It occurs to me that, in an earlier era when we got our news from local papers, I would never know that we were experiencing another set of semi-annual riots in major cities. It could not be more peaceful out here in the countryside. Spring weather is beautiful, too.
This one appears to be occasioned by a female cop who didn't know the difference between her taser and her pistol. Diversity is our strength! Not, apparently, training or competence.
7 comments:
Well, ........here in MKE, there used to be two newspapers, one AM, one PM. Both carried national news in one section, local in another, and both had the really important stuff: comics.
Over the past year I have seen people making a lot of hay comparing the differences in training levels between cops in certain European countries and the US in regards to number of police involved shootings. The implication being more up front training would lead to fewer cop shooting incidents.
That gave me the idea that we should run an experiment where we import a dozen or so Norwegian cops and have them work in Baltimore for a couple years. We can even have an exchange program and send some Baltimore cops to Norway. Then we can compare the two groups' performance, as well as how they fare to the control groups of cops staying in their own localities.
An obvious objection to that proposal: your Norwegian cops will probably speak reasonable English, but your Baltimore cops will definitely not speak Norsk. Nor are they likely to manage to learn it successfully during the exchange program.
So you'll have a group of polite, mannerly cops from Norway getting rolled by gangs in Baltimore; and trigger-happy cops who don't speak the language shooting up Norway.
What Grim said.
nmewn
The phrase "trigger-happy cops who don't speak the language shooting up Norway" makes me smile for some reason. And you're right, Grim, though I suggest this as more of a thought experiment than a real experiment.
A probably more tractable experiment would be to have a select number of cops going through a training program based on a European model and then compare their performance after several years to a control. But then we'd have to worry about the regular fuzz contaminating our intervention group of Nordic trained cops.
I agree, that phrase made me laugh, as well.
For as long as I’ve followed the posts in the Hall (I made my way to the Hall from Blackfive), deficiencies in the training of American police have been raised as a significant issue. I don’t know enough about their training to know where it’s deficient. Grim (and anyone else), can you give me more information about that?
So, that deserves its own post. It's been a regular topic for years, as you say.
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