Headline is kind of funny, but I wanted to know what he shot at
In body cam footage shared across social media, the officer was seen jumping to the ground and shouted “shots fired” after the acorn strikes the roof of his car. He then turned and emptied every bullet from his gun, each aimed squarely at his squad car.
Funny again…
While Hernandez fired on the car, Marquis Jackson, who was accused of stealing his girlfriend’s car, was in the back of the police cruiser. Officers had searched, handcuffed and loaded the accused into the back of the police car and, despite being cuffed, it was Jackson that the officer thought was shooting at him.
Nope, he was trying to kill someone handcuffed in the back of his squad car and had already been searched for weapons.
Cop should at least be facing reckless endangerment, if not attempted murder.
He also yelled “I’m hit” while unloading on his own vehicle.
Same as when they think they’re doing on fentanyl…
After hearing the sound of the acorn, the deputy reported that he also felt a “tingliness” all along the side of his body. He then said his “legs just give out” and he fell to the ground, assuming that he had been seriously injured by something.
Because of this, the video also showed Hernandez complaining about feeling “weird” and shouting to his colleague that he’s been hit. It’s all very dramatic.
Cops are constantly terrified because of their training, so they panic and mistake a panic attack for something else.
Being a cop sucks so much (because of their own leadership and culture) that good qualified people do t want to be a cop. So we end up with these fragile snowflakes that shouldn’t be allowed to carry at all. Let alone be a cop
good people get fired as cops because they hesitate to shoot unarmed people and won’t lie for officers doing questionable things.
My goodness what a fucking snowflake. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the profession if you’re “scared shitless” 99% of the time. But we all know that’s a cover for them. They love killing people.
…fragile snowflakes that shouldn’t be allowed to carry at all.
Yeah but deputy tacticool has holo sights. Not wasted on him at all.
Poor Durango.
Training? What training?
“It hit my vest” and “I feel weird”. Them be signs that his fat ass has coronary artery disease. Fucking Okaloosa County. Good riddance. Don’t miss it.
Is he trying to use the South Park ‘He’s coming right for us’ defense?
Aren’t they all?
I deal with PTSD vets every day so I understand the snap buuuuut… No one else gets to get away with a slap on the wrist because of their mental illness so fuckem
Yeah. The “having PTSD” part isn’t what should be punished, it’s the “and yet still carrying a gun while putting yourself in a position to have your PTSD triggered like this” part that’s egregious.
Well, Philip Brailsford, the murderer who murdered Daniel Shaver, claimed PTSD for murdering Daniel so he could draw on his pension and retire early. Because he murdered someone and it hurt his fee-fees.
Fuck that.
Indeed fuck that, but I don’t see what it has to do with what I said.
I was making the point that even the “has PTSD” is egregious when it comes to cops.
I mean. Being in combat and being a cop are two different things.
Maybe this guy was in a shootout and has PTSD, maybe this is the only time he’s ever fired on duty and he’s just a coward who panicked.
During the course of the investigation into the shooting, deputy Herandez resigned from the force.
Oh wow. Good for him. I’m honestly surprised.
Many times cops retire to avoid being investigated and move to a different department.
Yeah at this point we should assume the worst until proven otherwise.
And most of us would still wait for an actual target in a built up area.
No where in the article does it mention PTSD.
See I’m like, I don’t even think you could qualify most of the things you would do to this guy as being punishment. Preventing this guy from being a cop forever (pretty unlikely, but could happen), isn’t really a punishment. If he’s discharging his firearm into his own car, he’s obviously just unfit to be an officer and that’s a pretty clear safety concern. If you sent him to prison, that might be more of a “punishment”, but that’s also, you know, what cops do basically their whole careers, is send people to prison, and we still have all the same problems with the prison system as we’ve always had, so, you know, I’m like. I dunno. That doesn’t seem like a clear “win”, to me, both in terms of improving society and in terms of helping him out if he’s mentally ill which, you know, seems to clearly be the case, here.
You could also maybe think, hey, this guy goes to an asylum or something for mental illness, but that kind of has the same problems as sending someone to prison, it’s not usually a helpful system.
Cop should at least be facing reckless endangerment, if not attempted murder.
The review board found his conduct was not reasonable; so, it’ll be up to the prosecutor (which I’m sure in FL is an office eager to go after cops). The other officer, who began shooting after the officer wearing the bodycam in the OP began shooting, was found to have acted reasonably.
Essentially, you can’t think an acorn is a bullet and get away with shooting at a detained and secured civilian. But, if another officer on scene thinks, even unreasonably so, that an acorn is a bullet and starts shooting at a detained and secured civilian, you can too. If this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, take that as reassurance that your critical thinking remains, at least partially, intact.
Nah, it kind of makes sense for the second guy.
Remember, he’s not getting triggered by the acorn, he’s reacting to his coworker yelling that they’ve been shot and actual gunfire. That’s a justified reason to pull out your weapon IMO
Granted, he should’ve tried to take control of the situation and de-escalate so he could “save” his panicked coworker, but that kind of calmness “under fire” would take actual training
It does mean that the assisting officers aren’t required to actually confirm their target, though.
What if this was real. If a 3rd party shot at them. 1st officer fires, blindly assuming it’s the perp in cuffs in the car. 2nd cop shoots and kills perp in car because he saw that’s what his partner was shooting at. When, in this hypothetical scenario, it was really a 3rd party that wasn’t identified yet, which would be the only plausible source of a gun shot anyway since the perp was already searched and cuffed.
That doesn’t make sense to me, but that’s how they’re trained. Ride or die with their comrads. Once the first shot is fired, it’s shoot first and ask questions later for all additional officers.
That’s not good policy. That’s not good for civilians.
It’s not a great policy, but it’s a decision that, you know, has ups and downs either way. On one hand, if you have a particularly sharp officer who can peep out someone shooting at them, locate where that person is, and then fire back and understand exactly what they’re shooting at. It would be better if that officer was able to also get their partner to follow their instructions, rather than relying on their partner, who, you know, being part of the police, might not be a sharp, and might not really be able to understand what’s going on or what to do without external instruction.
That’s if you have it as a kind of top down encompassing training thing, but that’s really kind of the stupidest way to handle it. It’s why the military has rank, and specialists, and roles, you can have a more clear chain of command where the more capable can, at least theoretically, rise to the top and be able to give those instructions. But then, none of this really prevents the person above you snapping randomly, and deciding to shoot a detained and searched person because of an acorn. Of all of what I’ve said, cops have a very mild amount of ranks and shit, too, but they’re obviously subject to much less training, have more uniform ranks, and, like the military, they’re very insular and have very little faith in anything but themselves. So more often than not they’re just going to all collectively default to kind of whatever will keep them the “safest”, which is going to be killing everyone around them that twitches kind of weird. Internal to the police, the life of every cop is worth infinitely more than the life of a criminal, and even the life of your average civilian, or, better put in their terms, potential criminal. When realistically it should be the opposite, but yeah.
