Originally
posted by
mrford:
There are over a million cops in the US. If you take a sample size of 1,000,000 persons from anywhere in the world, you are going to get some bad apples, and some really bad apples. Yes, there is a selection process and what not but the funding isn't really there for more thorough selective and training. It is fairly hard, and really expensive, to train every officer to react in a positive manner more times than not in a perceived life and death situation.
Let me put it this way. If there were even as many as 1 unjustified cop killing a day, it would still be less than 0.037% of the police force fluffing up in a given year. I agree one is too many, but we have to be realistic here. I see a lot of complaining, and no legit suggestions on solutions. You all just seem to like to be offended.
This being said, play stupid games get stupid prizes. Do not get into a scuffle with a cop and then run away. Most cops arnt going to kill you for it, but you never know apparently.
You're absolutely right. It's easy for people to start distrusting police officers when we hear of several big cases in the last year that were questionable. It's still a tremendously small portion of police officers.
And it pains me to say this, but I do think KoH is right (at least in his basic point) that the U.S. has really good police officers for the most part.
Preventing this type of incident is nearly impossible. The body cameras might be a great step, or maybe they wouldn't be (I think there would have to be a lot of limits put on when those would be reviewed because otherwise it'd be ridiculous how much additional cost would be involved having IA guys just watching hours and hours of irrelevant footage). But I think the thing that is really discouraging for most people is that after the event happens, people want to see actual justice, not a pseudo investigation that overwhelmingly always finds the officer was not at fault. Cops need to be given benefit of the doubt. They have to know that society has their backs. But they also have to be held to a standard where if they do many a questionable call, the situation is adjudicated.