Thursday, October 20, 2016

When policing is not done right we all suffer.

Image result for police training  imagesThe Field Negro education series continues.
 
The following  article was written by Luke Darby for GQ Magazine, and it's an interesting perspective of what is going on in police departments across the country. 
 
I have been saying this for awhile now, but law enforcement officers across the country need better training and a better understanding of the public they serve.
 
And if you think it's only black folks you would be wrong. Take a look at the case of Micah Jester 
 
Now to the article:
 
"Just under a month ago, something happened that seems to never happen in United States: a police officer shot an unarmed black man, and then was formally charged with first-degree manslaughter.
Terence Crutcher had been trying to get help with his car, broken down on a highway, when Officer Betty Jo Shelby shot him (as another officer tased him). She claimed that Crutcher was behaving suspiciously and failed to follow orders. While police didn’t find a gun on him or in the car, they did find a vial of PCP, and as of last week we know that toxicology reports say Crutcher had the drug in his system. Shelby’s attorney is claiming that the presence of PCP is the first bit of evidence that will prove that Shelby’s actions were justified.
The entire case is once again raising questions about drug laws, police training, and the relationship between cops and minority communities. Raeford Davis, who works with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a nonprofit group of judges and law enforcement agents, has been an outspoken advocate against the war on drugs and over-policing across the country. Davis served as a cop in South Carolina until 2006, and he was kind enough to talk to GQ about the epidemic. The following interview took place over two separate conversations and has been edited.

GQ: We’re in the middle of a huge national discussion right now about the relationship between police and minority communities. You’ve said elsewhere that, in your experience, cops aren’t individually racist, but they are actors in a racist system. Can you explain what that means?
Raeford Davis: That’s part of the disconnect, and that’s why you see law enforcement officers get so upset when they’re called out as just a bunch of racists. In North Charleston we had black leadership in my department, and Charlotte has a black chief. These guys would not tolerate overt racism. They work very hard to maintain a good rapport with the black community and they would get really upset when you did things to mess it up. However, they kind of operate under the same illusions. They put their murder and robbery rates over a map of the city and that’s mostly in poor and minority neighborhoods, and they say, “That’s why we’re there, it has nothing to do with race.” But we know that from the outset drug enforcement was just a covert continuation of Jim Crow-type oppression laws. The laws apply to everyone in theory, but we know they were used to target minority communities. Those efforts have a destabilizing effect on the community, and destabilized communities have more crime, then you have more police presence and activity, and that further destabilizes the community. No additional racism from individual officers is necessary.
Can you describe your training a bit?
In South Carolina they have a central police academy that everyone goes to. Training was eight weeks when I attended, and it has now been extended to 12 weeks. That short time frame by its nature ensures training will be very basic and focused on worst-case scenarios. The overarching theme when interacting with "subjects" is always maintain control no matter what. A great deal of your time is then spent training in physical control methods, use of force: how to shoot, how to strike, how to take a person down, and how to handcuff them in order to maintain that control.
And what about firearm training? Was there much concern about accidental discharge?
I was terrified that I would accidentally shoot myself or someone else. That weighed on my mind a lot. There’s a lot of emphasis on safety and procedure, and we spent time with a “firearms training simulator.” [Ed. note: Here is an example.] You interact with a video screen in shoot/don't shoot scenarios where the instructor can control the outcome the based on your responses. He can even fire ping pong balls at you to replicate being shot at. The simulators are great but they’re training just to shoot or not. I had to ask the instructor when it would be okay to not arrest someone or even press the situation because you think it might go bad for you or you were concerned about harming the person. My instructor said yes, and told me about a time when he pulled over a group of guys on a road and he was by himself and had no back-up. But I had to ask about that—it wasn’t actually covered.
 
When you first became a police officer, what sort of training did you get for de-escalating a potentially violent encounter?
 
 
Very little. My academy manual was approximately 1,500 pages long. Of that, maybe 10-20 pages cover effective communication and verbal de-escalation techniques. It wasn’t really until you got out with your field training officer that they would say, “Look you’ve got to talk to people and settle things without getting worked up.” In a lot of ways, when you got on the street you were unlearning a lot of thee worst case scenario training that you learned at the academy.
 
