Discussion- ending militarization of police, police brutality and gov sanctioned murder by LEO.

[dreamnightwind]

54. Thanks for your efforts

I see a lot of good ideas in this thread, not many clear paths though of how to bring them about. Pretty much the same here, a few ideas, not a clue how to make them happen.

One thing that strikes me when I see videos of police violence, is the police often seem to have dehumanized the suspects. They aren't seeing them as individuals with human problems, they are seeing them as vermin that need to be imprisoned or eliminated. This is a cultural and spiritual problem. I think training could go a long way in this regard. They should be trained to be compassionate and to recognize the humanity in the people they police, even if they have to arrest them. It might sound ridiculuous, but I think it addresses a real problem in the appropriate way. We've all seen the statements like "fuck your breath", or a lack of any effort by the cops to resucitate or otherwise keep alive a shooting victim. There's no excuse for that. Coupled with the training there needs to be monitoring of each officer's record, and their careers should be jeopardized when any such behavior is seen. Basically I think they should be trained in nonviolence more than they should be trained in violence.

Also I would like to see police departments decoupled from revenue from any of their policing. There should be zero financial incentive to a department or an individual officer to make arrests, to increase arrests, to write tickets, to confiscate property. The police should be funded entirely from tax revenue. And any revenue from police fines or property confiscation should go to the general treasury.

Finally, we have a lot of crimes that should not be crimes. Legalize drugs and treat their abuse as a health problem not a criminal problem. I don't know about prostitution, I've heard arguments for regulating it but I'm uncertain if that is a good idea. The eventual emergence of self-driving cars might prevent a lot of the need for traffic policing and drunken driving checkpoints.

A lot of crimes are just crimes of being poor, such as someone without a home trying to sleep or go to the bathroom or solicit money when they are desperate. Some property theft and even mugging is also a crime of desperate poverty. So addressing poverty would go a long way towards stopping these crimes (also towards improving our education system, though that's a different issue). Of course addressing poverty is no small matter, a very important one though. We're a wealthy country that could take care of the basic needs of all of its people if it was a system priority (seems our system is more concerned with maximizing returns for stock shareholders).