'A Sufficient Number of Psychologists'

I don't have a problem with this idea, as long as we can agree that the sufficient number of psychologists in a riot is always zero.
The Missouri Democrat who told MSNBC the riots of Ferguson and the tremors of racial outrage that spread nationwide from the Missouri community were “our race war” unleashed a Twitter tirade Jan. 3 that foreshadowed a stormy legislative session ahead for her white colleagues in the Missouri Legislature....

Her legislation also includes what Chappelle-Nadal described as citizen protections and officer professional standards:

• The bill scales back the current “use of deadly force” laws in Missouri, allowing officers to use deadly force only in instances where a suspect poses a clear danger to the officer or the public.

• If a police officer shoots an unarmed citizen, or a police officer kills an unarmed citizen by any other means, a special prosecutor will automatically be appointed.

• When law enforcement is deployed to a protest situation or a scene of civil unrest, all officers will be required to wear accurate and visible identification with their full names clearly displayed.

• Law enforcement officers shall not be allowed to “hog-tie” citizens or verbally degrade or make derogatory comments toward any peaceful protestors.

• If the governor declares a state of emergency due to civil unrest, the governor shall immediately reassign and mobilize a sufficient number of state social workers, counselors, and psychologists to the area.

• The deployment of tear gas shall not be allowed unless the governor has declared a state of emergency and a neutral third-party agency (such as Amnesty International) is on the scene to certify that the tear gas will be deployed in a humanitarian manner.

• If the governor declares a state of emergency due to civil unrest, the governor shall concurrently contract with a neutral third-party agency (such as Amnesty International) to immediately report any abuses of human, civil, and constitutional rights to the Missouri and United States attorney generals.

• All law enforcement agencies in Missouri must be accredited by July 1, 2016.
Most of these sound like sensible ideas. "Use of deadly force" laws in Georgia hold the police to the same standard as anyone else -- only to stop an immediate threat of death or grievous bodily harm -- which is a pretty reasonable standard. A special prosecutor standard may well be warranted in cases of unarmed persons being killed by police, at least for a while given the serious degradation in public trust in the system's ability to hold the police to account. The use of third party validators is not a bad idea in such an environment either: the US military used embedded media to great effect in tamping down the worst of the irresponsible accusations of excessive force. (In fairness, the embeds sometimes caught some actual excessive force on camera -- but that can be valuable too, especially in a policing environment where the goal really is to train so that excessive force will not be used.) Visible identification aids public accountability too, especially in an age of easy access to cameras and video recording equipment.

Not being allowed to "verbally degrade or make derogatory comments" sounds silly to me, though. I assume most departments have standards governing that anyway, so perhaps there's no harm in it, but still.

But 'social workers, counselors, and psychologists'? We'd be well off without them.

20 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Typo in the title.

I am a social worker, and you don't want me there.

The idea is common: get some do-gooder people there, hanging around freelance and y'know, doing good and it will just naturally help everyone to er, do something good, too. "Woodsman spare that tree," but with people.

Of course, it might actually work. The police and the protestors might decide to get together and beat up the do-gooders.

Grim said...

I think I fixed the typo. Thanks.

I can't imagine the good this would do. I'm a little suspicious of the value of psychoanalysis, but I'm pretty sure riot conditions are not ideal for getting the best of whatever it has to offer.

raven said...

Riot, trebuchet, social worker, some assembly required......

Grim said...

You're a man after my own heart, Raven.

Tom said...

Are there any third party organizations that aren't far-left? I'm not sure I would trust AI to report the truth about the weather, much less police actions in a riot where there might be socio-political ramifications.

Texan99 said...

There's an odd idea lurking in here, that policemen are armed solely for the purpose of defending themselves against armed criminals. Doesn't it occur to any of these guys that policemen also are armed so that they don't have to depend on overcoming obstreperous criminals in hand-to-hand combat? It's not supposed to be a fair fight. The policeman is supposed to win.

Grim said...

It is certainly my idea that the police are not entitled to kill people just to "win" in any confrontation. The state should not be able to deprive citizens of life and limb that easily.

Texan99 said...

Of course not. The assumption is that the policeman has a proper aim. I'm talking about tactics.

If we have to assume that the policeman is screwing up egregiously, then we should not only disarm him but handcuff and hobble him, so the righteous citizen will be more certain to win.

The idea is that the citizen gives in when the policeman insists, and fights it out in court later. It's not supposed to be a contest of strength on the street, unless we've reached the point of outright rebellion.