Were there any mechanisms in place to weed out people who weren’t suited for the job?
Most people wash out based on academic issues and obvious physical issues, like a bad knee, that would prevent them from performing their duties than anything else. As far as spotting over-aggressive or mentally unstable red flags, no, I didn’t see where that would come up and it certainly didn’t with my group. How people washed out from the academy beyond that would be off-campus problems, like getting a DUI or, as happened to one guy, getting into a road rage incident and flashing his badge and gun at people. But it’s the barrel that’s bad, regardless of the apples.
So, what are some of the things you learned about how to behave in those worst case scenarios?
We have this “use of force” continuum. It changes depending on the agency, but there’s a basic format. You can increase your level of response based on the reaction of the individual. You start off with your mere presence, then you have verbal commands, and if that doesn’t work you can put your hands on someone. If they pull back, then you can maybe use a pressure point technique. If they take a swing at you, then you can escalate to a baton. The main takeaway I got from my training concerning individuals armed with a knife or similar weapon was the "21 foot rule." Basically if you confront anyone with a knife and they get within 21 feet, you can shoot them.
Which means that if an officer wanted to, they could in theory escalate a routine traffic stop into a physical confrontation?
The number one concern is: are you lawfully present? Even if that’s an expired license plate on a car, you can say, “Yes, I’m lawfully present,” and from there you can work that use of force continuum up. And some officers manipulate it. While on its face the legal training appears to be a litany of what police can't do in order to respect subject rights, the result is officers know more about hundreds of confusing laws that you don’t know about, and it gives them the ability to reverse-engineer them to justify the virtually unlimited force and violence you see today. They can almost guarantee a suspect’s non-compliance. That’s what you see in a lot of these resisting arrest charges, an officer can subtly manipulate by doing something like giving people conflicting demands: “Put your hands up, don’t move,” for example. No matter what they do after that, you can say they didn’t comply. Or they might panic, and then it’s resisting.
In this case then you’ve described how something like a routine traffic stop could escalate to a physical confrontation. But what incentive would an officer have to manipulate the situation like that?
A lot of it is unconscious because you’re doing what you’re trained to do, but you’re doing it poorly. We also base law enforcement activity on arrests, which is the opposite of what we should be doing. Success should be measured by the absence of crime, not number of arrests. If you manipulate people into getting an arrest, you look like you solved a problem." [More]
*Pic from youtube.com
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

58 comments:

Anonymous said...

We don't have much crime in my neighborhood other than car burglaries. I've never had personal contact with a police officer other than one speeding stop in my youth.

If I lived in a crime ridden, violent neighborhood I wouldn't be disrespectful of police officers. I would be grateful for them and tell them thank you every opportunity I had.

Yisheng = nigger said...

I've run into enough good cops to know they aren't all bad. It's the bad ones people like to pay attention and the media loves to give them that attention. Bad cops need to answer for their violence though.
I dream of a day when police are there to help citizens.

dinthebeast said...

Anon @11:25:
That's an attitude that seems to make sense from your position of never having lived there. Having lived for decades in poor, crime ridden neighborhoods, from my experience, the police are not your friends there, and mostly don't want to be. They mostly want to go home to their nice neighborhoods in outlying communities, and make their arrest quotas to keep the money coming to pay for those nice digs. If they talk to you at all, even if you are white like me, you have to be very careful not to look to them like work, because as soon as you do, the easiest thing for them to do is drive you down to Oakland City Jail and fill out some nice, safe, paperwork on you.
Maybe things are different elsewhere, but you don't get much more crime ridden than MLK way behind MacArthur BART at the height of the crack epidemic ('88 to '90) so there's that.

-Doug in Oakland

Anonymous said...

I'd like to hear Yisheng's comments on this post. And, just as soon as her fat ass gets done chowing down on the KFC and Cheetos and cookies, I'm sure we will.

Anonymous said...

@ Doug -

Why do you live in poor black neighborhoods? Are you some kind of bum on public assistance? Or do you just like blacks a lot?

Puerto Rican food sucks ass said...

I bet cops love and hate black neighborhoods. Love them because they'll get a chance to bust a young black male. Hate them because they are full of blacks.

dinthebeast said...

I'm a poor musician and those are the only neighborhoods I could afford. I live in a nicer one now. I worked low wage (mostly) day jobs to keep my bills paid for 31 years until I had a stroke, and until I recover enough to work again, I'm collecting social security disability. I was a line cook for about a decade, a delivery truck driver/appliance installer in the '90s until the store went out of business, and I managed a warehouse in the '00s until that place went out of business. I was a supervisor at an organic food delivery company when I had my stroke in '08. So no, I'm not a bum. I keep myself and a couple of other people afloat even with the limited resources I have, mostly because I learned how to live on very little money when I was poor for all of those years.

