Tesla is actually a battery and electric car company that makes environmentally friendly cars and grid storage, and is probably towards the top of the list for companies who have reduced CO2 output in the world.
If it comes down to it, I would prefer an officer die compared to an innocent civilian mistakenly die because a cop was scared or already had their finger on the trigger. Their job is to serve the public, accepting some level of risks is part of this.
"About as risky as low paid delivery work" doesn't seem unreasonably high to me basically. Most cops die in car crashes, not being shot by potential suspects as it stands.
More police are shot and killed every year than people who were accidentally shot by police. Imagine if they didn't approach every high-risk situation with guns drawn. There would be orders of magnitude more officers killed.
This is not correct. to the best of my memory, no year since the 90s has had more than 100 or 200 total officer fatalities in the line of duty. Police routinely kill 3 people a day.
it's a pretty high bar to say that all three people the police kill every day were warranted.
most line of duty deaths involve not wearing a seatbelt.
This is where I think you're wrong. The vast, vast majority of people killed by police are warranted. People routinely threaten officers' lives with guns, and get killed for it. It's unfortunate, but it happens. People aren't just getting shot by police for no reason regularly.
Most police in the US don't overreact to the presence of a weapon during traffic stops or pther routine interactions. Many states could have around 10% of people carrying a gun, making armed interactions quite common.
Yes, firearms themselves present a clear and present danger by themselves. I'm sure once you make laws to control them, the firearms learn to stop being dangerous.
Why does this always have to be binary when any amount of gun control is suggested? It's simple math: if me didn't manufacture so many guns and didn't make them so readily available then there will inherently be less danger... this isn't even debatable!
That is obviously true... but also a fairy tale hypothetical, and we are in the real world. So the question is, what's the solution, right now? Not 200 years ago.
A fairy tale? The UK, Australia, and Brazil all have something to say about that claim. In developed countries, the United States is an extreme outlier so why pretend this is a completely unapproachable problem?
Our constitution itself gives us a blueprint because it states, in no uncertain terms, a "well-regulated militia"; not "each individual citizen".
You know, the human beings eligible to join the previously mentioned militia. The idea wasn't "everyone has the right to openly carry", the way it has been perverted recently, it was that you were individually responsible for the acquisition and maintenance of your own armaments. The militia act of 1792 was passed almost immediately after the second amendment was ratified, codifying what I just claimed.
That's the fourth amendment, not the second, so it's quite the leap to go from "I have the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures" to "I have the right to personally bear arms against the government to protect my property.".
And yes, I'm absolutely certain. Go ahead and test your theory against the American government and I'll wait to see you on the news.
Not the OP, but if I had to guess, they probably imagine that it means the nation as a whole, embodied by its government. You know, as in “The People’s Republic of North Korea.”
(If anyone wants to alter the 2nd so it’s more in line with their views, there’s a clear legal path. Pass an Amendment or call a Constitutional convention.)
The UK, Australia, and Brazil have significantly less firearms (which makes gun control a million times easier), and are not constitutionally granted the right to bear them (which makes gun control unconstitutional). If you go ahead start a new country with no guns and implement strict gun control, sure, it would probably have less gun deaths, but that's irrelevant to the American policy debate. Criminals in America will have ridiculously easy access to guns for a long time, and further restrictions on ownership will only decrease law-abiding gun-ownership rates.
Yes and in the meantime, respond with all available resources?
(pretending my parents, wife, children are police officers and posting from that perspective, but do not like taste of boot nor Flock - just thinking logical on the ground procedure accounting for broken larger system)
Try pretending your wife and children are in a car being pulled over for a drug inspection and think from that perspective. Or to have their papers checked to make sure they're not illegal aliens, whichever you prefer.
Great point, not fair for them to need a lifetime of therapy. So there’s a happy medium.
I don’t know why the first thing that comes to mind is calling in for backup and having a cop in a mascot costume get out, with body armor and a completely concealed weapon at the ready underneath. They cheerfully chat up the adult driver, say hi to the kid & give a sticker, and once they assess it’s safe they can move onto the next call while the uniformed officer comes to discuss the situation. Doesn’t help the adult much though I guess, we’d know about the concealed weapon. … btw maybe sending a drone or a robot actually came to mind first, but those solutions are uncomfortable - OK w/a million caveats maybe
(Instead of posting something so stupid I could’ve left it at I hope there’s a happy medium!)
For successful policing*. Which everyone should be for.
edit: Every single thing you guys have replied with are policy/law debates, not enforcement debates. I disagree with many laws on the books today. I want the laws changed, not selective/arbitrary enforcement of them.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A fundamental tenet of the US Constitution is that policing should be hard, lest average citizens lose their rights.
While I merely quoted the text of the Forth Amendment, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth are also arguably limits on policing power, making fully half the original ten amendments about limiting policing.
Unless we change the law, selective enforcement is the default. Courts have found again and again that cops have effectively no responsibility to even try to do their job. They can enforce what they want, and ignore what they don't.
So the question isn't: "Should we take away the tools these cops use to serve the public?" but "Should we give even more powerful surveillance tools to a group of unaccountable thugs who routinely abuse what they already have?"