Gringo said...

The deployment of tear gas shall not be allowed unless the governor has declared a state of emergency and a neutral third-party agency (such as Amnesty International) is on the scene to certify that the tear gas will be deployed in a humanitarian manner.

Anyone who believes that Amnesty International is truly a "neutral third-party agency" should read The True Genesis of Amnesty International.

Even if one could find a supposedly neutral third party, the delays involved in getting such an approval would be counter productive. If, as the saying goes, the police are a half hour away from responding to an emergency, a third party neutral bureaucracy is probably days away from responding to an emergency. Think of the interminable debates needed to decide.

Grim said...

Even in terms of tactics, and given a just purpose, lethal force isn't justified just to overcome resistance. A friend of mine who was a farrier as well as the Sheriff's Department's sniper moved to animal control a few years ago. This wasn't to avoid shooting people -- he never shot anyone, in spite of being the designated marksman. It was just that he had gotten old enough that he no longer enjoyed fighting drunks on Friday night. They were just good old boys, having a little too much rowdy fun. It would have been murder to shoot them. And of course he never did.

Texan99 said...

Again, of course not. But lethal force is justified if, instead of going along, the criminal decides it would be a good idea to attack the policeman and take his gun and threaten his life, because that would be a good way of getting away with whatever he was doing and not getting arrested. And that's the fight the policeman is supposed to win, not to give the criminal a sporting chance in.

There might be a lot of gray area where a criminal intends only to take the gun, not to kill the policeman with it, but I don't expect the policeman to find out.

Grim said...

...to attack the policeman and take his gun and threaten his life...

Well, that's an immediate threat of death or grievous bodily harm -- the very standard I was saying I thought was the right one.

Still, it's not that the gun is intended to spare him from hand to hand combat, or make it easy for him to win in confrontations with criminals. It's that he's facing an immediate threat of death or very serious harm.

It doesn't even have to be to himself -- if a guy is threatening some innocent with a knife, it's fine to shoot that guy. If a guy is threatening to punch another in the nose, it's not fine. So it's that standard that I think is behind the justification for using the gun.

Texan99 said...

I think you may be missing the point. The policeman has the gun in order to reduce the chances that the fight will become symmetrical. There is no intention to set up the conditions for a fair fight, and no reason why there should be.

If, under those conditions, a criminal is enough of an idiot to put the policeman in fear of his life, he'll die, and that's how it should be.

Grim said...

I think you may be missing the point.

I don't think I'm missing that point, but I'll be happy to explicitly reject it. The Marine Corps or the Army should always have overwhelming force at their disposal (although they don't have to carry it with them everywhere -- artillery, etc). We should never want them to go into a situation in which there is anything like a parity of force.

I don't think that's true with the police at all. The police should carry defensive arms, for this legitimate, particular purpose we've been discussing. There's not a problem with having highly discriminate offensive weapons for special cases (for example, my friend the sniper, whose rifle was not "defensive" but which would be deployed only in hostage situations or something similar, and which rifle is highly precise and therefore discriminate).

But I don't think we should take it as a principle that the police should be armed more heavily than anyone they might encounter, the way we do with the Marines or the soldiers. They're not rolling out to suppress an enemy army, but to police a community of which they are themselves a part. Even defensive deadly violence is quite rare, though in a large enough country we see it often. We shouldn't take the mindset that they need military-grade arms, or even just 'superior' arms, or a disparity of deadly force to hand. What they deserve to have instead is superior numbers (to the criminal class native to their area, if any, not obviously to the community), discipline and training, and communications to allow them to summon help if they need it.

Texan99 said...

How is the ability to summon help different from being better armed that whoever they are most likely to meet? Isn't it unfair for police to outnumber their foes?

I don't insist that we ensure the police be more heavily armed that anyone they might encounter. I do want police to have a decent chance of having the upper hand in most foreseeable encounters with people are likely to want to hurt them. They're not social workers. Normally, knowing that the police are armed, ordinary citizens aren't going to start physical fights with them, and that's how I want it. If physical fights do get started, I want the policeman to go home to his family that night. The criminal, I'm not so concerned about.