-Doug in Oakland

Matt said...

I would rather be poor and stupid than be Yisheng.

dinthebeast said...

I did want to say that Davis and LEAP are on the right track. Very little will improve in the relations between cops and the communities they serve as long as those cops are generally hated and feared by populations who have experience with the drug prohibition laws.
When most of the folks you know have been either busted themselves for drugs or have someone close to them incarcerated for them, you don't tend to like it when the cops show up. Cops, being people, can't really be expected to always do their best for people they know damn well hate and fear them.

-Doug in Oakland

Oregon Pride said...

What do you people want? Blacks are just more dangerous and more likely to commit crime and violence.

James Deplorable said...

"you don't get much more crime ridden than MLK"

Why is it that the name of St. Cibil Rites is synonymous with crime?

Limpbaugh said...

I know a couple of police officers. They live in the neighborhoods they police, low crime or high crime. Maybe that is just a Chicago thing. I know it was an issue here in the past. Or maybe my limited sampling is misleading. I don't know. I think I just assumed being close to their work was the determining factor.

Anonymous said...

yisheng's ass swallows a chair every time she sits down.

Anonymous said...

Doug must not be a very good musician.

anotherbozo said...

We have maybe 5 black friends in our lives, and one of them just reported that her cousin was shot and killed for DWB.

Never mind the odds, considering the number of black friends we have. A national problem just moved in and sat down next to us. It seems surreal.

I want to say "but this cousin was college-educated, upstanding, middle-class." Of course those qualifiers are irrelevant. Intellectually I know that, but emotionally I was unprepared. As if anyone could be, I guess.

May it never happen to you,is all I can say.

Yisheng = nigger said...

I hate to think what will happen to police/black relations if Trump is elected. They will probably worsen. Trump and his supporters hate black people.

dinthebeast said...

James: You missed the "at the height of the crack epidemic ('88 to '90) part. That old place is some expensive property right now.

-Doug in Oakland

James Deplorable said...

"That old place is some expensive property right now."

... and full of gays, artists and yuppies, almost all of them White.

F*ck you from DQAE said...

@11;38, do you give those cops you always "run" into a discount on "services"? Or does your pimp disallow that?

F*ck you from DQAE said...

@1:35, you ARE poor and stupid, you're just to poor and stupid to realize it!

DUMBASS!

F*ck you from DQAE said...

@1;56, what do you care, you're just a deplorable cracka pretending to care.

F*ck you from DQAE said...

@7:28, how would you know, real musicians don't play banjos local barn festivals.

F*ck you from DQAE said...

@7:27, and the smell of your ass makes anything you sit on dissolve like acid.

And how do you wash your ass anyway, your 12 inch arms certainly can't reach around your 4 foot wide body.

FUNKY ASS!!

James Deplorable said...

Ah, FNblog, FNblog... the pinnacle of Africoon-American wit, wisdom and refinement!

Anonymous said...

Yisheng sounds like the typical Hillary supporter.

Paul said...

Why do blacks never hold other blacks accountable for crime, violence, racism, homophobia, and sexism?

Go Pack Go said...

I thought Yisheng was supposed to be an adult. She sounds like a petulant child (I would bet anyone $1,000,000 that someone like lilac doesn't know what that even means).
Unless of course black people like Yisheng just naturally act like children.

Go Pack Go said...

Hell, I would even say MOST black people act like children, especially when white people don't suck their collective dicks just for being black.

Awesome Atheist said...

A lot of black people are Christians. So are a lot of cops. Maybe they can kill each other off.

dinthebeast said...

Nope, James, they haven't got around to gentrifying that block yet.

-Doug in Oakland

Anonymous said...

What instrument do you play?

PX

Anonymous said...

Another brilliant bit of wisdom from our resident genius.

dinthebeast said...

PX: Guitar, mostly, but I can also play bass pretty well. I have a few keyboards, but have never been interested in them enough to get proficient. These days I mostly write with computer programs like FL Studio and Ableton Live.

-Doug in Oakland

Duh said...

I guess the same reason whites don't.

No Pack No said...

And the whites here act like drooling morons.

James Dedumbass said...

Bwahahahahaha! Africoon-American. Wow did it take all 150 IQ points to think of that?
150 IQ bwahahahahahahahahahahshaha!

Yīshēng said...

