[Maru]

Originally Posted by Niamh.

The Police department are there to protect and serve the public, of course they have a right to get involved if they believe that there is an issue. The USA isn't a dictatorship last time I checked

Yes. Policing is and should always be a community effort. After all it's ultimately the voters and the communities themselves that are to be held the most accountable for their govt. What we have now is a system that passes the buck, points fingers and at best, waits for somebody else to solve the problem... at worse creates an even bigger bureaucracy (creating issues such as overpolicing) which in the end only makes the situation worse.

Originally Posted by Northern Monkey

I don't think it can or will change much for the better while guns are so prevalent.Any officer at any call could end up not going home.It only takes a second and it could be game over.The police are only human and it is instinctive to want to survive.It's a much bigger issue than just blaming 'poorly trained cops' when they are only human and know they could be shot any day.It's always in the back of their mind surely.That can take its toll on a person.
In years to come if the gun problem were ever to be solved(highly unlikely) then all this will be seen as just a symptom of the culture.Imo.

I know many people here don't like guns, but having a public that can function as a militia is a big part of American culture. It also aids in keeping the government honest, and like the UK citizens, we are more likely to rebel than in most any other countries then to accept government oppression. We also have the right to defend ourselves. I think we need to make background checks more universal (and make private sale illegal), but basically once the cat is out of the bag so to speak, you can't just put it back in and then enact laws to remove gun ownership from the constitution. It's impossible to find and destroy every weapon... either way, guns can still come in over the borders from Mexico, just like we have a problem with drugs. If gun control is done right, it can work in the US... but there will always be gun violence.

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

You cannot fix poorly educated people looking at videos and thinking that it is judge jury and executioner

The problem is not the police, its the masses and their new access to social media

No, the public should do their due diligence as a society and hold our authorities accountable for their action(s). That is part of community policing. Law agencies widely prefer when the public gets involved. Not to mention, this is how democracy works and freedom of speech... yes, there is ignorance, but there will always be ignorance and you can't fix stupid. That lesson is social media's biggest gift to humanity.

Originally Posted by jaxie

I think it's a really difficult issue and beyond saying get rid of the guns, and they are so ingrained in the US way of thinking I don't know if that is an achievable goal, I don't know what to tell you. I'm sure more training always helps though I doubt they are lacking in training realistically. I do have some sympathy for the police in the US who are in a difficult situation. I doubt any of the shootings are more than split second decision, maybe even panic in some situations. "The other guy or me, I choose me, bang." All lives matter but I doubt in many of these cases in the press that the officer sets out to shoot a black person, or any person. That isn't to say there isn't blame on the police sometimes too but I don't see it as being clear cut.

When every person you confront in you law keeper job could have a gun how can you deal with that confrontation without getting shot yourself?

I suppose something that could be done is to ban all fake weapons that look realistic or make them have some sort of glow in the dark neon colour that makes its obvious it's not a real gun so those kinds of mistakes don't happen.

Wonderful post, jaxie. I think you get right to the point.

The situation is dire because we let it get this way. The blame falls squarely on every single one of us in the US. We've ignored the urban communities and those of us who got out only focused on ourselves. These communities that are plagued with violence and poverty have been doing it mostly on their own which is why they've now come up with their own systems of survival and rules of conduct that aren't compatible with the local police. Of course they're not going to want to assimilate into society. Society's rules really don't apply when you live in a community where order is not apparent and violence/crime is a fact of life.

Before social media and cameras, the government could just ramp up police anytime crime or certain elements left their "assigned" neighborhood. We ended up with over-policing in these areas because more often than not, this is the default response from the government and the public towards the issues. The average law enforcement officer already was in-between a rock and a hard place and expected to solve most of society's problems and adding more pressure to that won't fix their ability to help those issues.

While I think we should optimize our police force and reverse corruption wherever possible, to put only put more pressure on every single police to do their jobs "better", i.e. lower use-of-force in the times of rising crime, is unrealistic. We need to take pressure off law enforcement by selecting the community's that need attention and take a civil approach at a local govt level instead of just resorting to more policing.

If we continue as we are now, encouraging disenfranchised demographics to self-victimize and dig themselves deeper into their entrenched beliefs and passing the buck to the police then it will only continue the cycle of police brutality/community violence.