Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Tue Apr 13, 2021 5:43 pm
Look, I know my last post was flippant, but there's no getting around the fact that black people are overwhelmingly the victims of these kinds of police misconduct, nor that they occur within an institutionally racist "justice" system.
You can train people as much as you like. In most of these cases it turns out the cops weren't following their training anyway. It happens because of racism, not because cops don't know how to not mace somebody in the face or how to not shoot them or how to not kneel on their neck.
I don't think anyone is claiming that USian police aren't racist. I'm certainly not. But the killing of Duante Wright has highlighted that the absolute bobbins training that the cops get is a contributory factor. You combine racism with bad training in your policing you are going to kill black people and other POC.
In fact, it is probable that the way USian police are trained is a cause of their racism (ETA: not the only one). For example here's some bits from the article I posted above.
It opens:
Until Earl McGhee was hired in 2018, Dodge County, Wisconsin, had never had a Black sheriff’s deputy, so when the county sent him to a police academy at a local technical college, McGhee wasn’t all that surprised to be the only Black cadet in the class.
But a few weeks into the course, McGhee was stunned when the instructor used the N-word during a lecture. “Out of nowhere he looks me in the eyes and points his index finger directly at me” while uttering the slur, McGhee wrote in a statement to the school, the Madison Area Technical College, shortly after the Jan. 25, 2019, incident. “The entire class was looking at me.”
The instructor apologized the next day, but only after McGhee spoke up in class and told him how offensive it was to hear that word coming from his teacher. Only two of the 24 classmates later said they’d had a problem with what happened.
The instructor later acknowledged during a school investigation that he used a variety of racist and sexist epithets in class, during discussions about some of the people and situations they may encounter on the job.
Another bit:
In Minnesota, which became the epicenter of protests about policing after the death in May of George Floyd, the majority of police officers pay their own way through training at a community or technical college. All of the officers present when Floyd was killed received their basic training from state community and technical colleges. (Minnesota is in the middle of a rulemaking audit that may change the way police are trained.) Officers currently being investigated for excessive use of force in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania also received their basic training at private universities and community and technical colleges.
Many programs at community and technical colleges are taught by retired cops who use a military-style teaching method that incorporates war stories from police work and warns recruits that they will face a choice on the streets: kill or be killed. That differs from the type of training that criminal-justice experts have called for, which emphasizes de-escalating confrontations, working with and listening to community members and teaching cadets to recognize signs of mental illness.
The old-school method can make it more difficult to attract women and candidates of color (like Earl McGhee) at a time when police departments, which remain disproportionately white and male, are under pressure to better reflect the communities they serve.