If police go bats and start shooting up the joint when there's no justification for it, I'm all for prosecuting them, not to mention throwing out of office the police chief or mayor who let it happen. I'm also all for reducing situations in which cops spur citizens into defending themselves in their homes because they don't even have a chance to figure out it's the police busting in. But suicide by cop is a real thing, and it consists of some jerk making a policeman choose between shooting him or getting killed himself. If that happens, what I'm focused on is whether the cop reasonably perceived a threat, which is a very different matter from whether the poor victim was "unarmed." This is not a game, with handicaps and sporting principles.

Grim said...

How is the ability to summon help different from being better armed that whoever they are most likely to meet?

Adding more readily-available friends is more likely to achieve your stated goal -- increasing the likelihood of submission to the law without violence -- than increasing the lone officer's payload. More friends prepared to apply nonlethal force also doesn't increase the chance of a fatal outcome.

I don't have a problem with the police being defensively armed, not only for reasons of 'suicide by cop' but for all the occasions when the principle justifying lethal force applies. But if you want good outcomes, most of the time we're better off adding another (or a few more) officers than upping the firepower the guy by himself is carrying.

Ymar Sakar said...

More friends prepared to apply nonlethal force also doesn't increase the chance of a fatal outcome.

Sure it does. When 5 separate force vectors coming from 5 200 pound people are applied consistently or erratically to a person on the ground, this pins the targets and begins constricting the internal organs and functions of the target body to the point where it will rupture internal functions, without any visible external bruising or struggle to signify violence had been used.

Just as firing a rubber bullet loaded with 5x the powder, into a person will penetrate through where it may not have with a normal load, 5 people firing at the same target at the same time will achieve better results. But non lethal force of that kind is too obvious for people to get away with, since it's obviously encroaching on lethal force to fire 5 tazer zaps at a person's head at simultaneous intervals. That's why they are currently trained to use "no hands", but with enough people any level of force easily becomes lethal force.

The only situation where having an excess or over abundance of numbers on your side, that avoids this, is if the situation is de-escalated, and people refuse to get into hand range of each other. So long as the bluff isn't called, there's no chance if the situation stops at a level. But there's always a chance it will hit critical if it gets to a level.

Ymar Sakar said...

Isn't it unfair for police to outnumber their foes?

Not particularly. Bouncers generally use joint lock holds that can be applied by groups, that way it doesn't take as much skill and failure isn't as critically damaging.

If the police storm a civilian house, and start sweeping it with shotgun blasts (people love talking about banning handguns and using shotguns for home defense) looking for druggies and throwing flash bombs into children's rooms, well, that might be unfair.

Generally, people need numbers because each individual isn't a sufficiently talented or superior warrior. So their incompetence or lack of skill mastery, necessitates help from other people, in order to keep the peace. Unfortunately, that's not what a lot of Leftist unions order their LEOs to do with more people.

More backup may calm people down, allowing them to think clearly, de-escalate a situation instead of escalating it due to anger/fear, and the numbers may deter villains from launching pre-emptive strikes thinking they just need to get the jump on this LEO and take his gun to win.

However, America's situation is such that more numbers is not enough. The issue has been accelerated beyond people's ken. Numbers are no longer sufficient, if ever they were, to cover up for LEO incompetence, training mistakes, and Leftist union orders.

Ymar Sakar said...

Doesn't it occur to any of these guys that policemen also are armed so that they don't have to depend on overcoming obstreperous criminals in hand-to-hand combat?

Like I told Grim before, if LEOs want hand to hand, they need to learn H2H or get some kind of blade tools to prevent close contact with enemies. A firearm actually makes it more difficult to win in H2H, because not only do you have to think of using it, adding OODA loop time to your decision cycles, but you also have to prevent the enemy from using it against you.

By the time a person is in grappling range, the level of reaction time or pure skill needed to draw and fire, requires hip shooting and CQB methods. These aren't generally known to be paid for training by the city's taxes. Those taxes usually go to the unions, which then send it to Democrats, after laundering it.

Historically, quarter staffs and spears with blunted edges, have been used in situations where restraining someone was preferred to killing or injuring them. The current training level, even for civilians that cannot afford to go to the range every week, is insufficient to handle both weapons, empty H2H, and high level shooting capabilities.

So the more time is focused on ranged shooting, the more the other areas suffer as a consequence. A multi talented or capable individual, is less and less a soldier/LEO, and more like a citizen warrior. In this current Regime, those aren't particularly useful or popular.

douglas said...

"...most of the time we're better off adding another (or a few more) officers than upping the firepower the guy by himself is carrying."

Remember when police rode two to a car? I do. That's the exception by a lot now. Reinstating partners in cruisers might be a good first step.