendment rights and arms as well as accepting the police as a necessary force to keep the peace.
I'm not sure if there is an easy way to de-escalate things. We might start with police 'engagement' procedures standardized from a federal level --but there'd probably be pushback from the states.
I do have a quibble with _always_ presuming innocence. If you see someone in the act, then I think they can take action without such presumption.
One of the specially hard things for me to understand is the necessity to shoot at 'disturbed' people wielding knives. Yes, I know knives are deadly --however, knives don't travel very far, compared to firearms, why not back up, give them a safe distance and try to de-escalate before shooting at the 'lunge.' Again, I know most of those disturbed people do mean harm[1], but you can avoid their intended harm by giving them space.
[1] Some intending assisted but unintended suicide from the police.
If "lunging" was the only thing knife welding psychos could do the world would be much nicer place.
(There used to be an excellent police blogger who talked about doing this from firsthand experience, but he was de-anonymised and his blog taken down).
Believe me no-one wants to try and tackle a knife wielding suspect with a baton, at that point you're using defensive tactics and your partner will use their CS/PAVA to try and disable them.
Fortunately, in the UK, the vast majority of people with knives aren't actively homicidal at the point at which the police turn up.
Nightjack was amazing, the Times is in my permanent bad books for their nonsensical justification for outing him. He thoroughly deserved the Orwell prize that he won for his blogging.
For others reading this, there are a lot of good videos on the net showing examples of it.
The qualfiied officers are Authorised Firearms Officers who will also stand up the equivalent of SWAT teams as needed for each constabulary.
London has Specialist Firearms Officers as well who are a standing set of SWAT type teams. Several have written some very good books about their experiences, Steve Collins especially.
The main thing in the UK is that armed officers who discharge their weapon, let alone kill someone, face extremely rigorous scrutiny by an external agency. This combined with no specific legal protections means that a police officer shooting their weapon is very rare, it happens a handful of times across the UK each year.
Yes, talking people down works in every situation.
Not to say that guns work every time but if someone has the intent to get all staby It's time to go lethal.
I think it would be eye opening for everyone to get a taste of how things can go wrong in police situations themselves.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite
Edit: grammer and thermite link