Law Enforcement's "Warrior" Problem (2015)

America is a very war-forward country.

Founded by one, massive civil war, recently endless foreign wars to waste money and lives on.

Heck, I was snowboarding at a $250/day mega resort in Colorado and right there on the village was reciting for army/navy/air force.

You don’t see that in developed countries that are not war-obsessed

I think warfighter crept into the lexicon for somewhat understandable reasons, likely because of the increasing frequency of joint operations (i.e., operations involving more than one branch of the military working together) after Vietnam, combined with the long-standing military tradition whereby members of any given branch take great offense if you refer to them using the wrong professional label (i.e., soldier, sailor, ~crayon-eater~ marine, airman, space cadet). That is, we can't just call all of them soldiers because only members of the Army are soldiers, so if for example you call a mixed group of marines and soldiers "soldiers", the marines will make their displeasure known to you, aggressively and in no uncertain terms.

When you're talking about DoD stuff all day long and frequently need to refer generically to the mixed personnel involved in a joint operation, warfighters beats saying Soldier-Sailor-Marine-Airman-Spacecase. All the other alternative phrases for the concept of "person employed by the military in one of the five combat arms branches" are variations on "member" and tend to sound clunky or be overly verbose, like "service member" or "member of the military." Try saying "service members" 50 times per day. Trust me, it gets old fast.

And frankly I don't see the problem with warfighter. Fighting wars is quite literally what they do, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to the truth and risks papering over the deadly seriousness of their work. Warfighter is also quite distinct from "warrior," which carries connotations of a specifically aggressive and barbaric flavor of professional violence purveyor. Like you say, it sounds like some atavistic hereditary soldier caste for whom violence is a sacred vocation joyfully undertaken rather than a solemn duty carried out only with great reluctance and forbearance.

Its the same stuff as we see in the manosphere today and in Italy/Germany as fascism took hold.

(Spoilers ahead for the first few minutes of "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse")

After I watch a movie for the first time I like to check out a few YouTube reaction channels to see their take on it. They sometimes catch interesting things I missed.

I've watched a few such reactions to "Across the Spider-Verse" and one interesting thing that stood out is when after a fight Spider-Women, who is wanted for murder, is out of webs and cannot escape when Captain Stacy, who is leading the effort to capture her, arrives. Captain Stacy does not know that Spider-Woman is his daughter. She reveals her identity to him, says she is innocent, and he is clearly conflicted, but finally starts reading her her rights.

The reactors almost uniformly condemn him for this, some quite adamantly. They think he should have let her go.

I would assume that the thinking is that someone that says they would arrest (or have arrested) their own mother, is a liar.

It's probably indisputable at this point that inviting the citizen gravy seals to deal with real threats will probably result in fewer innocent victims than a professional SWAT force that professionally sometimes rescues hostages while also mostly being used to throw flashbangs at babies and terrorize people at 2am no-knocks over petty crimes.

And it's almost always done for some drug related crime. End the War on Drugs now!

They're still beating their wives and killing black guys for no good reason only except now they're also treating everyone else like shit too.

Progress(TM)

Source?

I have a close relative that’s a cop, he’s a really good person, father and husband. I’ve known several other cops and never knew a truly bad person.

>Loose dogs can injure or kill random people they come across.

In theory - may be. On practice - typical fear mongering. The dogs in US cities are very docile, and those couple times (over 26 year here) i saw lost dogs they were pretty skittish about strangers.

>Why would you mention kittens when approximately 0% of their time is spent dealing with kittens?

you again have no idea what you're talking about.

> I have no idea what animal control outfit you're talking about

yep.

> but maybe they wear high boots because they go out into fields often for their work and it's more appropriate for than environment than wearing sneakers.

again pure theory. It was an urban AC. And neighboring ACs wear normal dark shoes. There are a lot of high boots if one needs it, yet these ones were obviously designed/chosen to complete the Stormtrooper look (tactical pants into the boots, etc.). No wonder they had these athletic youngish guys working there - in all other ACs that i've seen the mix of the people has been much more diverse.

> Loose dogs can injure or kill random people they come across.

Loose people injure and kill a lot more.

to me, the most interesting, actionable police-ology has been reforming two trends:

- modern 911, which rewards reactive, rather than proactive, policing

- the ever expanding mission of police officers. there's only one uniformed police officer class. experts and police all want specialization, just like in the medical field.

from a police chief:

> We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it…. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inqui...

warrior versus guardian isn't really actionable - what are you going to do, pass a law that says that training materials have to say guardian? versus, pass a law that appropriates funding for specialized workforces, that's par for the course in municipalities.

