Meaningful Police Reform

[Sailor.X]

Since Police Reform is in the news as of late. I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread about it. Not none of the defund the police crap. But meaningful changes that can be made to make things better all around. What reforms would you like to see happen?

Well I would like to see an end to No Knock Raids. Such a tactic is highly dangerous and quite frankly idiotic. I mean if suddenly your door is busted down and people start pouring in. The average gun owner would be shooting first and asking questions later. So that practice needs to end.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Since Police Reform is in the news as of late. I thought it would be a good idea to have a thread about it. Not none of the defund the police crap. But meaningful changes that can be made to make things better all around. What reforms would you like to see happen?

Well I would like to see an end to No Knock Raids. Such a tactic is highly dangerous and quite frankly idiotic. I mean if suddenly your door is busted down and people start pouring in. The average gun owner would be shooting first and asking questions later. So that practice needs to end.

Bit of a problem, are the BLM & ANTIFA & Far Left types concerned about that sort of stuff?

Does it even register? Yeah, it would be good to end that bullshit but to them it's not "newsworthy"

That said, what about police wearing body armor 24/7 and always being trained for CQC or disarming and the like and it being allowed for juniors to stop their superiors when they're doing something stupid AF

 

[Bear Ribs]

I probably don't have a good opinion here but I'll throw my uninformed one out anyway.

One thing we need need need* is for Cops to have partners again and work in pairs. This is really freakin' basic for police safety and peace of mind. With somebody backing you up all the time you feel safer and more confident, and you are safer with some backup. My step-brother is a (long retired) homicide detective in Los Angeles County and when they started sending him out alone instead of with a partner he basically starting aging like Obama did in 2008. Even my store has a rule that we open with two people because the risk of attack at open goes down by something like 92% from two people (boss researched it in detail) instead of one.

I'm not always fond of British things but I like some aspects of their police force. In particular they make a difference between "Bobbies" who are the neighborhood cop who's job it is to maintain a good relationship with the neighborhood, and the heavily armed types that deal with actual threats**. Right now police have to react to everything from "my neighbor's music is too loud at 11:00am" to "guy with a bloody axe is chopping down my front door." I think having a Bobbie type cop who's training puts a heavy emphasis on diplomacy, de-escalation, and maintaining a good relationship with the public would help more with the former, with more traditional heavily armed cops reserved for situations where violence is more likely. Perhaps both could be combine with Bobbies being paired with SWAT types so that the Bobbie can be the face in every situation that isn't going to devolve into violence and the SWAT type having her back and making sure the situations that do devolve into violence are contained.

*six more needs redacted.

**The UK doesn't let the street cops even be armed, I'm not proposing going that far but rather an emphasis in training and possibly a uniform designed for appeal and style rather than intimidation.

 

[Deleted member]

Here's a simple list of reforms which I think the entire political spectrum with a few exceptions could agree to, and which are absolutely necessary, with a hat-tip to my friend @Gurney Halleck for putting it together:

End qualified immunity, end civil asset forefeiture, end no-knock raids, end transfers of military equipment to the police, have the fedgov track statistics on police shootings, more aggressive DOJ policing for civil rights violations, mandate and subsidize bodycams, etc.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Here's a simple list of reforms which I think the entire political spectrum with a few exceptions could agree to, and which are absolutely necessary, with a hat-tip to my friend @Gurney Halleck for putting it together:

End qualified immunity, end civil asset forefeiture, end no-knock raids, end transfers of military equipment to the police, have the fedgov track statistics on police shootings, more aggressive DOJ policing for civil rights violations, mandate and subsidize bodycams, etc.

How about extra body armor, CQC training and a sort of training to keep them from reacting badly when danger or possible danger occurs

 

[Deleted member]

How about extra body armor, CQC training and a sort of training to keep them from reacting badly when danger or possible danger occurs

That's made the situation worse, because military training is mostly about acting first, and suppressing threats immediately. To be honest, we do want to inject some of the British Constable in our police--the ideal police do end situations without violence, when possible. Of course they must have the ability to suppress the situation if it gets out of hand, but @Bear Ribs is exactly right, making all cops work in pairs again is a better method to ensure their safety.

