Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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> It's almost like police officers signed up for a career that puts them at risk.

That's how you lose Police Officers. Workers prefer to work in safer jobs, and are even willing to take pay-cuts to work in a safer area.

A US-police department is in constant competition with rival cities for the same pool of applicants. If your local police department gets a reputation of not backing its officers, your officers will LEAVE to other cities. Period.

There's a reason why all cities back their Police Departments with as much support as possible. Its a necessary part of attracting the best candidates. Some Police Officers have degrees in criminal law theory, college-educated. Other police officers are just high-school graduates with some muscle.

When police departments struggle, they lose the higher-quality officers to their local rivals. Which means either fewer officers, or being forced to hire low-quality officers.

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The fundamental issue here is that Police Departments are too small, making the politics of "local rivals" a toxic culture. Police departments need to be forced to merge together and cover larger areas.

A nation-wide police force would probably be too big, but we can start by eradicating all town-level police forces (less than 20,000 citizens) and merging them into a larger regional area. As long as there are Police Departments that only protect $1-Million homes (where virtually no crimes are committed), you'll have the quality Police Officers leaving the dangerous areas where they're needed (ie: typical inner cities) and working to move towards the richer areas.

You gotta fix the fundamental politics: the underlying driver of the culture.

I never see a shortage of cops anywhere due to a lack of people applying. The idea that they're going to flee to other cities because we don't allow them to blow up houses and murder people with impunity is ridiculous. If we need higher compensation to adjust for not having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy then I'm fine with that. We need cops to stop being murderers.

> I never see a shortage of cops anywhere due to a lack of people applying.

There are different grades of Police Officers. You want the college-educated, criminal law graduates in your city. That's how you get fair-cops. This pool is smaller than you'd expect.

There are PLENTY of high-school thugs who want to be Police Officers. But its very short-sighted to base your police force primarily on that pool of applicants.

> If we need higher compensation to adjust for not having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy then I'm fine with that.

Its not just compensation. Its perceived safety, and other issues. A college-educated cop might be willing to take $50,000 / year if they only have to patrol safe neighborhoods in suburbia, but the same cop will need to be paid $70,000+ to patrol a dangerous ghetto (which happens to be the areas which most need a fair, well-educated officer).

Bonus points: safe neighborhoods in suburbia also want officers to patrol their gated communities. "Rent a cop" services provide ample opportunity for overtime with very low risk. The ghettos simply don't have the money to offer this opportunity.

That's why I'm saying that there are too many small police departments out in Suburbia: taking away the good officers from the areas that truly need them.

I suspect if we make cops accountable and change their training to quit fucking shooting people at the drop of the hat, the high school bullies will quit trying to be cops because they can't lord their impunity over everyone. Ultimately the situation we have in the US is unacceptable and something needs to change. It doesn't matter how expensive it is, cops need to quit murdering.

> I suspect if we make cops accountable and change their training to quit fucking shooting people at the drop of the hat

That's called sensitivity training and its widely deployed in the richer areas... but poorly deployed in poor police departments.

Sensitivity training, Diversity training, De-escalation training, etc. etc. Police departments know about this style of training and have names for these programs. It costs money though, money that not all Police Departments have.

If you think your local Police don't have enough sensitivity training (or whatever), either talk to your local Mayor, or local Sheriff, or police commissioner, or board (every town's political structure is different), and try to push more of it. There's probably budgetary constraints involved, but I don't think anyone's really against the idea of good training for their local cops.

On another note, thanks for a level headed discussion

> Workers prefer to work in safer jobs

Police officer isn't a bad choice, then. It does not even break into the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America.

> Police officer isn't a bad choice, then. It does not even break into the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America.

Police officer in an area with $1 Million homes in gated communities is even better.

If you're a college-educated, high-quality Police Officer, there's basically no reason to work in the inner-city Ghettos. There's always a suburbia which is safer, quieter, and simpler to work at.

If you can't work in rich-suburbia, then working in those cities with military-grade weapons is still better than inner-city ghettos.

It's exactly the same for teaching. Around here the nicer schools even pay worse because they get the best applicants anyway! The job's way easier, more pleasant, less full of horrors that haunt you for years after, and you don't have 3rd graders swearing at you and threatening to stab you with alarming frequency. Well worth 10-20% lower pay.

Pretty big fallacy bro. Its not in the top 10 most deadly jobs in America. "Danger" is a relative term. If a squad of 20 soldiers get in a gunfight every day over 3 months, and none of them die, was their job less dangerous than the 20 guys who work in an office, where Jerry was killed by a vending machine tipping over?

The FBI tracks Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA)[1]. There are around 540,000 police officers in the US, and about 58,000 recorded assault. Now, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Some of those assaults are undoubtedly some Kelly Thomas type BS where the cops beat the crap out of a guy and got blood on their uniforms and counted it as assault. There are also likely assaults that don't get listed/reported. E.g. a man who just murdered someone is running from the cops, car chase ensues. 10+ cop cars behind the suspect, who starts shooting at officers. This did not get recorded as 10 assaults, though 10 cops were shot at.

Also keep in mind that these statistics are of all reporting agencies. Every Mayberry town with 100 citizens, 1 sheriff, and 1 deputy. Every command staff and supervisor who are effectively just managers with a badge. The cops who do entirely admin work and don't wear their vest anymore. The High Tech Crimes guys who don't respond to calls, but do computer forensic analysis in pedophile cases. These are all less likely to be assaulted than the cop doing a solo patrol, responding to calls.

_____ [1]1https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka

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