I dunno, I kind of think sometimes that, I dunno if it’s just a lack of news reaching over here from other countries, but I never hear about police brutality from other countries nearly as much. Maybe in britain, and france, and places where I can kind of think, oh, yeah, the power structure above them is kind of fucked up, america style, but maybe a little less so. But, so, I kind of wonder if police corruption is really it’s own internal thing, and we should just abolish the police, like everyone says, or if it’s really just every overarching power structure that’s actually fucked up, and if we were like, finland, everything would be fine, cause I’ve not really heard a lot about the police of finland being super corrupt. Basically, I wonder if we target the symptom, and not the problem, because the police are obviously the slammer, you know, they’re the pog which gets thrown by the long arm of history to flip everything over, they’re the direct force that anyone who’s doing any political action, or anyone who’s a victim of the government, they’re who they interface with. But is that because they’re intrinsically a problematic institution, or is that because they’re just the face, just the tool? I dunno. I find myself wondering that, in the face of, you know, so much evidence that the police is full of like, fucking morons.
Essentially, you can’t think an acorn is a bullet and get away with shooting at a detained and secured civilian. But, if another officer on scene thinks, even unreasonably so, that an acorn is a bullet and starts shooting at a detained and secured civilian, you can too. If this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, take that as reassurance that your critical thinking remains, at least partially, intact.
IIRC Sympathetic Fire seems to be insta-forgiveness (by other police and the courts) whenever it comes up.
As one example, I think it played a role in the Daniel Shaver case, but it’s been a long time since I read all those details and I really don’t want to dive into that pool of anger and sadness again to verify.
Keep in mind, this is Florida. It is perfectly legal to murder anybody if you can prove that you felt threatened.
If a random loud bang from an acorn falling nearby is enough to get someone to behave like this, they really should not be walking around with a gun. This is completely insane and unhinged behavior.
theres no reason for most officers to be lethally armed their entire shift.
they are trained the exact opposite; be afraid of everything and empty the clip. ask questions later.
this cop behaved as he was trained
The good news is, the guy did resign. So I guess he agrees.
Or he resigned to just join a police force one county over.
Coming soon to a police department near you!
or a school ‘safety officer’
Fun fact: ‘police officer’ isn’t even in the top 10 most dangerous professions in the US. It’s solidly beat by things like garbage collector, delivery driver, maintenance worker, and pilot. None of those professions typically carry weapons on the job.
Lots of police officers were former bullies with an inferiority complex. Some are wusses who only feel powerful because they’re carrying a deadly weapon.
Another fun fact: police in several other western countries don’t carry deadly weapons and yet are able to do their jobs just fine.
American police are trained to think everything and everyone is against them, through programs like David Grossman’s Killology course. Weird how a program designed to teach recruits to kill without empathy would result in people killing without empathy.
Elsewhere, police are learning de-escalation tactics, but police in the US are learning escalation.
It’s absurd, and leads to scared, trigger-happy morons shooting at acorns.
e: missed a word
From the body cam footage it was quite a soft bang
I want to stress that I am in no-way attempting to excuse this cop, nor am I suggesting that there is any reasonable way to confuse the sound of an acorn with the sound of a gunshot. Even if there were, there is no justification for blindly “returning fire” in the general direction of the noise. That is so batshit crazy a scenario that it is completely irredeemable. This cop needs to be in prison.
That being said, I do want to comment on the capabilities of recording and playback. They completely lack the dynamic range necessary to make any sort of reasonable judgment on the intensity of the “bang”. What we hear in the video and what the officer heard in real life are two completely different things.
I have heard black walnuts (golf ball to tennis ball sized outer shell) hitting vehicles at close range. While they certainly can’t be reasonably confused with a gunshot, they are startlingly loud.
Again, I want to stress: completely unreasonable that an acorn hitting the cruiser could be confused for a gunshot, and criminally stupid to fire in the general direction of the noise.
I appreciate your dedication to science (I’m still going to call you a nerd)
You can call me anything you want, so long as it’s not an apologist for this criminal cop.
In that case I’m going to call you Shirley
What was he shooting at? This man just blindly ptied his gun at something or someone he couldnt see!
He was shooting at the unarmed suspect cuffed and trapped in the back of the police car.
Read the story.
Kinda sounds like PTSD or anxiety or something.
That doesn’t make it ok. Just ml saying police need more support and supervision.
And yet the most surprising thing about the story is that the bodycam footage was released, smh
Likely to protect the cop/department too, since he shot at his own car that already had a disarmed, detained suspect inside. He very nearly killed someone that was already a non-threat. If the body cam footage got out it might make people think their cops are negligent or improperly trained! /ghasp
It’s like a business. If the liability rests with their officer and they are afraid of a lawsuit causing significant political blowback they are going to take action against the officer to minimize their liability. Hearing about an officer doing something like this and then leaving the force means there is nothing left for them to take action for.
If he didn’t resign, perhaps it would be slightly harder for the chief a town over to hire the guy, but since he resigned he may have minimal marks on his record.
I’d bet a thousand bucks this guy gets another job as a cop within 1yr though.
I’d bet a thousand bucks this guy gets another job as a cop within 1yr though.
I’d bet a thousand bucks I know which video they’re going to be watching in the morning briefing on his first day.
Of all the stupid that exists in Florida, they actually have pretty powerful open records laws.
It’s actually one of the reasons Florida has the “Florida Man” reputation. We know more about what’s happening there.
More like that it was on in the first place.
Not even close. The most surprising thing is that the cop resigned, by far.
He resigned when he knew he was going to be fired. Probably easier to look for a job in another department before the dust settles.
Obtaining a barber license means that you have completed a minimum of 1,250 hours of instruction in barbering education within a period of at least 9 months or completed 1,250 hours of training. It takes 1,250 to 2,000 hours to be a cosmologist. Police in Germany get 2.5 years of training, and in Finland, police education takes three years to complete. Police in the USA get 750 hours.
USA intentionally dumbs down its people.
Exactly. The PD will also reject applicants if they are too smart.
When I first heard about it, I could not believe it. Fair enough there is shortages of police so they want recruitment process to hasten. But this is at the expense of public safety as there are too many trigger-happy police. Which is counter to “protect and serve” motto!
Plus, it’s one of the few jobs that will disqualify you for being too smart.
cosmologist
uh… this is why we didn’t approve of the word “cosmetology”. It takes more than 2000h to be a publishing cosmologist/astronomer.
Everyone, stop what you are doing and check your local police department for this guy.
During the course of the investigation into the shooting, deputy Herandez resigned from the force.
He is out there somewhere, getting scared and shooting at his own car.
Yeah. Both he and his partner opened fire without a clear sight of a target.
This is too funny until you know they buried a dozen squirrels
It sounds like they believed the shooter was their own engine so I’m going to assume all the local wildlife was fine. They did however eliminate the evil deceptagon.
The article said where he was firing, into his cars engine block. It does not mention where his partner, who was in the car, was aiming at.
I presume, the handcuffed person in the car was traumatized, but physically fine.
The cop was firing at the back of the car. His partner was interviewing the girlfriend of the suspect when she heard the shout of shots fired. She asked from where and the cop said from the car, she opened fire at the front of the car.
It’s easy to shit on cops but I hope the guy is okay. It kinda sounded like he resigned after self-realizing how this is not an okay situation. He’s probably been in a handful of fucked up situations to be triggered like that tbh.
