How do we change the culture in local police departments?

[hunter]

44. I think a prerequisite for being a cop should be at least five years satisfactory accomplishment...

... as a high school teacher in under-served-mean-street communities.

It doesn't matter the teaching subject really. Home room, detention, basic words and numbers literacy, raw "health" classes of sexual diseases, condoms, and birth control... lunch litter pickup, or sorting the recycling with the most deviant misfits...

I was frequently a lunch litter pickup deviant in school, and later as an urban school teacher, supervisor of such deviants. I met my wife teaching. Later she was accepted, following her dreams, to graduate school in another state.

The skills required to deal non-violently, without escalation, with over-crowded situations of hungry hormonally challenged teenage students in difficult environments, all are directly transferable to police work.

Ideally cops would be accomplished teachers who only rarely arrested anyone, and then always in the most polite and civilized way possible.

Arresting people for trivial things would make a cop subject of official scorn and derision.

A ticket for a burned out turn signal instead of a friendly fix-it? WTF is wrong with you dude? Two more like this and you'll be fired.

If you can't break up a fight between people bigger than you without a gun, if you can't deal with a teenager questioning your manhood or womanhood, if you can't suffer an occasional bloody nose or black eye or personal insult in the "line of duty," if you ever need a gun to feel secure, then you are simply not qualified to be a cop.

I've never been qualified to be a cop because I hate handguns. I'd probably rather be shot than shoot someone, but always I'd rather not find myself in that situation.