Personally, I would have no interest in dealing with the horrible things people do to one another, on a regular basis, as part of my job. No thanks. Reading the news is bad enough, I wouldn't want to live it.
Risk factors: "employment as nightclub bouncer, professional male dancer, professional wrestler, or law enforcement officer"
Funny enough, casual criminals fit that picture quite well. That would explain why they are attracted to "the horrible things people do to one another, on a regular basis" - to a non-trivial extent, they share the character traits of the people who do these things in the first place.
> “The Ruderman Family Foundation, a philanthropic institution, also found that first responders die by suicide at a higher rate than people in the general population, according to an April 2018 report.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/for-third-straight-year-polic...
if you group people by profession and gender, you can probably find 1000 things that are specific to that group. it's like saying that programmers/engineers have a higher probability of being good at math or being introverted vs the general population.
That is, do racist assholes disproportionately gravitate towards the police force? Or does the police force disproportionately turn ordinary people into racist assholes?
This one, probably, as usually racist+fascist assholes are the ones who dream of wearing an uniform and carry weapons so they can "feel the power" over other people. It's a selection problem, which I'm sure those responsible are very aware of and have no intention to change. A violent cop is a perfect weapon for corrupt governments and politicians: he does nasty things for you and when he retires he becomes part of your private "police" as eternal gratitude for having saved his ass multiple times for those nasty things. That is also very likely the reason why there are many accounts of cops abusing steroids (side effects very similar to cocaine) but so far it seems no serious investigation has been started.
You can't be expected to punish the police when you need them to do your job, which is the position DAs are in. If they were to lose the trust if the police then they wouldn't have the super they need to go their job. A statewide role of internal enforcement that's separate from the DA and is an unelected role appointed by the governor or legislative body would likely be the best one could do for this role and provide the freedom to do the job effectively.
Add to that punishments should come out of the insurance funds for the force meaning police organizations that are truly terrible would get shut down when they could not afford their insurance. Also a national police database with all punitive actions against officers that is permanent and not removable unless ordered by a judge would go a long way to prevent officers who get punished in multiple locations from just moving to a new job.
Do you have evidence for this?
If anyone of us had evidence of this the cat would be already out of the bag, so unfortunately I don't. There is however evidence that selection is deeply flawed, so I wonder why the same criteria that would have me sacked in no time by any company HR department if I behaved as such can't apply there. Racist violent people aren't usually that smart at hiding it, I know some of them and usually 30 minutes of chit chat is more than enough to expose their ideologies and how wrong would be to give them that power.
You’d have to get a department to consent to the random sampling of its officers’ social media histories. (Can’t just use public data due to the selection bias it entails.)
The data are there, being dutifully logged by everyone’s cell phones and flung off to servers across the world. Ethically accessing them is the political problem.
He talks at length about how the skill sets necessary to investigative work and community policing have largely been lost as a result of the focus on meeting drug war quotas.
These individuals should be punished no doubt and likely will be as a result of this article.
I don’t have the source on hand. But the elevated rates of domestic violence (like 4x baseline) in policing households is unusually prominent in the United States.
If the US or job is higher that could be a serious problem that they need to look into (if it isn’t already, which I doubt). There has to be more to this than the police are just over-selecting for evil people.
Although the US has to be one of the highest numbers of police dealing with people with weapons. I remember the WaPo database of police shootings showing that almost all of them (95%+ except one or two involved people with weapons). Adding all the people who didn’t get shot but still had a dangerous weapon, that can have some PTSD. Which famously rears its head in many unexpected self-destructive ways.
"a non-partisan, not-for-profit, multimedia journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality"
I can, because I've been in their midst in both of these places and it's as bad, and likely worse, than you'd imagine. It's happened more times than I can count, but it still never ceases to amaze me what some of these people will say to someone who they don't know, but could pass for one of them.
That being said, Buzzfeed and their ilk routinely make excuses for people on the left posting the same type of racism and thugish messages. "Ironically" calling for old white men to be punished, routinely calling for violence against Trump and Trump supporters (not ironically), sexist comments against men and so on.
I feel the need for freedom of speech is so great that we shouldn't censor any of this stuff but neither should we endorse or support it in the media regardless of what side of the political spectrum it's being perpetrated on.
Leftist asshole talking about "old white men" online = bad
Cop who has the power to use force against you or arrest you talking about how "thugs deserve slugs" = worse
This isn't hard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, please don't use the 'whataboutism' label in arguments here. It falls under the guideline that asks people not to call names in arguments. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Oh dear, speaking of "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"
>“I would of pulled the trigger.” This sentence on its own does not show any racism.
"Police Post Racist and Violent Messages on Facebook, a Review Shows"
When you have enough evidence one way or the other then you can begin addressing the problem properly.
Evidence lead policies are the most rational way to addresses things.
Of the pages of officers whom the Plain View researchers could positively identify, about 1 in 5 of the current officers, and 2 in 5 of the retired officers, made public posts or comments that met that threshold — typically by displaying bias, applauding violence, scoffing at due process, or using dehumanizing language. The officers mocked Mexicans, women, and black people, celebrated the Confederate flag, and showed a man wearing a kaffiyeh scarf in the crosshairs of a gun.I wouldn't characterize using lethal force when someone pulls a gun on you, or advocating for the death penalty for child murderers, as unreasonable positions.