Either that or he’s actually retarded.
Why do you assume there’s trauma? He’s just reactingly exactly how he has been trained to react.
You don’t empty a whole clip like a schizo after hearing one shot lol. I think the protocol would have been to call back up or “I heard shots fired on main Street”
You’re right, it’s a bat shit insane response, but cops in the U.S. are trained to be afraid and react without thinking on a hair trigger. His reaction is unfortunately way too normalized.
I do hope he gets the treatment he needs. It is not normal behavior.
I also don’t want him with a gun near a school, mall, or any other place with lots of bystanders. Not until he has a good record of not overreacting.
Frank’s got donkey brains!
I’m sorry, this is fucked up and I shouldn’t be laughing, but you really can’t make this shit up
What’s more, in his body cam footage you can clearly see the acorn fall into frame and strike the roof of his car. When asked if this was the sound he heard, Hernandez had this to tell investigators:
“I’m not gonna say no, because I mean that’s, but what I, [10 second pause in speaking] what I heard [3 second pause in speaking] sounded almost like [12 second pause in speaking] what I heard sounded what I think would be louder than an acorn hitting the roof of the car, but there’s obviously an acorn hitting the roof of the car.”
So has he been tested for drugs already?
Guy served two tours overseas.
I think it’s kinda fucked up to laugh at what clearly seems like a PTSD attack. He shouldn’t be a cop, and it’s a good thing he resigned, but you shouldn’t mock someone for this. Even if it’s super easy to.
“Man killed people for a living for years so we gave him a pistol and let him corral the civilians around!” Making fun of it and shaming this dumbass system is the only hope of it ever changing
And in order to shame the system, you shame the man?
Wise.
Yeah I know, taken out of context it’s really funny but it’s not when you consider the circumstances.
I hope he actually resigned and found a safer job instead of just being moved to another department and that the mental health checks for cops get better, but I’m not holding my breath for the second one.
Thanks for that. You really captured it
Top comment really nails it:
This is unironically the most embarrassing video I have seen in my entire life. I am not exaggerating at all. I would kill myself if there were footage of me acting like this. Dude gets scared by an acorn, does a Max-Payne-backwards-dive, unloads 20 roads into his own car (luckily not murdering the unarmed guy in the back of it), does some horrid Arnold-Schwarzenegger impression while crawling over the floor bawling his eyes out, and then forces an armed stand-off with literally no one. Actually absolutely insane, the most unhinged behaviour I have ever had the pleasure to witness.
He quit afterward. Probably because he was teased mercilessly by other police officers. If only we could harness peer pressure to reduce police shootings.
Imagine doing this and just being able to quit your job, meanwhile a citizen would be arrested and charged with a felony.
deleted by creator
It’s entirely like something out of a comedy.
Too far fetched fiction.
This sounds like a scene out of super troopers that would have been cut for being too unbelievable.
“save me Tom Cruise, save me Oprah Winfrey!”
“SHOTS FIRED!”
(combat roll)
“SHOTS FIRED! SHOTS FIRED! SHOTS FIRED!” (still rolling around)
(gets up, unleashes hail of bullets at the car with his partner pretty much directly downrange)
(slight pause, beat of silence)
(falls backwards into the road)
“Eaaahhh!”
(fires several more times, now lying on his side in the road)
"I’m hit! I’m hit!
(fires until his gun is empty)
(his partner asks something)
“What?”
“Ablbla! Abinica!” (crawling across the road now) “In the car! Ow!”
(catches his breath, taking cover behind a different car)
(after a while, his partner comes nearby, frantically asking if he’s okay)
“I’m good! I feel weird! But I’m good!”
“Dude, did I get hit?” Is probably my favorite line
As funny as it sounds, my understanding is that it’s often not immediately obvious in the adrenaline of a life-threatening situation whether or not you got shot. You have to kind of check yourself over and make sure because you literally don’t feel pain.
I’m going to be honest, there is a part of me that’s hesitant to be so so harsh on the guy, because it’s hard to say how you would react in (what you perceive to be) a life-or-death situation. It’s not unusual for people not to react well. There was one shooting video like that where the cop did something embarrassing and I had full sympathy and support for him (A woman pulled a gun on him during a traffic stop and shot at him, and he stumbled back and shot her, and he thought for a second that he might also have hit someone in a jeep full of people that was randomly stopped behind her. He was on bodycam just overall losing his shit from having shot her, not even understanding why she tried to shoot him in the first place, and thinking for a second that he might also have also hit someone in the jeep by accident. That I can have a lot of sympathy for honestly.)
That said, you need to not have this kind of reaction if you’re a cop. In a personal capacity I have sympathy for him; he learned he doesn’t have the right stuff for what he wanted to do; this humiliating display is etched in permanently as his legacy, and he has to find a new job and he’s just lucky that no one got killed because of him. In a professional capacity, fuck him and let’s all laugh at him rolling around in the road and wailing.
(Edit: Personally, for me the absolute peak of the comedy is when he half-empties his gun, and there’s a little beat of stillness, and then out of nowhere he just falls down and wails before starting shooting again. Again I shouldn’t laugh because someone could have been killed. But it’s fucking hilarious and I can’t see it as not so.)
My dad was in the military, and he got shot in the leg. He said it was the most painful thing that he’s went through so far, so I don’t know if I believe that. I bet this cop has never been shot in his life.
Everyone’s experience is different. Sometimes it’s excruciating, yes.
I bet this cop has never been shot in his life.
I would bet that this is accurate, yes.
By most accounts it is definitely common enough that you should REALLY check everything, because adrenaline can be a hell of a drug. Like: people noticing a fairly small entrance-wound but being completely unaware of a gigantic exit-wound is apparently so common that I’ve heard that it is the very first thing you should check for in case of a shooting.
Wow. Listen to those screams of traumatized neighbors as he continues to claim he was hit ~1:35/1:40 in. Can’t tell if it’s the other cop yelling at screaming people to stay back, or a mother yelling at her screaming child to stay back or what.
And that guy in the car - they’re just going to shrug and say “my bad” about the fact that if the cop was even the slightest bit competent with that firearm he’d be dead?
That’s nuts
Thank you.
Headlines like this are often a stretch, if not outright BS. Read the story. The headline does not begin to do justice as to how fucked up this was.
Even better, watch the video without any sort of narration or commentary.
Lul, that was a good suggestion. He ‘felt weird’, hid out of the acorn way (with some epic fat-rolling), still decided his car needed suppressive fire and get shot (maybe) multiple times (I guess fancy red-dot sights don’t improve skills like they show us in vidya games?). Just perfect.
But the cherry on top will be his inevitable medal, promotion, lifetime rent for emotional damage suffered, and a whole bunch of murders he will commit (after all, anyone could be hiding acorns, or perhaps would have at some point in the future, can’t take that chance).
But the cherry on top will be his inevitable medal, promotion
He resigned.
For real or for like two weeks or like went to cop elsewhere?
(Legit question, I don’t know things, but see posts about this sort of stuff)
Red dots are a performance enhancer for someone who is trained, not a substitute for training in and of themselves.
