mikeylikey wrote: ↑Tue Aug 01, 2023 11:12 am
hector wrote: ↑Tue Aug 01, 2023 10:53 am
If the 25% training meant fewer lawsuits, it might be financially prudent. (NYC will spend hundreds of millions a year on law suits.)
And if less people were murdered or hurt, there’d be a moral argument.
The moral argument seems pretty obvious.
Fiscally speaking, if Derek Chauvin and the three other MPD officers were spending even tens of hours per month in a remotely sensible training regime, George Floyd does not get murdered on camera. Think about the savings to Minneapolis alone, let alone the country... Not just the civil award to the family, but the criminal trial(s), riots, lost time and productivity of public and private sector alike, and then lingering effects on the city. I would wager its in the hundreds of millions.
Jocko has made the argument for a long time that police should be training 25% of the time.
The military spends what, 100 hours training for every hour in combat?
Not necessarily practical for police as there is a lot more administrative busy work to be done but still. Tens of hours per year is way too far the other direction.
I’m glad you agree on the moral point. And would have expected you to. But there are huge swaths of the country that don’t. When a SWAT team throws a flash-bang grenade in through a window and a baby is maimed, there are no drugs, and the whole operation is based on bad “intelligence”, what sort of accountability would a moral system demand? Idk. Our system doesn’t demand much.
https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/us/georg ... index.html
(For sure there are more recent examples, but this one always sticks with me.) Politicians willing to do the things this way keep getting voted in. There are changes at the margins, with relentless abuse maybe shifting emphasis over time from low income criminals to Muslims to immigrants to whatever the current flavor is. No matter, the machine’s gears keep turning.
When you mandate LE enforce immoral laws maybe “morality” isn’t even a metric you can properly use.
What was the lesson that MPD officers took from Chauvin? Not to murder? Or not to murder on video?
Also, I’m not sure I agree with the financial argument I made in my last post. It was too hasty. Yes, I think better training could pay for itself in reduced settlements. But for a true cost/benefit analysis you would have to know the state’s desired outcome. Money is only a part of it. Further complicating things, “the state” is shorthand here for something too complex to easily describe (at least for me) in this context. Specifically, I’m thinking about public choice theory. What are the incentives and preferences of the prison system? Of private prison shareholders? Of police? Of the people in power who might benefit from a system that takes voting rights away, disproportionately, from poor and minorities?
Idk. I’m traveling with wifi only for a few minutes. No time to edit. Hope this is readable.