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College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive. Why waste money on them when we could instead give police better police train

College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive. Why waste money on them when we could instead give police better police training and resources?

bfeynman 3y ago
Very idealistic to think that money would be reallocated to give police better training and resources, unless you mean military grade equipment for responding to domestic disputes. One can dream though...
- coding123 3y ago
  Domestic Disputes in America very often involves guns now. So yeah it seems like if you were a copy and you were told to handle a bunch of yelling from an apartment upstairs in the US, you might want to go with at least a vest on, if not helmet.
- augment003 3y ago
  True, but it’s only idealistic because nobody is seriously talking about it. The two options seem to either be defund or militarize. If more people talk about sensible options regularly then they won’t seem like pipe dreams. In any case the point here is that college degrees clearly don’t serve as great police training.
  - amalcon 3y ago
    There are people seriously talking about it. E.g. the current President of the United States has been talking about better police training since his campaign, and has issued executive orders touching on it. It's just kind of boring, so it doesn't end up in the news and doesn't go anywhere with the legislature. (edit: I don't want to litigate whether POTUS's preferences for better training would actually improve things, I only want to point out he's been talking about it).
    - augment003 3y ago
      In that case, I guess I’m not being idealistic, just reasonable.
- redavni 3y ago
  Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer. I sure wouldn't want to show up to a couple fighting in a bad neighborhood without backup and guns because some suburbanite is squeamish about violence. Especially for like $50k a year or less.
  - smcin 3y ago
    > Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer. I don't see that the FBI stats support that claim, and even if, the rate is still comparatively low, and skews very heavily towards the US South (which is only 38% of the population, but has very high gun ownership and gun violence rates): Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking [0]. From the 2021 data ('FBI LEOKA') [1] for on-the-job police officer deaths reported by 7886 LE agencies: • 73 were Feloniously killed (only 7 total in responding to all disorders/disturbances (e.g., disorderly subjects, fights, domestic disturbances/violence)) - 61 of those 73 were killed by firearms - 44 of those 73 were in the South • plus 56 Accidental deaths (32 of which were crashes). (If we check individual case reports at [2], we can see how many of the 7 total responding to disorders/disturbances were Domestic.) • Assaults: [3] 43,649 officers assaulted in 2021 - 28.6% (12,463) occurred while officers responded to [all] disturbance calls - 35% sustained injuries - 49.5% occurred in the South And for 2022, FBI releases preliminary LEOKA statistics for 2022 to October [4]. The latest years for which I can easily find all the detailed LEOKA Tables are 1996..2019 [5] e.g. Table 24: "Circumstances encountered by victim officer upon arrival at the scene of the incident". [0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/workplace-fatalities-25-most-dangerous-jobs-america/1002500001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work... [1]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlights/crime-data-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty-statistics-for-2021 https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight... [2]: Comprehensive data tables about these events and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/ https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/ [3]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlights/crime-data-law-enforcement-officers-assaulted-in-2021 https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight... [4]: https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/fbi-releases-preliminary-leoka-statistics-for-2022-to-date-tGFpAwH9DMNje0cF/ https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/fbi-releases... [5]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-feloniously-killed https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-feloniou...
nawgz 3y ago
> College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive Sorry, but can we try to talk in facts? In Canada, since 2000, there have been 704 police-involved deaths [0]. Let's take a conservative population of 30M for Canada (which will inflate this stat) - then we get: 704 / 22 / 30M => 1 in 1 million Canadians die at the hands of police per year On the other hand, in the US, there were 1022 police shootings in 2022 alone [1]. 1022 / 331M => 3 in 1 million Americans are SHOT by police per year. There's already a >3x discrepancy while using only US police shootings vs all Canadian police-involved deaths, and I'm sure the police killed plenty of people with tasers, beatings, and negligence in the US in 2022 too. So, in general, I disagree with your claim that university education hasn't done anything to make Canadian police better than US police, and it's unlikely you'll change that opinion unless you bring some statistics into this conversation. [0]: https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/police-involved-deaths-canada-rise/ https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/police-involved-deaths-ca... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
- augment003 3y ago
  Erm, your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all. You’re just saying Canadian police shoot less people than American police, which nobody is disputing.
  - nawgz 3y ago
    > your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all What I'm saying is pretty obvious, but I'll spell it out for you. 1. Canadian and American cultures are extremely homogenous 2. Canadian and American police have few differences, but a critical one is the Canadian-only requirement of university degrees 3. With no other clearly-defined drivers of police culture differentiation across the border, we see that US police are probably 4-8x more lethal than Canadian police per capita So, since the police is clearly not about to properly train their people, let's not dismiss the value of a university degree as a filter, since it appears from a high level view that a university degree could serve to make a police officer 1/5th as likely to kill a citizen compared to a diploma. Will you propose a different reason why US police are so much deadlier, related to crime statistics or otherwise, or will you just continue to say "the police should train their people", not hold them to account for not training their people, and also excuse them for dropping educational requirements that served in lieu of that training?