Anecdotally, people who are not trained to the point of second nature tend to forget about their sights, especially on pistols, during a shootout.
While the cop’s failure of aiming ended up being an overall positive against the rest of his incompetence, it still highlights incompetence strictly within the realm of shooting.
I guess fancy red-dot sights don’t improve skills like they show us in vidya games?
Training solely with red dots is a detriment to your skills, at least. A red dot can make even the most inexperienced bozos look like a sharpshooter at the range, but under stress the lack of “low-level” practice/skills would severely limit your gunmanship. That’s not to say to not practice with red dots, you should put a lot of time into the tools you’re likely to use and in a similar way to how you’re likely to use them, but it’s also important to practice a lot with iron sights and whatnot if you want to develop and maintain… actually good aim. A lot of people tend to not do that, though, because fancy sights make shooting practice targets easy and can make you feel like you’re way better than you actually are.
Link?
The video is in a tweet which is embedded in the article, because of course it is. I’m not gonna link that, but it’s hilarious.
Edit: Found a youtube link posted way down in the comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxnuPgiPHLA&pp=ygUNQ29wIGd1biBhY29ybg%3D%3D
holy fuck lmao. Dude does a triple roll and does he actually yell “I’m hit” between 25 and 30 seconds or am I hearing it wrong?
Yeah, he yells “I’m hit” a few times, like he thought he got shot.
arguably the best scene.
I think 1 roll and his stamina bar dropped zero.
This story pairs nicely with the other one that’s currently trending.
Florida Legislator Files Bill That Would Keep Killer Cops From Being Named And Shamed
This dipshit is what they want to protect so he can just go work in another district and kill someone else.
Police aren’t brave, they 're the biggest cowards in societies, and we let them kill without consequence… This should frighten you
One of the biggest reasons I’m glad I did an enlistment in the Army is having got a couple years experience in Iraq to genuinely understand what a fucking joke American cops are.
Can we please stop pretending Twitter is a video hosting platform? It’s not, the links never work. When you only include Twitter video in the article it’s like not including the video at all.
Thank you
I mean it’s a website that hosts videos as part of the services it offers. And the video loads fine on mobile and desktop. I would check your network or browser settings. Unless it’s hosted by the actual article writer, hosting it somewhere is basically another social media.
The only thing more dangerous than a Florida man is a Florida cop.
Isn’t that just a Florida man with a gun tho…
No, it’s Florida man with a badge.
What a very composed and calm individual that is perfectly suited for a job as a public servant.
Unpopular opinion: Cop pay and training is inadequate. If you want professional cops, you need to hire professional people and train them professionally. The only people that apply to become officers are morons and the power hungry. People with integrity don’t apply because the money is shit.
Any job that trades money for fraternity is a job that’s garbage. And boy oh boy are cop houses frats.
I’m a combat veteran and the fact that cops aren’t held to half the standards I was drives me nuts.
nuts
OFFICER DOWN!!
I see what you did there. Bravo.
Vet as well that worked with a few police departments and was planning to transfer to a department post service. I was completely dismayed that I had better training in every single aspect of policing than the departments I had worked with, as a combat arms trade.
Needless to say, but I didn’t become a cop.
The fire service also usually gives preference points to veterans.
Although I don’t know why anyone would want higher pay, better benefits, and people not hating them.
they dont want professional cops.
They want hyper aggressive bullies that have no problem with getting down and dirty with the corruption.
Profesionals would be a threat to cops. Which is why they try so hard not to hire anyone that would actually be qualified for such work.
Cops in my area get paid about 70-100K USD yearly, but it’s a high cost of living area. Sergeants and above, though, make bank. We’re taking $120K and above. They’re just as shitty as cops in the sticks. It’s anecdotal, but I wonder if fixing income alone has little effect.
Low bar and high pay? Huh.
Yeahhh they need a higher bar. And then the pay to match that.
The other thing is that the bar should be for going over not under. They have standards for maximum intelligence and won’t hire people who are too smart.
That’s not strictly or universally true. Yes, there was a federal (SCOTUS?) case about that, I think for New Hampshire, and the rationale was that people that were too smart (>120 IQ) tended to get bored on the job and quit, which costs the city more in training. BUT I don’t think that all police departments use the same hiring practices.
I can’t speak for all police agencies, but over a decade ago I applied for Chicago PD, because I figured that it didn’t take much to be a better person and cop than Jason Van Dyke, or Anthony Abbate. The application test was pretty easy, except for recognizing faces (mostly because the pictures were photocopies that were 1" square). The problem was that they had a lot of things that moved you up on the selection process, like, did you have an immediate relative that was a cop, did you have prior military service, did you go to public schools in Chicago, etc… That meant that people with cop relatives ended up getting hiring preference over people that were smarter and better suited for the job.
In retrospect, I’m really glad I didn’t get high enough up in the lottery to get an offer; the more I learn about policing, the less I like police agencies in general, even if there are individual cops I can respect.
The median gross pay among Seattle PD’s more than 2,000 employees 2020 was about $153,000, not including benefits, with 374 employees grossing at least $200,000 and 77 making at least $250,000
Income and proper mental health management as well as proper holiday/forced holiday’s post stressful engagements.
That’s a fun myth not at all backed up by fact.
My job is orders of magnitude more dangerous and I make less than an officer with the same amount of experience.
For reference average around here is ≈40k while an officer with equivalent experience to me is 90-100k.
What sort of job?
Probably a delivery driver.
One of the most dangerous jobs out there, and average pay is aright around 40k.
A fun hint would be nearly any job involving vehicles is as dangerous as being an officer and those involving dealing with people as well make that job much more dangerous.
Landscaping is as dangerous.
I mean it’s partially a myth in terms of pay, but I wouldn’t really be opposed to officers having more training, especially for crisis intervention, and shit like that, training for when they actually have to interact with people face to face, rather than pseudo-military tacticool bullshit.
I’m with you there but I’d go so far as to say I’d rather they be trained enough to earn the money they are currently making. I’m my state a barber has more training and certification then a state certified officer.
There should be a 2 year criminal justice degree requirement. It requires more schooling to be a fucking barber than it does to be an armed police officer, and a massive number of them couldn’t quote basic laws, let alone explain them.
I would also posit there needs to be at least 6 months of situational simulations in proper threat engagement and another 4 months in situation de-escalation training. The fact I had more peace-officer training as a combat arms trade is ludicrous.
There’s vastly more to being an officer of the law than just hitting the target range and that shows with the number of issues presented every year.
Any human with a job should have a living wage and proper training imo. Cops are no different.
I don’t think that training (of which they have a lot, most of it to my knowledge teaches them that they are at war with citizens and always in danger) is the entire answer.
We need to figure out what we want cops to do.
To my knowledge:
- Cops have no duty to protect citizens
- Cops can steal our property (in traffic stops)
- Cops can murder us with minimal justification and expect minimal consequences. Indeed even lawsuits are paid by the city and not the police budget
- Cops are immune to prosecution in most cases.
