"To Protect and Serve" Seems Pretty Clear Cut

Eshi talked about the police recently on this blog and I wanted to add something to his post's idea. There are two reasons that police brutality is so overwhelmingly common in the US and I would like to address them both.

The first one is that it is way harder for a police officer to exercise impulse control when access to a firearm is readily available. We see this with the police when they get military hardware as well. In countries where police have very limited access to firearms, for example Japan and England, police shooting of civilians is practically zero. Limiting police access to firearms by itself wouldn't do much, you would need to ban firearms in general. In the US this is a tricky position that will probably never be popularly accepted.

In response to the banning of guns most people will say, "If you ban guns only criminals will have guns." This is one of the stronger positions and one that is hard to argue against. That being said, banning access to military style equipment for police departments seems like an option most people can get behind. Do the police really NEED a tank? They are not fighting enemy combatants. For the most part they are stopping domestic disputes and pulling over drunk drivers. You don't need fully automatic weapons to do that. If there is ever an instance in which the police would need a tank, it is no longer a police problem. That's what the national guard is for, its literally their job.

This segues nicely into my second point. Both sides of this debate, police and civilians, need to stop treating each other like the fucking enemy. Our police force isn't a military organization that is fighting a war, it's a group of civilians tasked with protecting people. Our civilians aren't all gun toting ne'er do wells that need to be put down, most people are just people trying to live their lives. I do think that we could benefit from not training officers in the use of militarized tactics. When a training manual encourages officers to "steel your battlemind" it encourages them to view civilians as the enemy. We aren't. And the more violence that the police use the less likely people are to trust them, which only widens the gap between the two sides.

I don't know how else to say it. Empathy motherfuckers.