...and those rank titles were deliberately chosen at the formation of the Met to make it expressly look non-military. The Peelian principles are still a good read.

> I think a large amount of the danger American police face is due to how easily a single arrest can ruin your productive life. One facing the loss of their home, pets, job, important documents, sentimental items might not see the difference between losing everything, and losing everything and taking the guy who's taking it from you, with you.

I don't think it's that complicated. Rather, I think that a lot of cops think they're in more danger than they really are. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to gun them down for a traffic stop or for providing a warning about something. The situations where they're likely to get shot are exceedingly rare. By treating policing as some tremendously dangerous job we're completely ignoring the actual statistics, which show that firefighters and construction workers are far more routinely in physical danger.

The police then get carte blanche to walk around treating everyone like some dangerous creature ready to explode at the slightest provocation when most of us are just trying to get by and are pretty accepting of the benign law enforcement interactions we get.

The biggest danger American police are traffic accidents. Mostly because they spent a lot of time on the streets and accidents happen. They don't get shot at all that much.

What actually happens is that American police is basically unaccountable. It must be really egregious and on multiple camera for them to face any scrutiny. And even then it is easy for them to engineer situation where it is actually ok for them to kill or be violent. Meanwhile, non-cop is supposed to have perfect self control, perfect awareness of situation and be able to follow mutually exclusive instructions yelled at him from multiple cops simultaneously.

Unaccountable groups of people always end up behaving badly. Be it priests, isolated cults or cops.

I think it is more than a bit circular, though. Police and corrections unions are some of the biggest "tough on crime" lobbyists, to the extent that the latter have never been seen to go on the record for decriminalization of marijuana, for example.

And it's asymmetrical. "You can beat the rap, can't beat the ride" does a lot of heavy lifting: Sure. You might spend a couple of days in jail, though, you might need money for an attorney. And even if charges are dropped, or not even filed, many states make arrest records public regardless. Hell, the state of Florida will send you a bill for your jail time regardless of disposition, and guess what, not paying it is a felony.

And we've gone out of our way to protect police from the consequences of actively negligent or even malicious actions, because those same unions fear monger about cops quitting in droves if they have to face consequences for their actions.

There's been a big and long running case of Massachusetts state police and the town of Canton police trying to frame a woman for the death of a policeman. Michael Proctor is a former state police detective who "investigated" the case.

At one point in the case, a large number of text messages between various cops was released. They won't make you optimistic about cop culture.

It’s possible it’s a bit of an “arms” race, the police are more aggro but so are the public. At least in public perception back before the 70s its was perceived that by and large there was “respect for authority” but that’s eroded over the decades for various reasons among them court cases asserting more rights for individuals where cops can’t just up and arrest willy nilly. But also movements like “sovereign citizen” leaks in places enough to affect behavior elsewhere.

Also weapons are relatively cheaper today than decades ago.

Assault rifles were banned for most of that time. Now I can go buy 10,000 rounds of green tip XM85 ammo and an AR platform at a gun show in an hour. I’m not saying that justifies militarization (that’s mostly war profiteers selling to police departments and right wing alignment with law enforcement) but OP isn’t completely wrong.

>If everyone is really armed, that's the single biggest reason why standard doctrine should be de-escalation first.

See also: Game wardens during hunting season vs game wardens during fishing season.

20 feet is approximately the distance a person can rush forward, and have a decent chance of engaging in a weapon retention challenge.

its also the effective range for most people snap drawing a pistol in a use of force situation.

And yet mysteriously the British police seem to be able to deal with such situations with nothing more than a Taser - and often manage to avoid even using that. And yet, in spite of all the falsehoods being spread about knife crime levels, their mortality rate is much less than that in the US.

It's pretty clear to me that gun laws have become less restrictive. Stand your ground laws and open carry have become more commeon and more normalized. Tactical rifles (i.e. semi-automatic variants of military rifles like the AR) are less restricted since the "assault weapons" bans expired or were overturned. Perhaps even more importantly, ARs have become a much more prominant part of gun culture. Openly carrying guns at protests has become more normalized (although it did exist before; e.g. many Black Panther demonstrations).

thats what happened to presumption of innocence absent indications of guilt.

> a land border with a large continent that has a lot of guns and violence and criminality

That's a curious perception indeed, given that guns predominantly flow from the US to Mexico and not the other way around, and guns in Mexico are of mostly US origin.

Unclear which side you are talking about.

Plausible sounding theory, but in reality what kills cops is traffic accidents. Even there it's not people running them over. Cops are seldom charged with DUI where other dangerous behavior on the roads.