Wouldn't you rather have more police officers with more training?
While adding additional community programs onto that. That makes the most sense to me.

Weakening a police force is going to have negative consequences. And crime will spike. Here's the New Jersey Camden police department that got dismantled and rebuilt.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html

This post was edited by GLYC123 on Jun 13 2020 12:41pm

More police officers probably aren't necessary, and if the training is bad then why would you want more training?

What the actual fuck

/e naw

This post was edited by Goomshill on Jun 13 2020 03:21pm

I got a suggestion: Police recruitment should rely heavily on college athletes of team sports who were not quite good enough to make a professional team (or who briefly made one but washed out at a young age)

I realize for this to happen, it would mean that their salaries would have to go up, which given the situation seems like a cost that we can bear if it means addressing the problem.

Think of it this way: College athletes are:

1) physically superior to the average citizen
2) already have experience working as part of a team
3) college educated
4) less likely to be racist (they grow up through all their school years with racially diverse teammates)

Instead of cops being "an average joe who wanted to be a cop", maybe we could transform the position into a high-paying position designed for high-quality people and held to high standards.

Think about police brutality in the context of NFL penalties for unnecessary roughness. Players are trained to be keenly aware of where they can hit. If their arm goes too low or too high, they get penalized. They practice the skill of having to make split-second decisions of exactly how to contort their bodies in a way that tackles the opponent while reducing the chance of injury. This is the exact kind of skillset you want cops to have in order to have unquestioned physical dominance over a citizen without needing to choke them out.

This post was edited by Kayeto on Jun 13 2020 03:29pm

LOL

And this is why the police in this country, basically regardless of location, have lost legitimacy.

The """college education""" that these athletes get in these programs is a joke. It neither indicates lots of knowledge nor a high IQ nor classical education in the Humboldtian sense.

Also, the desire to protect people is one of the strongest and most important motivators for good cops. You'd risk a lot more candidates lacking this key trait if you abolish self-selection. And I think that most of those former prospective NFL/NBA/MLB players would still consider the job as a cop to be a failure, a demotion, even if these jobs were much better paid than they are right now. I'm really sceptical that "I failed at achieving my professional goals, and this is the best job I could find instead" would lead to cops with the right attitude.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jun 13 2020 03:39pm

That's mostly true for the athletes who are on full scholarship at Division 1 schools with highly competitive programs. Overall, those athletes represent a minority of the total pool of college athletes. Kids that play basketball at a D3 school still have to participate in classes, even if they get some *cough* "tutoring" *cough*.

This post was edited by Kayeto on Jun 13 2020 03:42pm