So, why do we have them? They seem to be an armed gang that waits for us to commit a traffic infraction and then write us a ticket and possibly kill us or steal our property. They have no duty to protect us from criminals or disasters and if they get scared and kill us, at worse they transfer to a new department.
I think we need law enforcement and police, but the current system is irrecoverably broken imo. They have had decades to reform themselves and haven’t done so unless under duress from a court. We need to rethink why we have them and what their job is. Indeed if we want them to have a dangerous job where they protect us from “things” and put themselves in harms way they need to be compensated properly, but I don’t think we can fix the current system.
I got off on a tangent, my apologies.
So, why do we have them?
I think it’s a pretty common narrative that police agencies came about as a result of slave catchers and strikebreakers, thought I’m not sure to what extent that’s true, and to what extent that’s been the case with, say, police in the UK, or other countries, who obviously still have police forces with different reputations than those in the US.
In any case, even if the narrative might not necessarily be accurate, it’s still somewhat reflective, to me, at least, of what police are supposed to do in the modern day. They have no duty to protect citizens, they steal our property, they can kill us, and they’re immune to the law. They are the law, is basically what it is. They are an armed gang, they’re an armed gang that the city pays in order to manage all other forms of violence which might happen in the city, even systemic violence which the city might create from, intentional or otherwise, resource mismanagement. They deal with the homeless, and mentally ill, and push them into a prison system where for-profit and public prisons can use them for free labor and generally lock them away into chaotic, meaningless, and authoritarian microcosms of society.
We also need homelessness to be rampant as a kind of threat, which we can levy against labor, since a population which can quit their jobs and go and still have a house obviously has more leverage against their employers, a higher capacity to unionize and strike. Homelessness also means housing is in more demand which helps drive up housing prices as long as you are trafficking the homeless away from the housing, when, otherwise, homelessness would generally decrease the value of the housing in a neighborhood since they would just kinda stick around, being, even formerly, embedded and tied to a community. Drugs need to be illegal as a form of protection on intellectual property laws, enforced at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who want to monopolize particular sectors of the market, and sell to our extremely privatized hospitals at an absurdly high premium. The police serve these interests, and more. That’s their purpose. They just exist as an extension of society and serve it’s whims. They exist, basically, to maintain status quo, good, or, in this case, bad.
Currently the police nationwide live up to the saying ‘police exist to protect home prices, not lives’
Cop pay and training is inadequate
For what though? That’s the problem. They have to do a lot of different things, and they’re not trained well in any of them.
They have to deal with homeless people who are trespassing. They have to deal with people having mental issues. They have to deal with domestic disturbances. They have to deal with violent crime. They have to investigate thefts. It’s really a grab-bag of different jobs, and they’re not trained well in any of them.
Making it worse, the training they do receive focuses on violent crime. And, in particular, the training is how to survive the most violent possible criminal who is actively trying to kill them. That’s what the TV shows are all about, but it’s not what the job is about 99.99% of the time. Only 27% of officers say they have ever fired their guns in their entire careers. If they’re always thinking about this worst-case scenario, they’re not going to be doing very well at any of the other jobs.
My city actually has a whole segment of cops who are unarmed that focus on the less risky aspects of policing. This specialization could help.
And from what I’ve been lead to understand from people who discuss policing issues in the US, cops are made to feel terrified of those ‘worst case scenarios’. Fear is instilled deep, deep in their psyches and it is pervasive in every facet of their work.
The money is only shit if you’re ethical. https://divestspd.substack.com/p/nearly-50-seattle-patrol-officers
Cops in central IL were making 100k+ easy in 2010. Who knows what that is now. It is pretty good money compared to similar training and risk.
Afaict the money is pretty good.
You’re totally right about the training though.
I haven’t done a nationwide investigation personally, just several areas I looked into and a couple that reached out toward the end of my service had dogshit pay for the level of stress.
They literally reject candidates who are too intelligent.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
It’s not that they don’t get enough training. They are trained to do the wrong things. A lot of their training is basically desensitizing to shooting at people. They are trained like soldiers: you see something - shoot at it. They should be trained in de-escalating instead. No additionally to the desensitizing, instead.
As a former soldier who has worked with officers they are 100% not trained anything like us.
Your comment is entirely baseless and comes from someone who doesn’t actually understand nor have any experience in either policing or military service.
“Desensitization” is not a specific course offered by either services. The entire point of training in military service is to ‘train how you fight’ there is NO desensitization training, there is training that promotes self control, self discipline and of course trigger discipline, learning when not to shoot is as important as learning when to shoot.
Police are given inadequate training in all avenues and if they had anything remotely resembling military training (especially our de-escalation and negotiation training) they wouldn’t be even a quarter as trigger happy as they are currently.
So in military you don’t train by shooting at human shaped targets? You’re not trained to shoot quickly at pop-up targets? You don’t have hand-to-hand combat training? What do you think it’s all for? Self control? BS.
Police does the same. They often run simulation after simulation in which they have to fire quickly at simulated people. It all serves the same purpose: remove the natural mental blockades people have that stop them from killing other people. Is desensitize them.
No need to get triggered. I’m not saying cops are trained as well as soldiers. Just that they often use the same techniques.
Shooting a target is not the same as situation control and personal control.
If I was triggered I would be lobbing personal insults at you, I’m trying to make you understand that you are slightly misrepresenting what both services train for and what access each service has to effective training.
Police do not use sims in the same way the military does, and in fact most precincts barely have any de-escalation training when you compare to combat arms trades. (Which I find unbelievably fucking stupid; a major part of RoE training is de-escalation and warnings, depending on the area and scenario of planned engagement [sometimes the rules of engagement note everyone in your area as hostile)
Target practice is maybe 1/100th of what is in military training and maybe 1/10th of what’s in police training (This should be reversed or at least the same). Sims are used to present a wide variety of scenarios to train when and who to shoot during stressful situations, presenting a note that officers have similar access to sims is easily one of the largest misunderstandings I’ve come across online.
We do not use round targets as it is unrealistic when training to fire on humans that either intend to harm others or the operator. That’s why we learn to group shots on human shaped targets, so we can effectively take down aggressors. (these targets neither present a dehumanizing training nor desensitizing training, it simply helps to better aim shots on a human target so those shots don’t hit innocent bystanders). The army then has negotiation and de-escalation training, then mix that in with simulated combat training of hostage situations, patrol situations, non lethal engagement situations while exposed or not exposed to various non lethal riot control measures [cs gas sucks to inhale btw] (usually trying to take a group of high value targets alive), point defense training and a significant amount of drills and stress training between fake and live munitions (which directly contributes to self control and discipline in tandem with a variety of drills). Police don’t get most of this and what they do get is not enough to be considered ‘professional’ in my opinion.
Negotiation and de-escalation training is incredibly important for both services, for when deployed and stationed as defenders in various allied locations, we have to work with local police or act as local police until locals are willing to be trained to police the area, and when trained our military personnel are swapped out over time with the newly trained police force. (because police should and need to be trained to de-escalate and preserve life whereas military members exist to defend and attack land points)
Military can train police members, but it’s not advised because, as you said, we are trained to be lethal, we do train with non lethal munitions but it’s not a primary requirement of our jobs and until I worked with a few precincts I had believed that police got a vastly superior ratio of negotiation and de-escalation training,
I also realize at this point when I am referring to sims you may not understand what I am talking about:
All units I worked with in the army had access to this type of equipment, not a single one of the precincts I visited or worked with had access to it: https://youtu.be/GdqPYYxomVk this is a public example of what I’m describing when I mention sims.
