Ditkaless Wonders
Footballguy
You could be sure if you cared to. Find the number of police officers in the U.S. multiple that by the number of shifts they work and then again by a conservative number of citizen contacts per shift. Multiple that by a conservative number of citizens involved in each contact. That is your number of opportunities for abuses. Now, find the number of actual abuses. Time to use the two numbers to find the percentage.You say it's incredibly small; I'm not sure of that. But it doesn't matter so long as we pay attention to each incident and try to resolve it. I generally agree with the rest of what you wrote.It is an incredibly small percentage of individual officers treatment of some small percentage of minorities which represents individual ignorance which is generally in the process of being weeded out.Lol so ridiculous. You're like a mirror image of Butkis, just from the other side. He doesn't think there's any problem at all, while you see a police state.Arrest and prosecute the cops doing it and stop making excuses for them (like you have been by implying that the victim was to blame). That is the only way to begin to stop it. We live in a police state where we have slowly ceded our rights and given law enforcement the right to do almost anything to us with no accountability. It is ridiculous. My wife asked me if your rights mean anything when dealing with a police officer, and I told her that sadly they mean nothing during the incident/confrontantion itself, although they might later. But in our society we are so ruled by authority that has no check unless its excess is caught on video that trying to articulate or stand up for your rights is meaningless now until you are safely away from the cop.Kal El said:I'll pose this question to everyone: How do we put a stop to incidents like these? We can't fire all the police, because crooks would run amok, and training replacements takes time, and the law needs to be upheld to keep something resembling order. Perhaps training for police forces to curb improper behavior?
We don't live in anything close to a police state, and anybody who suggests we do really has no idea what a police state is really like, no offense. Our problem is not the police in general, it's the police's treatment of minorities which represents the last lingering residue of institutionalized racism. It's easy to fix so long as we acknowledge it and really try to fix it. But your nightmares of totalitarianism don't exist in reality.
That said, a single officer with a fouled up belief system generally works 200 shift per year and may have ten or more citizen encounters per shift involving multiple citizens. Very quickly the number of potential abuses mounts. Those officers are afforded due process rights under the constitution and under their bargained for civil service contracts. It is an arduous process to eliminate them from their Departments once hired and through their probationary periods. Still, it is essential that the abuses are addressed. One abuse of police authority is one too many, and unfortunately, though the abuses are statistically rare in general, there are enough encounters that some abuse is occurring somewhere nearly every hour of the day or night. Any one abuse indicts the integrity of the entire system and is wholly unacceptable. These include abuse which happen across the racial spectrum, though I would not argue that they are evenly distributed by racial demographics.
Having worked for two different Police Departments, one with a force of 600 and the other 700 I can tell you that less than 1% of the officers had a propensity for abuses. Of those they were far from uniformly abusive during their shifts, and in fact likely had negative encounters on only 1 to 3% of their shifts, and then not in every encounter during those shifts. What you have, generally is less than 1% being abusive les than 1% of the time. The training and weeding out of those who should not have power is pretty well done. The problem is that even though the % is extremely small it still represents a pattern of abuse, and when applied across large metro areas leads to some problem on a daily basis.
BTW, in my job I have had opportunity to view the I.A. and complaint stats from numerous Departments across the country and the numbers are generally consistent, though there are departments that deviate from the norm more than one standard deviation.
Overall policing is done very well. The problem is that this remains not good enough. It will never be good enough. Likely, also, it may never get much better as human endeavors always fall short of perfection.