If you don't have SWAT, there's no swatting. Part of the problem here is catching the swatters, but the other part of the problem is "don't respond with an attack force for something that in normal countries just has regular police show up to figure out what's even going on".
Most swattings aren't the actual swat team but the police. A lot of streamers don't go to deep into it to not draw attention to it, but both ludwig and summits swattings were just cops.
Sometimes the cop does pull a gun, but it's honestly why this should be attempted murder. How do you blame the cop for pulling the gun on someone who was reported to already have killed 4 people and said they were going to kill another. The alternative is basically ignoring all threats pretending they're fake, putting the cops lives in danger in a real situation.
Which is even worse. Regular police officers with a high school diploma and a few weeks worth of training (if even that) showing up at your door with military surplus equipment wanting to play hero.
In Greece it is 3 years of studies to become a patrol police officer. To be a ranking officer it is 4 years and counts as a bachelor. There is also a 2 year special force which supposedly catches up to the same standard, that's a different discussion.
And all that to get on the street without a gun. To get a gun you need another half to one year of on the street training.
But the problem is the gun ho culture. Here are some on the news examples.
a) there is an armed robbery with an ak-47: US go in and start a gun fight, EU/Greece: tell everyone to let the robbers go and note the license plate, catching them a few hours later with no shots fired;
b) person wants to commit suicide by cop, everyone else has left the building: U.S. cops rush in blind, get shot and kill the guy; Greece: there is nothing really equivalent, cops just try to get a psychologist and stay away;
And if the cops shoot someone the public disagrees with, expect weeks of lynching and rioting.
c) mental I'll person with a gun: U.S.: full escalation and long gunfight; Greece: in front of the parliament: chat de-escalation no shot fired by anyone.
Comments are yours.
P.S. (And gun ownership has nothing to do with it. Where I am from there is practically WWII weaponry -- minus the tanks -- everywhere. People learn to shoot really young and keep it up.)
Your impression of policing in the USA is a caricature of reality. B) and C) are particularly offensive to make as unsupported claims. Policing in the USA is handled at a state level, and the policing product varies widely between localities.
Bad policing in the USA gets attention from around the world. Good policing in the USA gets none. Your comments betray a deep ignorance of policing challenges in the USA.
As a word of advice, commenting on domestic political issues of foreign nations often causes one to appear quite foolish, due to a lack of understanding the constituent factors.
US resident here. Policing in the US does vary by municipality, which is part of the problem.
Regardless, policing in the US is broken. I live in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation and our police still kill people with disturbing frequency.
> That's an odd take. What would a college degree bring to the table for a regular beat cop/patrolman?
Cops are expected to be able to descalate situations, identify suspicious situations, in theory behave in accordancd with the rule of law and limitations on police force, and much more. These all seem like things that could be in a degree program.
Okay, now replace “police” with “doctor” or “lawyer”. In a job that is mostly theory, having theoretical study is important. Because otherwise lives are ruined. It also helps to filter deadbeats who just want to abuse the system, which is unfortunately a non-zero percentage of police.
I’m not saying we need 10+ years of study, but at least a bachelors focused on civics and humane treatment + a psych evaluation would do wonders to clearing out abusers.
Being a painter/woodworker/upholsterer is way less theoretical than being a street cop.
But if you hire an untrained one, or one that only learned on the job, you'll have a way, way worse end result than if you hire a formed one (or it will take trice the time and double the materials, if I listen to my father's stories). Two years is enough for low-level workers, i'd guess 3 to 4 should do the work for the police (considering it's 6 to 8 years and a masterwork for compagnons, pro woodworkers/upholsterers would still be better trained than police).
Perhaps not a degree, but definitely enough study to make it harder to get in.
Cops in pretty much any developed country go through one to four years of training. Most give trainees extra points for related studies, like law or criminology. South Korea, for example, has a police university.
Then you have places like the US, where training plus probation time is, on average, less than a year.
I’m not saying that it would make US police necessarily better, but it is clear that they need better, harder, and more comprehensive training, given the current state of affairs.
My main gripe is that over the last 40 years we have worked hard to force people to get college degrees even for work were on the job training produce more competent individuals.
I don't know about others professions a lot since I only met a US woodworkers/carpenter, but I'm pretty sure others would be a bit ashamed comparing an out-of school French/Swiss compagnon to any woodworker with less than 30 years of experience. The one I met was ashamed that an formed upholsterer was more precise and knew more about angles than him, despite him being 24 years older (and at that time, my father wasn't working in construction at all).
