Improving the 911 EMS system won't improve police response time in Oakland because Oakland, like most of the US, has an ongoing shortage of police officers. There isn't any easy way to make the job of a police officer more attractive.
Take the privilege to their own police away from them.
Take the city through bankruptcy.
Etc...
It's not some poor human who has to suffer due to that, it's lenders who the city defaults on, and who should have thought better.
The hatred directed at police officers certainly doesn't help.
The recent fury directed at the handful of police officers who did not enter this or that school with an active shooter comes to mind. People have the expectation that police officers are required to die for us. Imagine being told by someone who already hates you, that you are supposed to die for them.
It feels like we are awfully entitled when it comes to the police. We expect them to serve us with the highest integrity, kindness, & selflessness, while offering them mediocre pay, disgust, & hatred in exchange.
Perhaps it could also be at least partly related to the systemic and indiscriminate killing of people of color by police forces across the entire country.
I can't say I blame would-be "good cop" cadets deciding not to join the force to be associated with these acts; the willingness to protect bad cops by leadership seems, from the outside, to mean the entire system is rotten and impossible to change from within.
Well that's certainly the narrative that drives it. However for something to be systemic, it has to be happening regularly everywhere. The people who promote this narrative can only really point to a couple of unjustified office involved shootings (which are of course a tragedies, but are in no way 'systemic'), and in reality spend most of their time complaining about perfectly justified shootings as a scapegoat for all of the genuine problems in their communities.
In 2017, police killed 1,129 people. Were the vast majority of those "perfectly justified?" How about the vast majority of the 718 that were suspects in nonviolent offenses? Or the 147 that were unarmed? Are you sure? I'm not.
The reason "the narrative" exists, I think, is that there's a widespread perception that regardless of the circumstances of the shooting -- even if the evidence clearly shows the police shot an unarmed victim in the back multiple times, for instance -- the police tend to get off on the grounds that they "felt threatened." This contributes to a feeling that the police are held to a lesser standard than non-police suspects, rather than the same standard.
The vast majority absolutely are. There are some examples that are not, and whenever something even remotely questionable happens, the narrative pushers jump on it immediately. If you think the vast majority aren't, then go find some examples. You won't be able to come up with more than a couple.
It would be good if either of you could back up your claims.
People in minority communities around the U.S. have said for generations that the police abused them; I give that some serious credibility. Also, there is much more to abuse than killings; there are many reports on widespread abuses by police departments, such as Baltimore and New Orleans.
I will add that in at least some other countries police do their job and shoot hardly anyone; I think in Scotland it's on the order of one per decade.
Pick a year, note how many police shootings are listed there for that year, then generate 20 random numbers in the range [1, N] where N is the number of said shootings, and look at the corresponding killings. That should give some reasonable insights.
The claim that there is systemic racially motivated killings carried out by police is the claim that needs to be backed up. This is a claim that is not supported by facts. There is a small number of officer involved shootings that are found to be unjustified, and there are entire communities of people who will jump at the chance to report on them, so it’s not like they can slip under the radar on a massive scale. The crime rates in different countries have absolutely 0 bearing on whether office involved shootings in the US are justified. The occurrences of unjustified office involved shootings in the US don’t come even remotely close to anything that could be considered ‘systemic’, the whole narrative is an outright lie.
A lot of the anger directed at police in Oakland is well deserved due to the number of people they've needlessly killed without any real repercussions. There's other things coming to light showing even more corruption and that very little seems to be getting done about it.
