this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago (13 children)

Unpopular opinion: Cop pay and training is inadequate. If you want professional cops, you need to hire professional people and train them professionally. The only people that apply to become officers are morons and the power hungry. People with integrity don't apply because the money is shit.

Any job that trades money for fraternity is a job that's garbage. And boy oh boy are cop houses frats.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I'm a combat veteran and the fact that cops aren't held to half the standards I was drives me nuts.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I see what you did there. Bravo.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Vet as well that worked with a few police departments and was planning to transfer to a department post service. I was completely dismayed that I had better training in every single aspect of policing than the departments I had worked with, as a combat arms trade.

Needless to say, but I didn't become a cop.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

The fire service also usually gives preference points to veterans.

Although I don't know why anyone would want higher pay, better benefits, and people not hating them.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago

they dont want professional cops.

They want hyper aggressive bullies that have no problem with getting down and dirty with the corruption.

Profesionals would be a threat to cops. Which is why they try so hard not to hire anyone that would actually be qualified for such work.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Cops in my area get paid about 70-100K USD yearly, but it's a high cost of living area. Sergeants and above, though, make bank. We're taking $120K and above. They're just as shitty as cops in the sticks. It's anecdotal, but I wonder if fixing income alone has little effect.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

Low bar and high pay? Huh.

Yeahhh they need a higher bar. And then the pay to match that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

The median gross pay among Seattle PD’s more than 2,000 employees 2020 was about $153,000, not including benefits, with 374 employees grossing at least $200,000 and 77 making at least $250,000

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Income and proper mental health management as well as proper holiday/forced holiday's post stressful engagements.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That's a fun myth not at all backed up by fact.

My job is orders of magnitude more dangerous and I make less than an officer with the same amount of experience.

For reference average around here is ≈40k while an officer with equivalent experience to me is 90-100k.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Probably a delivery driver.

One of the most dangerous jobs out there, and average pay is aright around 40k.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

A fun hint would be nearly any job involving vehicles is as dangerous as being an officer and those involving dealing with people as well make that job much more dangerous.

Landscaping is as dangerous.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I mean it's partially a myth in terms of pay, but I wouldn't really be opposed to officers having more training, especially for crisis intervention, and shit like that, training for when they actually have to interact with people face to face, rather than pseudo-military tacticool bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I'm with you there but I'd go so far as to say I'd rather they be trained enough to earn the money they are currently making. I'm my state a barber has more training and certification then a state certified officer.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There should be a 2 year criminal justice degree requirement. It requires more schooling to be a fucking barber than it does to be an armed police officer, and a massive number of them couldn't quote basic laws, let alone explain them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I would also posit there needs to be at least 6 months of situational simulations in proper threat engagement and another 4 months in situation de-escalation training. The fact I had more peace-officer training as a combat arms trade is ludicrous.

There's vastly more to being an officer of the law than just hitting the target range and that shows with the number of issues presented every year.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Any human with a job should have a living wage and proper training imo. Cops are no different.

I don't think that training (of which they have a lot, most of it to my knowledge teaches them that they are at war with citizens and always in danger) is the entire answer.

We need to figure out what we want cops to do.

To my knowledge:

  • Cops have no duty to protect citizens
  • Cops can steal our property (in traffic stops)
  • Cops can murder us with minimal justification and expect minimal consequences. Indeed even lawsuits are paid by the city and not the police budget
  • Cops are immune to prosecution in most cases.

So, why do we have them? They seem to be an armed gang that waits for us to commit a traffic infraction and then write us a ticket and possibly kill us or steal our property. They have no duty to protect us from criminals or disasters and if they get scared and kill us, at worse they transfer to a new department.

I think we need law enforcement and police, but the current system is irrecoverably broken imo. They have had decades to reform themselves and haven't done so unless under duress from a court. We need to rethink why we have them and what their job is. Indeed if we want them to have a dangerous job where they protect us from "things" and put themselves in harms way they need to be compensated properly, but I don't think we can fix the current system.

I got off on a tangent, my apologies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Currently the police nationwide live up to the saying 'police exist to protect home prices, not lives'

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

So, why do we have them?

I think it's a pretty common narrative that police agencies came about as a result of slave catchers and strikebreakers, thought I'm not sure to what extent that's true, and to what extent that's been the case with, say, police in the UK, or other countries, who obviously still have police forces with different reputations than those in the US.