In fact, considering the number of 'X-doing American react to X in Europe' video, you might find one showing exactly how your carpenters aren't that good (or at least, those working in WV/Ohio, the US is a big country).
Is a degree necessary? Maybe not. But if you’re going to require 2-4 years of formal training, it may as well result in a degree.
Fact is policing in the 21st century is 1/3 social worker, 1/3 law enforcement, and 1/3 procedural red-tape (give or take). It takes a lot of training to do all three effectively. And we, as a nation, don’t require a whole heck of a lot of training.
> What would a college degree bring to the table for a regular beat cop/patrolman?
Because Reasons, it's become expected that anyone capable of getting a college degree will get one. Which in turn means that not having one gets used as a signal of not being able to get one.
The push to stop listing a degree in job postings that don't actually use one is partly intended to correct this.
For one it would prove that they have at least -some- self control and self discipline. Also the military basically keeps 19 year olds in tight reign with an clean line of command and a lot of training to do what you're told with relatively very rare combat situtations and when they get in those situations they are surrounded by others doing exactly the same thing, rather than alone (or at most a partner) in a community that hates cops.
> Regular police officers with a high school diploma and a few weeks worth of training
Meanwhile, the UK is moving to a model that requires the equivalent of a three-year undergraduate in policing[0]. Also the po-po there generally don't have guns.
For 'Basic Bobby' it reads more like a three year trade apprenticeship:
You can choose to undertake a three-year Level 6 degree apprenticeship, which involves both on and off-the-job training. As with other apprenticeships, you'll earn while you learn and upon successful completion of the programme, you'll have finished your probation as a police constable and will have achieved the BSc Professional Policing Practice.
Undergrad degrees don't have on the job training + probationary.
Looks appopriate though.
Basic Constable here is two years - six month coursework, 18 month probie.
Sure .. but typically for centuries in commonwealth countries undergrad university degrees don't include paid on the job training.
Sure, medical degrees include time in hospitals after the basics are completed, etc .. all that aside this really does read like a (good) trade apprenticeship program - time split between course work and supervised practice, which I agree with.
But a Bachelor of Science equivilent undergrad degree?
Apparently technically yes .. but that does seem a stretch.
And lots of podunk towns also have officers who live in the community, hang out with you and your family at the Saturday Fish Fry, and know that when some new neighbors from the city call 911 because they see me crossing the road at 0200 in full camouflage it’s probably just Rusty out huntin’ yotes. There are always one-offs, for sure, but most country cops are good folks who usually give the town drunk a ride home and will probably just give you a warning the first you decide to act like an idiot.
Easy to say but if you’re actually being held hostage or someone is threatening to murder you you won’t want a couple of cops with billy clubs and mental health assessments to show up. Swat teams need to be better at assessing which events are swatting attempts vs the real thing. We also need to do a better job of finding the swatters and sending them to jail.
Ah yes, that thing that is super duper common in normal countries. Hostage situations. Can't order a coffee without someone being taken hostage.
If only there was some way to make sure people didn't just have access to the weapons they need to successfully perpetrate a hostage situation... almost as if the glorification of weapons and the military is at the core of this eh?
If only there was one step further that this could be taken. Like making economic conditions for people so that they wouldn't even want to do hostage situations or robberies in the first place. If only there was such a model where we could see that happening...
Why? Not even the US calls SWAT for robberies, that would be truly idiotic. You call your insurance office so the you can try to fight your way through the people that are trying to prevent you from filling out all the paperwork necessary to get your coverage. Very different fight.
I've abstracted the problem a bit and traveled up the causal chain so I think this confused people. I'm getting at something more fundamental. Ask yourself why there are more violent crimes and theft in poorer neighborhoods/poorer countries than in rich neighborhoods/rich countries. Is it because the genetic makeup of people (often referring to skin pigmentation, but not exclusively) or is it because opportunity costs? If you're even lower middle class it usually is a high risk low reward situation to steal or perform violent actions. That's why the best thing you can do for public safety is actually to create a wealth/living standard floor.
