Things like less police shootings, less ketamine injections, less unlawful detainment, less murder immunity, less fabricated evidence, less autistic kids and their guardians getting shot up, less rubber bullets used on protestors sound like sensible reform to me.

Which means a significant injection of funds is likley needed to reform, restructure, increase training requirements, increase compensation, etc.

More money has been the answer to all of humanities problems even though there's ample proof that more often than not it doesn't necessary solve the underlying issues.

Good example is quality of education. We spend magnitudes more on k-12 education compared to Asian nations yet those kids curb stomp American kids on things like math and science. It's almost like cultural expectations and home socialization is the real reason most kids do well in school rather than the myth we've been sold quality = need more money.

It's honestly the same story with policing. There's flaws of course but it's missing the issue which once again if we boil it down is cultural and socialization. There was a time when parents could and were expected to mold kids, discouraging deviant behavior and encouraging good behavior. Now that responsibility is increasingly being shifted away from the parent to society and government. It's not the parents fault that he's skipping school at 14 and smoking weed, it's the fault of the school for not keeping him engaged. As the kid grows up without education and gets into crime, it's not the parents fault, it's societies 'institutional racism' or systems of oppression that led to this outcome.

I've seen this over and over being a product of public schools and living in the inner city. You see some massive differences in kids that grew up in 2 parent homes, with parents that were involved and disciplined their kids and the ones that didn't have this.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Sep 10 2020 09:42am

I don't disagree that fixing other socioeconomic issues will reduce the amount of policing needed and crime statistics would go down resulting in what appears to be better policing without an injection of money. That being said we are not there yet.

If you want higher quality policing you need a higher quality individual. A higher quality individual will either be a person that you put more training into to become that higher quality individual or someone who has already demonstrated those qualifications elsewhere such as obtaining a 4 year degree in something that shows they have strong analytical thinking ability, i'm not concluding one is better than the other. You will have to compensate that person with more money as they have invested in themselves already at a cost and will now sever in a high risk position in comparison to a typical office job. Ultimately in our current state a quality force will require money, Training which developed a persons ability to think and act in accordance with set protocols also takes time and investment.

Now, there's other factors at play in other countries, but I am willing to bet countries with less policing incidents do put more money into their officers than the USA.

training and education, yes.
militarising their equipment, no.

That is what i was getting at with the blurb above, education, training, reinvestment into the person carrying out the action, not the object used to carry out an action.

This is reasonable logic but yields an undesired police demographic. Police experts have figured out that having demographic/race similarities between police and the community is generally a good thing and desired. It's actually an area where i think affirmative action is really useful because if you have a bunch of white cops policing all black neighborhoods, there a certain level of disconnect from the community that's impossible to overcome. So if a city is 40% black then the city should strive for that % of black cops.

Problem is there aren't enough blacks that have 4 year degrees that want to become cops. That's why when i was trying to become a cop in my city, they lowered the requirements from bachelors to HS diploma. The city is 50% black and only way to get a meaningful applicant pool of a certain desired demographic meant you had to lower the requirements.

I do agree more money will attract better qualified individuals but we're actually going into the complete opposite direction. Cutting police budgets and freezing pay increases will just result in talent going into other fields meanwhile standards will have to be lowered to fill the numbers.

It's a complex web. It's not about having more money, it's about where the money is distributed throughout the larger society, because money is the biggest incentive.

Let's say more education didn't correlate to better life outcomes, there would be no real incentive to get educated. Or if there just isn't a realistic path to education. That's the reality for a lot of inner city kids who have mold growing on the walls of their schools. They don't see education being valued, don't see a realistic path to a better life through education, and don't have reasonable access to a good education, so they don't seek it. It's the same in rural areas honestly. Of the 24 people in my class I was one of 4 that went to college and we all went to the same college that was cheap and local, and we only did it because our parents went out of the way to facilitate that pathway. For other kids they went to vocational training junior and senior year to become welders, mechanics, and hair stylists. This is also independent of who was intelligent. There are three or four kids from my graduating class who were pretty smart and hard working but never even tried to go to college.

So yes, it's cultural, but the culture reacts to the distribution of resources. Nerds being a good thing is very recent and it mostly came around because they were the ones who still had jobs during the 2008 crash. Marketing people said "hey, these nerds have money, let's cater to them" and being a nerd with tech skills became fashionable and kids started going that direction more and more.

It's a feedback loop, money influences culture influences money influences culture. Just throwing money at the problem won't inherently solve it, but reorganizing the distribution of money will inevitably get results, and how best to do that is a hard question to answer.

This is the parents responsibility. Many poor foreigners come here and make it a priority that their kids do well in school no matter if the school is in the suburbs or the city. I went to a public school, in 8th grade i got put in the honors class. Like 60% of the class was a bunch of Asian kids of parents who were 1st gen immigrants.

The school can only do so much to inspire kids to get an education. That shit starts way earlier in life, usually with parents making it a priority for kids to focus on education. There's parents that if you bring home a C, you might get your ass whopped and you won't be watching TV for a week. There's parents who if you skip school and they get the call, there's hell to pay when they get home. A steady died of this type of reinforcements build patterns which eventually formulates a kids character.

Yeah but culture doesn't come from nowhere. When it's not clear that education provides a better life people do not seek education, and that's the same when parents don't see it as well as the kids. When the parents grew up in those areas and didn't have access, and the kids have similar access, it continues the culture.

Culture and parenting styles don't come from nowhere, they're influenced by the material circumstances the parents and kids were raised in.

If you're talking to an individual parent you can say "you need to reinforce this stuff at home", but when there isn't as much opportunity expect it to be dismissed by more parents than the groups that have more opportunity.