Remaking police departments starts with the recruiting process.

[Raven]

Before you even get to training. In my state, a police recruit goes through a very "light" background check and a very cursory psychological review. This needs to change.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. The recruiting process finds people who will succeed in a brutally oppressive system.

Sometimes people who think they can change the system make it past the recruiting process. The system then either gets them to shut up and conform, or they leave. The system itself is the problem and must be dismantled.

[Raven]

5. Well, I have been a part of the recruitment process in my municipality and

I can tell you from first hand experience that some young people apply because they want to serve the community and some apply because they like the guns and the power it gives them. You have to be able to weed out the bad ones and it can't be done with just a series of interviews. If you pick a bad one, no police academy, no matter how good it's training is, is going to be able to change the basic psychology of a recruit.

We had a young man who made the final cut. He was smart, well dressed and well spoken. He passed the background check and the psyc test. There was something about him that bothered me so I asked our Chief to check a little further. It turned out that he had been quietly asked to leave a prior job (one that had given him a good recommendation, BTW) because of "mental" problems. The Chief put him through an in depth psychological review by a specialist and her report to us indicated that he had serious problems, was suicidal at times, and took pills that you give a dog for nerves during thunderstorms. We dodged a bullet but I wouldn't be surprised if he was now working for some other police department.

Whether you dismantle police departments, reinvent them or replace them with something else, there are always going to be human beings involved so screening is critical.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. I think police work, at least as it is now, attracts people with authoritarian tendencies.

The remaking will have to be kind of circular, in the sense that if it's changed in a constructive way those authoritarian types will be less attracted to it. At the same time, the process of recruitment will have to be designed to better screen out those people.

[Jarqui]

3. A guy in my brother's shooting club wanted to be a cop

We were concerned because he seemed messed up.

He was a bank manager but he was weird when he had a gun. If he saw any animal, he HAD to shoot it. You couldn't reason with him.

The police turned him down. He failed his psych test.

Can they not test to determine some degree of racism or the propensity to shoot someone unarmed in the back?

It's not a perfect world but I have to believe that they could do better. Too many of these cops doing this seem pretty fucked in the head.

I still can't get over the Buffalo police resigning from the tactical team because of what the two officers did to the 75 year old man .. who apparently has a brain injury.

[beachbumbob]

4. many police recruiting efforts deny hiring people becasue their IQ IS TOO HIGH

if that doesn't reveal the nature of the problem what does?

[CanonRay]

6. I have a former colleague, whom I mentored

when she was a green new agent. I'm now retired and she's in charge of a Federal agency in Oregon. She recently had a vacancy and because of Veteran's preferences in Federal hiring, all the candidates were Iraq or Afghanistan vets. She said they all scared the shit out of her, and she thought that if she put them on the street with a weapon, she'd never sleep. She canceled the vacancy.