When I was younger, in the summer, when I had a (very dark) tan and worked a night job which involved my driving around at odd hours I would get pulled over once or twice each summer for pretty flimsy reasons which equated to me matching the profile of the sort of person the police officer in question felt should be stopped/questioned.
It should be a quick bit of data work for records to be made of such stops based on duty logs (sans personally identifying information) and compare it to actual arrest/conviction rates to verify that at a minimum the perception of the police match reality. If they don't, then the local community should exert a suitable oversight to adjust police procedure.
The arrest/conviction generally follow the pulled over stopped rates. It's pretty hard to arrest/convict people you aren't stopping. These types of biases and stereo types are often pervasive within certain groups of people, including law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and often the subset of the local community in power. If you've ever been to court (even traffic court) you'll find the word of the officer is given tremendous weight, while the word of the defendant is almost totally marginalized (no matter what your race). Even though you are "presumed innocent", the defendant has a natural incentive to lie and the officer presumably doesn't.
To top that off there is almost no "suitable oversight" of any police departments in the US of any kind, let alone by the community.
There really are no simple solutions to this, even places not plagued by bigotry and racism have major structural power problems for the average citizen.
I didn't say this was a solution or that the problem has a simple solution, but pretty much any solution needs to start with community involvement and community oversight seems a useful component to consider.
I'm not for “successful policing”: the term is way too ambiguous and I know that many people would have definitions in mind that I would find repugnant.
Should they? There's lots of things that are currently crimes that I don't believe should be crimes, so I have no reason to support policing in at least those cases.
The problem with rats' nests of infrastructure is that it is effectively impossible to determine what wires are structurally load-bearing in unexpected ways, and there's literally nobody in a position of authority that would be even remotely trusted by a super-majority to construct a suitable replacement system from whole cloth.
Virtually everyone is, including those who oversimplify and go too far with words like "abolish". The problem we have right now is that "successful policing" is currently defined in such a way that there's almost zero accountability for those who enforce the law.
With the so-called justice system the US has got -- which is a mixture of inane proceduralism with senseless brutality -- I'm very much not for "successful policing." I would be, as I think that every person in the abstract would be, if there were comprehensive justice reform and tort reform.
Yeah, so you fit in exactly the category I described. Assuming a better system then almost no one would argue against it, but our system is so tragically flawed that many conclude we don't need a justice system at all.
Policing is enforcement of law, which inherently lags/fails to reflect reality. "100% Successful Policing" would have even larger swaths of the population in prison for use of controlled substances, which includes you if you've ever even TRIED smoking weed.
Sure, if anyone could agree on a definition of success. Police forces don't even obey legislative bodies where their definition of success and the public's definition of success differs.
Things have drifted since Robert Peel defined successful policing as "Whether the police are effective is not measured on the number of arrests, but on the lack of crime". Civil forfeiture is a good example that would horrify him.
His insistence that "The police are the public and the public are the police" doesn't really hold up in many countries anymore.
Why should I be in favor of 100% successful policing? I don't accept the premise that all de facto law should be in line with de jure law. That sort of society is unprecedented
The one official statement I have ever seen on that was when a new Base Commander was being interviewed and was asked, "Will there be a quota on the number of speeding tickets issued by the Security Police on base?" and his response was, "Absolutely, and it will be 100% --- I expect all instances of speeding and other traffic violations which endanger public safety to caught and ticketed --- such disregard of regulations and safety is incompatible with the standards of the Air Force."
Perfekt enforcement never existed and our current laws were written for a reality where that was an impossibility. Not considering second order effects is reckless IMHO.
If policing was really "successful" there will not be a single person not charged with some crime. So fuck that. There has to be a balance. Lots of laws serve anything but "the people"
“Sir, we are coming by today because we are concerned you are insufficiently supportive of our public servants in uniform. It has come to our attention that you have been disparaging some members of our law enforcement divisions to groups as large as 100 people! This is part of our new thought policing initiatives, we need everyone to support our policing efforts!”
“Yes, I work for Flock Online. We only index statements posted at publicly accessible URLs, which in principle anyone can see. We are able to profile every person at scale for a more effective community policing database. This new thought policing initiative is being carried out as a public-private partnership with the full support of your county’s representatives, as a way to preserve our community’s harmony and enhance social cohesion.”
“Please don’t be alarmed, the AI flagged you but I assure you, this is a real human in the loop wanting to talk to you about your comments. I am here because we know you’d be home around this time. Can you please come down to the station with us?”
If your notion of good/bad policing is predicated on perfect policy, your notion of good/bad policing does not survive contact with the real world.
I expect this argument is actually a poison pill for some anarchist or libertarian fantasy of “if the laws fit onto a single sheet of paper all these problems would just go away”.
I think the police should especially have guns drawn if they are pulling over a car owned by a murder suspect. It is reasonable enough to assume the driver is the suspect. If they PID the driver as not the suspect, holster up, no problem. Police always have guns drawn for any felony stop as an officer safety precaution, no reason to not when you have a high risk suspect.
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