 

[S'task]

end transfers of military equipment to the police

How much equipment really is transferred between them and what kind?

Like, I know the popular thing to show is APC like vehicles (which even in some departments you can argue there's a case for, more on that in a moment), but is it really bad for the US military to cycle out older body armor to the police forces? Police forces do have legitimate needs for it and it allows police to get it at a lower rate while recouping cost to the military. That seems legitimately win/win to me.

As to APC like vehicles, I do think there are actual legitimate police uses for them in two very specific areas: urban SWAT situations (where the armor and ability to crash a hardened position might have use) and rural disaster situations (where the off road capability and ability to cross bodies of water without bridges could come in handy). Suburban police departments I would agree tend to not need them.

As to others... is it bad to transfer surplus, say, handguns from the military to the police? Or other non-automatic weapons? I think the connection between the militarization of police and the use of surplus military equipment while connected, needs to be handled with much more nuance than simple blanket prohibitions. There's a lot of military equipment that isn't per se "militarized" and is functionally identical to civilian equipment (handguns being the most obvious here) and there's good budgetary reasons to allow the transfer as it can allow police departments to transfer money to other areas rather than equipment budgets.

 

[bullethead]

Well, this guy may or may not have the right ideas, focused on data based analysis of policing:

Research

www.joincampaignzero.org

Here's a video talking through the whole thing:


TL;DR of the Twitter thread/video:
-Body cams and anti-bias training don't do shit
-More restrictive use of force rules work
-Demilitarization
-Police unions purge accountability records every 4-6 years during contract negotiations
-Use predictive policing tech as oversight on cops
-10 alternative organizations to police reduce crimes by 4-9% (depending on type of crime)
-Make non-911 alternatives for dealing with mental health crises
-Make DoJ investigate police departments - post-investigation departments have 25-30% less shootings

Honestly, I think the biggest problem with attempting demilitarization is that there's literally nowhere else for that hardware to go if you want to keep it in the US. It's either too expensive for private citizens to buy (the vehicles) or illegal to sell to civilians under current regulatory schemes (military surplus firearms). And that's not even getting into the budgetary impacts of removing free/cheap supplies from organizations that are typically pretty poorly funded to begin with.

That said, I think getting the police unions to not purge records every few years would do a hell of a lot to bring bad cops to justice. I don't even get why they're allowed to do that, outside of being a caricature of why American unions are terrible.

 

[Bacle]

One big way to reform US cops to to put them all under the same standards of behavior held for the Coast Guard.

Heck, I'd be all for the Coast Guard taking over a large amount of policing duties, since they are the one LEO agency few tend to gripe about.

Use them to reform and standardize police behavior, without completely shredding the existing departments.

 

[Sailor.X]

I would also add making it illegal for City and Town Police Departments to set up speed traps. Those tactics only make people hate police more. Especially when you get a $400 dollar ticket and points on your license for literally going 36 mph in a 35 mph zone. Yes that actually happened to a friend of mine. If a town wants more revenue. Then set up a Penny tax and be done with it.

 

[Bear Ribs]

end transfers of military equipment to the police,

This one I'm going to disagree with. Transfers of military equipment are kind of important. Specifically, we need to buy a certain amount of military equipment every year in order to keep the military suppliers going. For instance, the Navy must have X submarines either being built or in the pipe at all times in order to keep Electric Boat in business, because it's the only company with engineers who know how to build submarines. If they fold and those engineers have to find new jobs in other fields, the next time the US needs a submarine we'll have to retask engineers who've never worked on one, the first few submarines will be lemons that might get their crew killed from lack of institutional knowledge of how certain things work, and the loss of both people, prestige, and potentially important battles will be devastating. The other option would be to hire foreign companies to build our submarines and there's obvious risk issues there, not to mention currently Electric Boat is just plain better than anybody else due to institutional experience.

The same is true of fighter jets, tanks, you name it. Life isn't a video game where you can just move the people icon to the factory building, click the "Build tank" button, and a standard tank with no issues pops out, identical to all the other tanks you built fifteen turns ago.