These simulators are extremely important but they are ridiculously expensive and a major reason why combat arms has them and cops tend not to (budget differences). A major oversight in the bill that allows old military equipment be sold to police departments is that these training sims do not appear to be included in the ‘old equipment’ list.
I would also posit the military requires more training overall and is not necessarily as trained as you might believe, they’re just objectively more well trained than police officers and that’s what I’m trying to note.
Police are supposed to be well versed in de-escalation and negotiation but a lot of their training is by incompetent civilian contractors (thanks police unions) who only understand policing (and military) affairs from movies and internet forums whereas military instructors are trained in house and need a wide variety of qualifications before being allowed to instruct others in ‘proper procedure’. In my own training we had about 7 civilian instructors (out of 53) and every instructor was a retired former military member with decades of experience (legit retiree’s that could beat down recruits).
Again, to note, this isn’t to insult or denigrate just explain the core issues I’ve seen from my own perspective both as a grunt by itself and as a military member that had to work with police on a few occasions for work.
As a final note I would posit that the largest issue holding back police from getting the training they require is the police unions that appear to be run by a mix of incompetent former officers and uneducated civilians.
Additional source examples: https://www.police1.com/military-methodologies/articles/how-a-military-approach-to-training-could-improve-police-skills-IlWt9UJET8X7NujR/ (I don’t completely agree with this, I think a lot of it is useful to police but they should prioritize life and liberty over aggressive action)
The following is a perfect example of a journalist misrepresenting reality to push their views rather than an objective view presenting what’s actually going on, however she does have several decent notes, it’s just that she seems to fundamentally miss the point in regards to de-escalation training and stress training to improve self control; additionally the author fundamentally doesn’t understand what a paramilitary organization is or does, and continually makes the case that police are such an organization when it’s either unwarranted or inaccurate but her notes about incompetent instructors following movie gimmicks is ENTIRELY accurate for the problems in police training: https://archive.ph/kZAeG
This is a more comprehensive explanation of simulation training and why it’s useful, I would also posit that how it explains the usefulness of the simulations also explains why current training in police forces (and some mil units) is not adequate: https://whatfix.com/blog/simulation-training/
The following link presents a comprehensive comparison between how a military member might have engaged a situation that police already did, killing the accused rather than engaging from a proper training form to de-escalate and capture: https://archive.attn.com/stories/9720/difference-between-police-and-military-firearm-protocol
You know, maybe more of a kind of theoretical, or heady point, I would make here, but I’m gonna make it anyways and then just kind of give you free reign to tear it apart, since it’s been on my mind for a little bit, and you seem like you know what you’re talking about.
So, desensitization isn’t an explicit course, but it’s obviously it’s still a factor in the training, right? To be able to be trained how to fight, you have to become used to fighting, pretty simple idea, you train for what you do, you do what you train for. Not necessarily desensitization to murder, mind you, just desensitization to shooting your gun and hitting human sized targets, you know. What happens afterwards is entirely circumstantial. But enough of me shitposting at you, in any case, you already broached that whole deal, and I don’t know what the military service entails in terms of conflict de-escalation or whatever.
No, what I really wanted to talk about was passive desensitization through language, through framing. It’s pretty common, and easily lambasted media literacy 101 type shit, to look at police headlines and kind of tear them down. A bullet left the officer’s gun and struck the suspect, right, rather than, oh, this policeman shot someone, type shit. One uses passive language for the officer, it was just a kind of cosmic event that happened, and the other one uses more active language. Partially as a result of a 24 hour instantaneous news headline news cycle, and partially because reporters are just easily willing to swallow and regurgitate whatever authoritative information they come across, these events are framed in such a way, and are framed, usually, devoid of external context. Events are described with passive language framing them. Events happened, that was it.
Now this is partially because there’s a pretense of objectivity, right, you just give the viewers the authoritative information, and what they decide to do with it is up to them. But this pretense is kind of problematic, because, you know, we’re not actually critically analyzing any of what’s been presented, it’s just a random event that happened, and then we push on and kind of uncritically assimilate it into whatever superstructure it is that we’ve evolved in order to deal with this very quickly. And which frame of mind strikes you as the one people are more likely to evolve in a contextually devoid vacuum? The one that’s simple, where they just say “oh, yeah, the officer shot that guy because that guy was bad”? Or the more complicated and emotionally burdening one, where they say “oh, because of the litany of factors that lead everyone to this moment through the long arm of history, that guy got shot by the officer, that kind of sucks and is a tragedy.”? So, without any real framing of the issue, with just presenting “objective” information, we can kind of just passively trust the reader to arrive at certain conclusions. If not all the time, right, then we can at least trust the majority of our headline-only stooges to arrive at those conclusions, which is realistically all we wanted to do anyways.
So, that’s a point I would also make for the military, right? We don’t actually have to charge, or frame things in certain ways, we don’t have to actively attempt to desensitize people to whatever they’re doing. And actually, it would be worse if we did, because then we would be focusing on it much more, and kind of playing our hand to what’s happening here. I dunno about how you feel about the WMDs in iraq, for instance, or the vietnam war, or what have you. Instead of looking at these wars and kind of thinking about them from the top down, though, the viewpoint is forced into that of a pure tool, you are just presented the information, and then you’re trained to respond, and the reasoning you’re doing internal to the process isn’t expounded upon. Sink or swim. People just are expected to evolve whatever opinions and viewpoints will help them to be more functional in the field, because they’re presented information that is just kind of, right in front of them, matter of fact, and it’s harder to think long term when you’re kind of swamped in a constant state of emergency or danger or, to put it more charitably, when you’re constantly processing information that’s right in front of you.
I’ve even heard stories, pretty commonly, where people get into the service, and then retroactively come to conclusions that “oh this kind of sucks I don’t think we’re doing anything good here”, and then they still continue to go along with it, because like, of course they do, what else are they supposed to do? They get dishonorably discharged, that’s gonna blow for any career prospects, you have to be immoral to do it, and you’re abandoning your squad. Are they supposed to pretend to be insane? There’s not really any backing out, there. You know, and that’s especially going to be the case when the only people who ever know shit about the military are the people who are in the military, you know, the people who are more likely to have evolved opinions that are functional to what it is that they’re currently doing.
Also a relative sidenote, but something that stands out to me is the use of acryonyms in the military. It’s like, fetishistic, almost. Theoretically, right, this makes it faster to refer to things in emergency situations, but then, people would just use codes for whatever they’re doing in those situations anyways, right? So I would think that the only thing it would really serve to do would be to save printer ink. More importantly, though, I think maybe it serves to obfuscate and isolate the military world from the civilian world, even more than it already is. Even to the point where you can start calling things UFOs, and then switch to UAPs, because they’re lockheed-martin in-camera phenomena from fighter jets, right, pretty obviously, and then mainstream media is like “guys, we have aliens. They admitted we have UFOs.” basically regardless of whatever you’re doing. Just because the previously internal, somewhat unprocessed information is public, and then the public can process it however they choose, basically. I dunno, shit just strikes me as weird.
