Cops are literally trained how to yell and how to intimidate people and given military style equipment and training -- so what do we expect them to do?? How about instead, we teach them to use their compassion and voice to reason with the vast majority of people. No not all problems can be resolved with compassion and reason, some require a gun and someone willing to use it, but we shouldn't start there. It is called escalation of violence/force and police used to be trained to prevent it, anymore it feels as though they are the ones to escalate resolvable problems into all out fights.
I am not saying all cops are bad, there are a huge number which will first use their words and compassion, the problem is as a group, it feels like those who will use their brain first are no longer the majority.
My own personal interactions have varied over the years, but have been net positive, that said, I am a 40 something entrepreneur/professional who is white. However, even with that, I have had more than a few run ins where a LEO tried to use intimidation and threats instead of conversation to understand what is going on. To be super clear, I am not against them doing their jobs in any way, I know their job is hard and I first hand know (from EMS work) how hard it is when you are dealing with people who abuse the system. But as an example,. less then 2 months ago I had a cop in a neighboring city screaming threats at me and stopping my vehicle for driving around a car accident. What made it interesting is I was following the instructions of the Sgt that was directing traffic who had told me to go around a specific way (which I was doing at less then 10 MPH as he said proceed slowly). My luck is I knew the Sgt could hear this tantrum and the Sgt came over to put a stop to it. Sadly though, this was after the cop had already asked me if I was "fucking stupid" and threatened me with arrest, but I hadn't even said a word yet. When the Sgt walked over he told me to have a nice day and go ahead and made a point of saying that I did nothing wrong. In one example, I saw the good LEO and the dickhead. So that is a recent personal interaction with a bad cop, who I don't think is in the majority, but nonetheless he is out there and is getting training that focuses on threat neutralization instead of calm deescalation. I mean he had every right to stop me and say hey, wth dude why are you driving through here, and I could've said I was told to and that'd be it, he could/would confirm and all is good. No need for the crazy talk.
My overall feeling is the vast majority of cops are good humans doing a hard job where they deal with mainly societies troubled people all day long. So when you train them on threat neutralization or in other militaristic tactics it gives them muscle memory of the wrong nature. Even good ones. And for the bad ones it only intensifies their ego and trains them to be better at their aggression.
Wealthy activists, politicians, and movie stars have private security. They don't care if we have less cops to protect the average person or we make it impossible for the average person to protect themselves.
I have no issue with the protests. My main issues is with radical separatists groups like BLM that are going to make the average citizen unsafe and ruin the city around them to prove some sort of point.
They also want to abolish all prisons.
If this does happen, people like me will just get weapons illegally and take our chances.
My second concern is that pay for police is often considered not great. Hitting the city/county budget will likely impact salaries, pay increases, health care benefits, vehicle maintenance, and many other areas. Sadly the fastest thing to get cut from municipal agencies is often training, so I'm skeptical we can "defund" the police while simultaneously adding additional training requirements around mental health, de-escalation, etc.
I'm not inherently against the defund argument, particularly when it involves shifting those funds toward more community services that would reduce crime and poverty anyways. It just seems like the problem has less to do with the amount of money police departments actually have and more to do with a lack of oversight on how they're spending it.