In any case, even if the narrative might not necessarily be accurate, it's still somewhat reflective, to me, at least, of what police are supposed to do in the modern day. They have no duty to protect citizens, they steal our property, they can kill us, and they're immune to the law. They are the law, is basically what it is. They are an armed gang, they're an armed gang that the city pays in order to manage all other forms of violence which might happen in the city, even systemic violence which the city might create from, intentional or otherwise, resource mismanagement. They deal with the homeless, and mentally ill, and push them into a prison system where for-profit and public prisons can use them for free labor and generally lock them away into chaotic, meaningless, and authoritarian microcosms of society.

We also need homelessness to be rampant as a kind of threat, which we can levy against labor, since a population which can quit their jobs and go and still have a house obviously has more leverage against their employers, a higher capacity to unionize and strike. Homelessness also means housing is in more demand which helps drive up housing prices as long as you are trafficking the homeless away from the housing, when, otherwise, homelessness would generally decrease the value of the housing in a neighborhood since they would just kinda stick around, being, even formerly, embedded and tied to a community. Drugs need to be illegal as a form of protection on intellectual property laws, enforced at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who want to monopolize particular sectors of the market, and sell to our extremely privatized hospitals at an absurdly high premium. The police serve these interests, and more. That's their purpose. They just exist as an extension of society and serve it's whims. They exist, basically, to maintain status quo, good, or, in this case, bad.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Cop pay and training is inadequate

For what though? That's the problem. They have to do a lot of different things, and they're not trained well in any of them.

They have to deal with homeless people who are trespassing. They have to deal with people having mental issues. They have to deal with domestic disturbances. They have to deal with violent crime. They have to investigate thefts. It's really a grab-bag of different jobs, and they're not trained well in any of them.

Making it worse, the training they do receive focuses on violent crime. And, in particular, the training is how to survive the most violent possible criminal who is actively trying to kill them. That's what the TV shows are all about, but it's not what the job is about 99.99% of the time. Only 27% of officers say they have ever fired their guns in their entire careers. If they're always thinking about this worst-case scenario, they're not going to be doing very well at any of the other jobs.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

My city actually has a whole segment of cops who are unarmed that focus on the less risky aspects of policing. This specialization could help.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

And from what I've been lead to understand from people who discuss policing issues in the US, cops are made to feel terrified of those 'worst case scenarios'. Fear is instilled deep, deep in their psyches and it is pervasive in every facet of their work.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Cops in central IL were making 100k+ easy in 2010. Who knows what that is now. It is pretty good money compared to similar training and risk.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Afaict the money is pretty good.

You're totally right about the training though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I haven't done a nationwide investigation personally, just several areas I looked into and a couple that reached out toward the end of my service had dogshit pay for the level of stress.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I think it's kind of a multi-tiered issue. What you say is true, but police are also kind of structured in the way they are in the US because we have so many issues that we basically use them as a band-aid for, so we spread them very thin and kind of go with a quantity over quality approach. Which hasn't ended up working out very well, except in that, sometimes, and particularly for your white middle class neighbors that are going to call the cops for a noise complaint, cops appearing is basically the only thing that they needed to do. It's just for security theater, just so you can have an interlocutor that can do all the work of dealing with someone else for you, at your behest. A cop is just kind of meant to be around in order to make your dwindling population of middle class white people feel safe, more than they're supposed to actually make everyone safe. Such is why private institutions in a lot of places basically just have their own LARP cops in the form of security guards, who just stand around 95% of the time, and eat up way more in salary than they would save from product losses, or increased insurance premiums on product.

You pair this with the actual built environment in a lot of places, where cops have to be even more spread out than they otherwise would be, enforcing traffic tickets and shit like that, and it's kind of an obvious formula for a shitshow. Even if you gave police departments just straight up more money, three times as much, you'd still probably see complaints that they're underfunded, because they'd just spend all the money on hiring more people, and more equipment, rather than making a smaller number of people who are maybe better equipped to deal with, say, psychological problems that somebody might have. And obviously, in such a case, you're not going to get a better return on investment, than had you, say, dumped all the money into infrastructure that could've benefited your community, created jobs, lifted people out of poverty, and decreased the systemic causes of crime.