In my experience we got desensitized on ops and during our ‘free time’ when the leading NCO would pull us aside and we’d watch videos of whichever enemy we were engaged against committing various war crimes on civilians and military members. Some stuff is in the public venue via sites like live leak (RIP) and others were very much in-house either as personal footage from their operations or footage from helmet cams usually used to review how the operation went and what everyone did correctly or incorrectly so we can improve for next time.
In regards to passive desensitization I wouldn’t say it’s overly explicit in the way you’re presenting so much as the humour. The humour we engage in is abhorrently dark and, to those that have survived perilous situations, be it in the military or in civilian life, extremely hilarious. However the level of dark humour, I would say, is what, out of everything, inadvertently promotes desensitization via language as well as passively teaching the troops a positive coping mechanism. The passive influence of language as you describe doesn’t really start to have an effect until several months into the deployment and by that time it’s likely everyone has already been ordered onto body detail and is thusly heavily desensitized by that point. (Body detail is easily one of the most negative aspects of military service and not really something anyone applying thinks about before they’re in the field and they’re ordered to deal with the remains, regardless of state. And I would say the desensitization peaks when observing the sheer number of civilian dead compared to enemy dead, especially in COIN operations (counter insurgency), these are the operations that current forces deal with and out of all the operations have the highest likelihood of doing permanent psychological damage, likely on par with shell shock from ww2. I would posit that many people begin to not only keep the fact the enemy is human at a distance but the civilians as well. Because if you don’t you will break from the amount of dead you see, especially the number of kids.
Now I do want to clarify that not everyone handles this well and everyone has different breaking points. Some people I saw break before the end of basic training quitting or, as two people from my own platoon chose, jumping from the top of the tallest building on the base or slipping a link (remove a 5.56 round from the belt of the training LMG’s) and go to a blue rocket with their service rifle and end their service prematurely. Others would last for years, offering to go out again and again, but I think, for those that have seen the most operations and, from my POV, were the most mentally tough, even they either chose to rotate out or were forced (by the chain of command) to rotate out of deployed duty after about ten years (usually becoming an instructor at this point given their wealth of experience).
I think it’s also important to note that no one I’ve met in the army sees themselves as a ‘good’ person. I think this objectivity of the self helps keep people grounded for a while. A lot of people in the army don’t ‘hate’ the enemy, they just see them as another individual with a job that’s counter to theirs. We could easily drink with or break bread with the people we kill, it’s all just a matter of circumstance and who lives is decided by the amount of training and luck the ‘victor’ has.
I think the military mindset is completely inappropriate for a police officer to have and would go so far as to say former military should only be SWAT or similar specialized officer team. I think, from my experience discussing these topics between military, police and firefighters that it should be a requirement for police officers to have a precinct councilour or psychiatrist in order to be able to have officers that engage in combat to keep themselves from dehumanizing people they don’t know which would make it easier to take life but also make it easier to break mentally.
In regards to media presentation of the facts, I agree with you that they don’t need to be like this, I think they should be taking an objective view entirely from both the officer and the potential criminals standpoint until a verdict has been reached by the courts. We don’t live in judge dredd and humans are completely fallible so I think automatically assuming everyone that dies (especially given some precincts proclivity for covering up the crimes of officers) is a criminal is counterproductive to the general public’ view on the matter as well as their ability to feel safe in their own country. While there is still violence these days, we are in one of the least violent times in human history and I think it’s important that the news reflect that, if not in content then at least in context. For the police presenting reports to the media, for sure they take a more objective view from the officers standpoint, especially these days, where the blue mafia is almost as bad as the green mafia (I wouldn’t say actual mafia more a reference to the influence of brass to have the officers or members essentially take a ‘fraternity over all else’ stance; although there is some organized problematic groups in both services). I feel that the media a lot of the time will jump to frame the individual the officer shot to be ‘as bad as possible’ in order to gain clicks, but this has become an issue as they keep presenting everyone that this happens to as ‘the worst of the worst’ without presenting any real nuance for what ‘bad’ or ‘good’ really is and people that take the news at face value seem to be parting ways with their education and accepting the world as a ‘black’ or ‘white’ world and not the ‘grey’ that it actually is.
You are correct in regards to the not intentionally desensitizing people aspect. Desensitization of the individual in service comes over time, regardless, and going out of your way to desensitize people in combat roles will inevitably end up with a German SS situation, where ‘orders over humanity’ reigns and improper conduct is swept under the rug because ‘the enemy isn’t human’. That’s an oversimplification and a particularly over-the-top example but the only military I can think of that had anything resembling desensitization training was the SS in the 40’s. The WMD bullshit about Iraq has permanently destroyed my trust of mainstream media. The fact journalists that were reporting on it got fired and blacklisted from the industry had me suspicious initially but when I did learn that all the lives we wasted in the end were literally over nothing more than the eurodollar market and oil company profits it marred my belief in the system. It further infuriated me that all investigations into the corporate landlord taking out a multi billion dollar insurance contract just before 9/11 just added more suspicion to anything I see now days, regardless of source. I only take peer reviewed research reports at face value these days and even then I wait until the report has been replicated at least three times by different and wholly unrelated parties before I trust it because even the academic industry has been tainted by constant fraud, willingly overlooked by various institutions in order to have their “prestigious” name on more popular papers.
“oh this kind of sucks I don’t think we’re doing anything good here”
Yes. Very much so. I would say most people that join, myself included, thought a good idea to serve the country was to join the army as an NCO, assuming the systems in place were not necessarily as problematic as some of the people in place. I learned some pretty rough lessons, as did hundreds if not thousands of others, and by a few years in we had all accepted that what we are doing is simply a job and if we don’t do it someone else will. There is an underlying ethos of ‘warrior culture’ that kind of gets ingrained in everyone over time, but it’s not necessarily one which everyone would admit to. I don’t know if anyone seriously see’s themselves as warriors, as much as paid killers, and I think this line of philosophy is what inevitably leads people to go to a higher paying position in a
mercenaryprivate security company. (A key chant we end up memorizing even before basic is complete “what makes the grass grow?” BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD) Most people I know that want a job with a guaranteed pension sign 25+ year contracts. However of the people I know in the military a vast majority of them do not renew their contracts. The first contract, depending on trade, is 3-5 years (unless you went for a specialist trade and had the government pay for your education then you’re likely doing a minimum of ten years plus) the second contract depends on your performance but most people are offered the option between 12-25 year contracts with an increasing amount of days off per year (and significant pay boos) as you increase your rank.On the note of acronyms I don’t see it so much as fetishistic as much as necessary. The considerable amount of information you are required to learn, even as a simple combat arms trade, is easily on par if not surpassing what I did for my double major. For people that don’t have a particularly sharp mind they need easy ways to remember the information and acronyms make things vastly easier for remembering various plans, ways of cleaning, rules for various situations, etc. Additionally, you can write all the acronyms down in your pad and just have those as your reference for what you need to do instead of listing out each word and using a ton of paper. Additionally if you get killed or captured and someone gets a hold of your notepad they’ll have a hard time figuring out what all the acronyms are, especially since new ones are made every day, especially for plans of attack and various forms of engagement.