It helps to play the "why" game and physically draw your connections (especially since you want to travel down certain paths after you have have gotten to them and there's going to be a lot to keep track of). Certainly removing guns can be one part of the solution, but it clearly isn't the only factor contributing to "people getting shot" and is really a lazy way of trying to solve the problem by presenting this as the one and only way to resolve it. Complex problems require understanding the whole chain (or a good portion of) to resolve and the over simplification just causes us to fight and continue our 30 years of debate that has not deviated or grown despite the problem having.
Do hostage takers usually murder their only leverage as soon as a cop car pulls up? Certainly if someone has broken into my house trying to murder me, I'd be thrilled with two armed regular old officers showing up at my door to investigate the situation.
I'm sure there are situations where a swat team is genuinely needed, but I'm also sure those cases make up an extremely small percentage of the times they're actually used. In any case, if police are called out to an innocent person's house and they kill the innocent people there it shows pure incompetence on the part of the officers involved. A little restraint and a lot more training would probably go a long way to preventing tragedy.
The specific thing that makes swatting a useful harassment tactic is that SWAT teams don't handle situations with subtlety and deftness. The sort of police who someone could use to harass me with a false report are the exact sort of police I wouldn't want around if I was being held hostage.
the "blue" are too often unworthy of being backed, these days.
the number of stories that I read per day about bad police officers is insane.
there are too many people in law enforcement positions because they want authority and power over others.
lately I find myself believing that anyone who desires to be in law enforcement should be forbidden from ever having authority over anyone, in any form.
If you’re not asking as a gotcha, “good police” stories are a dime a dozen. You can routinely catch them on the evening news, and they frequently rise to national news as well.
Practically no other profession gets such exceedingly positive and prolific press for doing the most charitable version of their job description. You never see stories like “trash collector relieves neighborhood of unwanted refuse without crushing anyone in the compactor”, even though their job is more dangerous and much less controversially beneficial to society.
The reason there’s even an appetite for “stories about good police officers” is specifically as a counterpoint to the continuous story of cops behaving badly, either by their direct action or pointed inaction, or by their collective activity to protect other cops from scrutiny when they directly do harm.
If cops want a better rep, they could be more deserving by not doing bad things and protecting other cops who do the same. If they don’t want to do that professionally (understandably! actually good cops are afraid of retaliation, or become afraid when they exercise their principles and find out what the consequences entail), they are always welcome to leave the profession.
Admittedly there should be a better support system for cops who want to change careers for these reasons. But there isn’t a lot of demand for that so
> Do you ever read stories about good police officers?
I could do 10 really nice things a day for you all week long, but if on Saturday I rape your whole family you're not going be happy with me. This isn't about keeping score, it's about making sure that things that should never happen don't, and that when things do go wrong the police are held accountable for their actions, and meaningful steps are taken to prevent situations like that from happening again. Cops don't get to save up enough "nice points" that they still get our support after they murder one of us and get away with it again, and again, and again.
Once the problems that allow the abuses by police to persist start to be addressed trust between the police and the people they've been abusing will improve, but until that happens, the "good cops" who are sitting in a barrel full of rotten apples will just have be patient with us when we're embittered and skeptical after seeing example after example, week after week, of what the "bad cops" have been doing.
I get the point that you're making: that there is a perception bias. You're absolutely right that there is. But also consider the old clique "a rotten apple spoils the barrel." The takes here would probably be a lot different if there was good evidence that these "bad apples" are being removed or adequately punished. I don't have a problem with a policy of paid leave during an investigation. Investigations need to happen and removing them would be going too far in the other direction. BUT we frequently see these people stay on their jobs, be let go and join another neighboring force, or at best be let go. That's a big issue. Yes, we should believe that police have to act quickly and make quick judgements BUT they are supposed to be trained for exactly that kind of thing. They shouldn't be held to the same standard as an average citizen because they aren't. They are a trained expert and thus should be held to a _higher_ standard. People have every right to feel like the system is corrupt, there's tons of evidence that it is. I mean just look how easy it is to become someone who has some of the most power that a normal citizen can expect. Compare that to other countries. I'd say it is one of the many issues.
We can both have a perception bias AND have the system be corrupt. I'm pretty confident that this is the situation we're on. If you want to get nuanced, let's. But comments like these are swinging too far in the opposite direction, hand waving away objectively terrible things. If it is bad, it is bad. Doesn't matter if 1% of officers or 100%, the incidents are still bad and should be dealt with accordingly.