College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive. Why waste money on them when we could instead give police better police training and resources?

bfeynman 3y ago

Very idealistic to think that money would be reallocated to give police better training and resources, unless you mean military grade equipment for responding to domestic disputes. One can dream though...

coding123 3y ago
Domestic Disputes in America very often involves guns now. So yeah it seems like if you were a copy and you were told to handle a bunch of yelling from an apartment upstairs in the US, you might want to go with at least a vest on, if not helmet.
augment003 3y ago
True, but it’s only idealistic because nobody is seriously talking about it. The two options seem to either be defund or militarize. If more people talk about sensible options regularly then they won’t seem like pipe dreams. In any case the point here is that college degrees clearly don’t serve as great police training.
- amalcon 3y ago
  There are people seriously talking about it. E.g. the current President of the United States has been talking about better police training since his campaign, and has issued executive orders touching on it. It's just kind of boring, so it doesn't end up in the news and doesn't go anywhere with the legislature. (edit: I don't want to litigate whether POTUS's preferences for better training would actually improve things, I only want to point out he's been talking about it).
  - augment003 3y ago
    In that case, I guess I’m not being idealistic, just reasonable.
redavni 3y ago
Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer. I sure wouldn't want to show up to a couple fighting in a bad neighborhood without backup and guns because some suburbanite is squeamish about violence. Especially for like $50k a year or less.
- smcin 3y ago
  > Domestic disputes are one of the most likely calls to result in an injury to or death of an officer. I don't see that the FBI stats support that claim, and even if, the rate is still comparatively low, and skews very heavily towards the US South (which is only 38% of the population, but has very high gun ownership and gun violence rates): Police officers' risk of on-the-job death in most years averages #14 .. #18, behind logging, fishing, farming, construction, heavy manufacturing, trucking [0]. From the 2021 data ('FBI LEOKA') [1] for on-the-job police officer deaths reported by 7886 LE agencies: • 73 were Feloniously killed (only 7 total in responding to all disorders/disturbances (e.g., disorderly subjects, fights, domestic disturbances/violence)) - 61 of those 73 were killed by firearms - 44 of those 73 were in the South • plus 56 Accidental deaths (32 of which were crashes). (If we check individual case reports at [2], we can see how many of the 7 total responding to disorders/disturbances were Domestic.) • Assaults: [3] 43,649 officers assaulted in 2021 - 28.6% (12,463) occurred while officers responded to [all] disturbance calls - 35% sustained injuries - 49.5% occurred in the South And for 2022, FBI releases preliminary LEOKA statistics for 2022 to October [4]. The latest years for which I can easily find all the detailed LEOKA Tables are 1996..2019 [5] e.g. Table 24: "Circumstances encountered by victim officer upon arrival at the scene of the incident". [0]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/workplace-fatalities-25-most-dangerous-jobs-america/1002500001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work... [1]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlights/crime-data-law-enforcement-officers-killed-in-the-line-of-duty-statistics-for-2021 https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight... [2]: Comprehensive data tables about these events and brief narratives describing the fatal attacks are available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) portion of the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/ https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/ [3]: https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlights/crime-data-law-enforcement-officers-assaulted-in-2021 https://leb.fbi.gov/bulletin-highlights/additional-highlight... [4]: https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/fbi-releases-preliminary-leoka-statistics-for-2022-to-date-tGFpAwH9DMNje0cF/ https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/fbi-releases... [5]: https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-feloniously-killed https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/officers-feloniou...

nawgz 3y ago

> College degrees don’t seem to have done anything to make the police less abusive Sorry, but can we try to talk in facts? In Canada, since 2000, there have been 704 police-involved deaths [0]. Let's take a conservative population of 30M for Canada (which will inflate this stat) - then we get: 704 / 22 / 30M => 1 in 1 million Canadians die at the hands of police per year On the other hand, in the US, there were 1022 police shootings in 2022 alone [1]. 1022 / 331M => 3 in 1 million Americans are SHOT by police per year. There's already a >3x discrepancy while using only US police shootings vs all Canadian police-involved deaths, and I'm sure the police killed plenty of people with tasers, beatings, and negligence in the US in 2022 too. So, in general, I disagree with your claim that university education hasn't done anything to make Canadian police better than US police, and it's unlikely you'll change that opinion unless you bring some statistics into this conversation. [0]: https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/police-involved-deaths-canada-rise/ https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/police-involved-deaths-ca... [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

augment003 3y ago
Erm, your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all. You’re just saying Canadian police shoot less people than American police, which nobody is disputing.
- nawgz 3y ago
  > your argument has nothing to do with college degrees at all What I'm saying is pretty obvious, but I'll spell it out for you. 1. Canadian and American cultures are extremely homogenous 2. Canadian and American police have few differences, but a critical one is the Canadian-only requirement of university degrees 3. With no other clearly-defined drivers of police culture differentiation across the border, we see that US police are probably 4-8x more lethal than Canadian police per capita So, since the police is clearly not about to properly train their people, let's not dismiss the value of a university degree as a filter, since it appears from a high level view that a university degree could serve to make a police officer 1/5th as likely to kill a citizen compared to a diploma. Will you propose a different reason why US police are so much deadlier, related to crime statistics or otherwise, or will you just continue to say "the police should train their people", not hold them to account for not training their people, and also excuse them for dropping educational requirements that served in lieu of that training?