Specifically to note the UFO/UAP situation, they did that so that they wouldn’t be associated with the mentally unwell within the UFO community
Also here’s a video for levity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMhhMx-yDQU
Interesting, you gave me a lot more than I was anticipating. I’ve had a couple friends in the military, and even in high school, it was pretty common for them to be watching liveleak videos and shit like that. I guess, yeah, it would make more sense as something that’s kind of like, that’s kind of something that people promulgate themselves, just sort of internally. People are a little bit fucked up, huh? I’ve also heard from them that it’s pretty common that someone offs themselves in basic almost every time, or you get attempted suicides, I think one of them was talking about some guy that tried to snap his neck with something heavy thrown out of a window, might’ve been a forklift, or something to that effect, can’t quite recall. I’d be interested to know whether or not that’s an abnormal amount of suicide, or if that’s just kind of the expected rates for what I would assume to be a heavily male subset in an environment where there’s easy access to firearms and a bunch of other potential ways to kill yourself.
Also I gotta ask, and I’m sure I could find this out via google, but do they still use quicklime for body detail, or do they have some sort of other chemical disincorporation that they’ve moved to? Pretty grim stuff, in any case. I don’t envy that, not a big fan of mindlessly digging a bunch of holes. Makes sense that most people wouldn’t be prepared for it, I’d imagine the smell is also pretty bad, in combination with the sight of it. People don’t really think about it much, but while you can close your eyes, or avoid trying to look directly at something, you can’t really shut off your sense of smell in the same way.
I dunno, it’s interesting because on one hand, the humor is used to inoculate you to traumatic shit, right, but on the other hand, it’s also a kind of like, if only aesthetically, comedically, the humor presents a kind of functional ideology to people. It’s going to propagate because of the environment, because it makes the job easier, and then the job is selecting for people who will naturally not be disgusted by the humor, who will find it funny, and, you know, the cycle feeds back into itself. Same shit as why rich people litter their house with self-help books, so they can get rid of their wealth guilt.
Also yeah, the whole like, it’s just a job, is also kind of concerning. Basically everyone I know that got in, got in just for the free college alone, which, you know, also having healthcare and a steady job right out of high school is nice, if you can swing it. I’ve never really encountered anyone, outside of old people, that kind of view the military as being something that they have a kind of moral calling to. If they do, that’s sort of a thing that comes as like an “also, I think it’s a good thing”, rather than their primary motivation. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, right, I would expect it to be a job, but it’s just kind of weird, mostly. It’s like an extreme disillusionment. I dunno whether or not it’s a good thing, to be able to morally recognize and then square away that, oh, this isn’t a great thing, right, we can dispel the illusion that we’re morally righteous and are fighting a “good war”, but at the same time, it’s just replaced with nihilism, and the effects end up working out to be the same. Such is our postmodern condition, I suppose.
Also, yeah the acronyms make sense, when you consider the amount of information, sort of a self-contained mnemonic. It’s self-referential, isolated, standalone, compared to calling, like, a cigarette a “cowboy killer” or something, which might rely more on external information. It’s a good point. I’m sure they have some sort of evidence based thing related to how they train it, but I do kind of wonder like, just a general thing, about the lingo, the jargon, of a bunch of different fields. Like how science uses latin all the time, or how engineering disciplines can call something a flange, programming calls shit bits and bytes, or folders and documents and desktops, since it’s all digitized bureaucracy. It’s fascinating because the things kind of evolve into whatever is functional for the field, but it’s also entirely and completely arbitrary, and things end up carrying a lot of baggage.
So I dunno. We moved from a kind of, and this was true of broad culture at the time, I suppose (maybe, I might just be an dumb zoomer idiot though), but we moved from a kind of culture where things were named relatively arbitrarily, right, nicknamed, or just named after whoever the designer was. Oh, that’s the jerry-can, oh, they have shell-shock, stuff like that. Now we have PFCs and PTSD. We went from picture boxes, to televisions, to TVs. I dunno, maybe that’s just a result of a kind of rapid systematization of things, everything needs formal codes that you can write down and file. Maybe a side effect of digitization, more than post-war. Maybe as a result of having so much information to digest, right, for the troops, but also it might be having so much information to digest even for the people actively working with it. Oh, we need a clever new word for this new thingamabob! uhhh, uhh, I dunno, maybe we just give it a kind of protracted, proper name, and then we just shorten it to an acronym. Easier than trying to give it a “clever”, natural name, that’s maybe going to rely on external reference or information to get across. We can just say the full name once or twice, and then have a self-referential piece of information we can refer to now, very easily.
Edit: also about the UAPs, I find it really funny that they tried to distance themselves from it by changing acronyms, right, but then everyone still basically did the same shit they did with UFOs to it, and just treated it exactly like a UFO. Word substitution. Strikes me as a very funny, especially military kind of decision to make about it. I don’t know why, but it does.
Yet the example of the sim you posted (the exact type I had in mind) is from police training. This is exactly what I was talking about: police using military style training and using it in way that desensitizes officers.
I’m not saying the training is exactly the same as in military, I’m not saying it’s as common. I’m saying that cops are trigger happy (as in the original article) because of this type of training. In many countries police are trained to shoot only as a last resort (or don’t even carry guns). IDK, maybe it’s different in US but most people have natural blockades preventing them from shooting others. That it’s so easy for US cops to shoot at people for me means that they are trained to do it. All the effort that goes into this type of training should go into de-escalation training instead.
I think it’s kind of a multi-tiered issue. What you say is true, but police are also kind of structured in the way they are in the US because we have so many issues that we basically use them as a band-aid for, so we spread them very thin and kind of go with a quantity over quality approach. Which hasn’t ended up working out very well, except in that, sometimes, and particularly for your white middle class neighbors that are going to call the cops for a noise complaint, cops appearing is basically the only thing that they needed to do. It’s just for security theater, just so you can have an interlocutor that can do all the work of dealing with someone else for you, at your behest. A cop is just kind of meant to be around in order to make your dwindling population of middle class white people feel safe, more than they’re supposed to actually make everyone safe. Such is why private institutions in a lot of places basically just have their own LARP cops in the form of security guards, who just stand around 95% of the time, and eat up way more in salary than they would save from product losses, or increased insurance premiums on product.
You pair this with the actual built environment in a lot of places, where cops have to be even more spread out than they otherwise would be, enforcing traffic tickets and shit like that, and it’s kind of an obvious formula for a shitshow. Even if you gave police departments just straight up more money, three times as much, you’d still probably see complaints that they’re underfunded, because they’d just spend all the money on hiring more people, and more equipment, rather than making a smaller number of people who are maybe better equipped to deal with, say, psychological problems that somebody might have. And obviously, in such a case, you’re not going to get a better return on investment, than had you, say, dumped all the money into infrastructure that could’ve benefited your community, created jobs, lifted people out of poverty, and decreased the systemic causes of crime.
