Thursday, May 20, 2021

What’s broken about policing in America? - Vox

"…So the defenders will say that the academy is stress-testing for this. If you can't keep your cool when an instructor is screaming insults at you and ordering you to get down and do pushups, then how are you going to keep your cool when you're on the street and 50 people are standing around in a circle when you're doing something perfectly legitimate and lawful and spitting at you and calling you names? This is how we make sure you can keep your cool then. 

I get that argument in the abstract, but I don't think it tends to work terribly well. I worry that many recruits take away the opposite lesson. The lesson that they take away from the police academy is that it's okay for powerful people to yell at people with less power. It's okay for people with power to demand and expect instant obedience rather than questions from those with less power, and it's okay to punish disobedience with physical pain. Those are not lessons that we should want police officers to be carrying with them in their interactions with the community…"


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