Traditionally the military uses the "Military Surplus" stores to sell the excess in times of peace. Sending it to the police is also a way to bleed off the excess that has to be produced to keep the engineers in practice.

 

[Terthna]

This one I'm going to disagree with. Transfers of military equipment are kind of important. Specifically, we need to buy a certain amount of military equipment every year in order to keep the military suppliers going. For instance, the Navy must have X submarines either being built or in the pipe at all times in order to keep Electric Boat in business, because it's the only company with engineers who know how to build submarines. If they fold and those engineers have to find new jobs in other fields, the next time the US needs a submarine we'll have to retask engineers who've never worked on one, the first few submarines will be lemons that might get their crew killed from lack of institutional knowledge of how certain things work, and the loss of both people, prestige, and potentially important battles will be devastating. The other option would be to hire foreign companies to build our submarines and there's obvious risk issues there, not to mention currently Electric Boat is just plain better than anybody else due to institutional experience.

The same is true of fighter jets, tanks, you name it. Life isn't a video game where you can just move the people icon to the factory building, click the "Build tank" button, and a standard tank with no issues pops out, identical to all the other tanks you built fifteen turns ago.

Traditionally the military uses the "Military Surplus" stores to sell the excess in times of peace. Sending it to the police is also a way to bleed off the excess that has to be produced to keep the engineers in practice.

The tools the police have are not the issue; it's how some of them choose, or are ordered, to use those tools.

 

[Deleted member]

@Bear Ribs Most of that equipment doesn't go to the police anyway. And a restoration of the traditional State Militia system, to provide manpower for emergencies which is chartered and organised at the local instead of federal level, would be a better location for cascading that equipment down to.

 

[Bear Ribs]

@Bear Ribs Most of that equipment doesn't go to the police anyway. And a restoration of the traditional State Militia system, to provide manpower for emergencies which is chartered and organised at the local instead of federal level, would be a better location for cascading that equipment down to.

I think the National Guard is the traditional state militia system right now, and acts essentially as you say. But police will also be called on for any actual emergency and need to be equipped for it, often as the locals they're the first ones on the line while the national guard is still being mobilized.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Aside from police reform, you need someone to fix the Police’s PR because even if they don’t do much horrible stuff, they’ll still get smeared

 

[LordsFire]

Aside from police reform, you need someone to fix the Police’s PR because even if they don’t do much horrible stuff, they’ll still get smeared

So another round of 'We need the leftist media to stop habitually lying and deceiving people.'

 

[CarlManvers2019]

So another round of 'We need the leftist media to stop habitually lying and deceiving people.'

Yup, and I doubt even if united in purpose, that the police departments, the police unions, the military and right-wing politicians would have the balls to go up to them and actually BE even for a moment, the monsters they say they are

 

[Deleted member]

I think the National Guard is the traditional state militia system right now, and acts essentially as you say. But police will also be called on for any actual emergency and need to be equipped for it, often as the locals they're the first ones on the line while the national guard is still being mobilized.

That’s not the case. It is highly federally regulated and subordinated. Some states still have separate State Guards which are not, however. Those could be the basis of an expansion.

 

[Floridaman]

For the military equipment, why not limit that to swat, I would even let them keep the apc because in some urban environments it actually is needed. For patrol cops, why not just replace their pistols With Fn 57s, they were issued the rifles following the north Hollywood robbery, so why not just give them a pistol that can penetrate body armor.

FN Five-seven - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[bullethead]

For the military equipment, why not limit that to swat, I would even let them keep the apc because in some urban environments it actually is needed. For patrol cops, why not just replace their pistols With Fn 57s, they were issued the rifles following the north Hollywood robbery, so why not just give them a pistol that can penetrate body armor.

FN Five-seven - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Good luck with that. Cops won't have a great feeling knowing that if a criminal manages to overpower them, they'll get their hands on a gun that can penetrate their body armor. (Also, odds are high that departments would go with the Ruger Five-Seven instead, just from a price perspective, assuming it was reliable enough.)