@5:58, what I sound like is a smart Black BITCH responding to crackas and a rotten womb Black heffa librarian on a Black blog whose comments section is more about attacks on me, than real political commentary.

Now if you don't like it when I respond in kind, then I suggest you find another big, black d*ck you claim your people are so found of sucking on, and pacify yourself with it as best you can with it.

Just be sure to wear a condom, we don't want you spreading STDs like you normally do.

The Donald said...

And James and Pack sound like typical racist Trump supporters.

Anonymous said...

Looks like there are a lot of trailer parks missing their village idiots. Take James for example, he is so stupid he thought a quaterback was a refund.

Anonymous said...

James is so dumb he found the fountain of knowledge and instead of drinking he drown.

Anonymous said...

James is pretty retarded. I'm surprised he can even use a computer, unless someone else is turning it on for him and typing.

Oregon Pride said...

James is smarter than any black person here, as well as any black person I have ever met, whether in real life or online.

field negro said...

James, black folks like to play "the dozens". The Anons above are pretty good at it. :)

OP, for some reason I am guessing that the people of Oregon are not proud of you.

Anonymous said...

Yeah Doug, I'm the same way. Been playing guitar for a while and have a bass and keyboard that never get used. Actually my mom made me take one piano lesson to see if I would like it so I can find middle C.

PX

Anonymous said...

Sooooo, you've never met a blah person. Shocking.

Anonymous said...

James isn't smarter than a brain damaged toddler.
At least his fellow dumb assed racist think he's smart. So stay the fuck out of Oregon because obviously they are really really stupid.

James Deplorable said...

"James Dedumbass said... "

Another sterling example of wit, wisdom and refinement.

"Africoon-American. Wow did it take all 150 IQ points to think of that?"

Caught one.  Took you ten times as long to write that as it took me to hook you.

"And James and Pack sound like typical racist Trump supporters."

You're too kind.  After all, all White people are implicitly racist, right?  So why do you want to even live in a country with us again?  I'm sure you'll find millions happy to pay your way back to Africa where you can be yourselves again.

"James is smarter than any black person I have ever met, whether in real life or online. "

One of my favorite commenters says "You will meet seven dwarves in real life before you meet one Black person as smart as on TV."  I have met seven dwarves in real life.

Yīshēng said...

"I have met seven dwarves in real life".

So glad you finally met your Daddy, how did it go?

BTW, which one of the 7 is your Daddy, or has your mammy not figured that out yet?

Bawhahahahahaha!!

Damn, my jokes are getting GOOD! 😀

Yīshēng said...

^^^^^^ ROTFL!!!! 😉

Anonymous said...

James daddy is also his uncle. That's why he thinks he's smart, his momma told him he has such a big forehead because his brain is big but we all know it's due to incest. Keeping it in the family means something totally different in James' household.

Anonymous said...

150 IQ bwahahahahahahahaha!

field negro said...

Told u James. Quit before it's too late. You are way out of your lesgue. This is not Stormfront.

James Deplorable said...

The number of erroneous assumptions in one line...

1. That I care what you think (including how you score your games).

2. That I'm only, or even primarily, talking to you.

3. That I have any idea what Stormfront is like, or care.

Allowing you to put your coarseness, stupidity and hate on display here is educational for the White people who haven't had the misfortune of having to deal with it in person.  A lot will decide they never want to.  Prevention is easier than fixing, and the preference cascade against the lie of the blank slate is brought forward every time someone looks in and goes "ewwww".

Yīshēng said...

Given the mission of this site, I'd say that YOU dwarf daddy man, are the one that is course, stupid, and most certainly hateful.

No wonder you like the pu$$y grabbing man, you're just as delusional as he is, obviously believing that your so called Whiteness makes everything you say correct.

Anonymous said...

James proves the white race is vastly overrated. He is too dumb to figure out how to poor piss out of a boot with directions on it.

James Deplorable said...

(psst!  stupidonymous!  it's spelled "pour"!)

Over on SBPDL, someone had this observation:

"They are so dazzled by their own grandiose delusions and brainwashed by their own fictional self-importance they just don't get it."

Nailed it.

Yīshēng said...

Hot damn Jimmiy caught another spelling error!!!

But he's STILL a barely literate dumbass!!

James Deplorable said...

Just keep telling yourself that.

It'll keep you quiet until the soldiers show up to order you onto the bus that will eventually take you to Liberia, where your medical knowledge is needed so much more than it is in the United States of America.  Go, with my blessing.