tempted to quote
everybody here, but will limit myself to these :
[EDIT: Five new replies appeared whilst i was writing this, mostly pretty irrelevant
I refer to the previous discussion]
I think reevaluating the protocol for wellness checks, like Phoenix said, is one important piece of fixing the system. A cop without psych intervention training shouldn't be put in a position of dealing with a potentially suicidal or unstable person. Nor should a social worker or crisis intervention worker be put in a positionwhere they risk being shot at. Maybe the answer is cop/psych teams, maybe it's specialized training for certain cops who go out on those calls, but it's sickening to see a basic wellness check on a vulnerable person end in brutality because the cops involved viewed every behaviour through the lens of criminal violence.
I wish they put more on the force but there's not many of those teams at all. In a region near me that has over 1.2 million people there are only 2 teams. Just the other day the police were called for a wellness check for a young man with schziophrenia (his parents called because he was trying to start a fire) and he was shot and killed. The SIU was called in but they're not releasing any details to the media other than the officer had very minor injuries.
My issue with the cop/psych combo is that I've seen them in action and they weren't good. I have someone close to me who lives in a group home and they responded to a call regarding her (she's 16 biologically but at a grade 2 level developmentally) and it was made clear they were only there to be used as backup. The Psych was successful de-escalating and the cop got impatient and said it was taking too long and she either had to stop her behaviour immediately or go to jail. Obviously she freaked out because she was terrified and she started crying and hitting herself and he hauled her off to jail.
Hmm. why shouldn't a social worker or crisis intervention worker be put in a position where they risk being shot at?
One reason that springs to mind is: because they're more valuable than brutes like Chauvin, and we wouldn't want to risk losing them
but i'm sure that many would be happy to volunteer.
OK, i see other pragmatic reasons why not, and i very much take Phoenix' point about that team. Might be ifxed perhaps, by giving the psych worker authority over the policeman. and not vice versa?
But the whole freaking system clearly needs a radical overhaul. Tinkering with what's already in place is not gonna change things enough.
One radical thought i have is: how about training people who are going to be dealing with the public in delicate and potentially dangerous situations in the caring professions first? Then adding full police training and full police powers on top of that? I'd really like to see
alll policeman replaced with people who had that sort of training.
Costly in the short term ofc, but the benefits to society could be enormous. And if it saved these escalations from occuring, that would entirely justify any financial investment
I don't know how it is the USA, but in Britain, we could start off pretty cheaply and easily by recruiting unemployed counsellors into the police (it pays to very careful with the spelling there
) We have something like 10 times as many trained counsellors than we have jobs for professional counsellors. This happens party because the caring professions are badly underfunded. and part;y because counselling courses are highly popular, one reason being that they are known to be useful tools for self-development. I've personally seen people sign up for those courses, and come out much better balanced and more sensitive. If the trainee can get a job as a professional counsllor, that's a bonus. Often, ofc. they don't get any sort of job at all, because we've way more people than we need. I'm sure that many of those people would love to do police training on top of that and wind up with a socially useful career. People cry out for such roles, even those with good salaries already. Most people would swap their good salary in a heartbeat for the chance to something meaningful instead. Such opportunities are wasted on oiks like Chauvin
But that's not all. We still need a thorough investigation, by psychologists into how that toxic cop culture develops, and what we can do to to undermine that development . We all know about it. It happens all over the world, and it's almost a cliche.
I believe that the findings of Stanley Milgrams famous obedience study are highly relevant here. It doesnt explain why a police officer will ""happily run over an old lady to get to a fellow officer in trouble " (words spoken to me by an actual british policeman once, at a social occasion) but it certainly explains why authoritarian power structures are apt to propagate atrocities. We badly need a whole new model, and not only in police forces.
As for police cover-ups, I think, to be fair, we have to bear in mind that decent, conscientious officers can too easily be coerced into co-operating with cover-ups; as was demonstrated by inquiries into the Hillsborough football disaster in England, possibly the most extensive Police cover-up to ever come to light. And it took 30 years to bring it to light. Thousands of wtnesses, including police officers were coerced into altering their statements; and one police officer said he found out, by chance, that his own statement had been altered without his knowlege or consent (No knowing how extensive that was). Increasinly huge nunbers of police became involved in the cover-up operation, not all of them willingly. All because the officer in charge of crowd control that day couldn't face it coming to light that his own bad decisions were responsible for 96 people being killed. Worse, it would have been substantially fewer than 96 dead , if not for his immediate actions to cover his own butt once he grasped what was happening; all of which served to interfere with rescue operations.
Nobody should have that much power. '
