> It honestly sounds like they are so self-centered that they only care about their arrest stats/job performance + personal safety. They care nothing for anyone else's safety if it gets in the way of their job performance numbers. That is a horrific concept, honestly.
If you think of them as undisciplined teenage boys in over their heads, given a job for which they have not developed sufficient levels of mental maturity and responsibility, it kind of seems less nonsensical.
> Rhoads, the Fairfax County police lieutenant, was upfront about this mind-set. He explained that it was standard procedure to point guns at suspects in many cases to protect the lives of police officers. Their firearm rules were different from mine; they aimed not to kill but to intimidate. According to reporting by The Washington Post, those rules are established in police training, which often emphasizes a violent response over deescalation.
Another teenaged boy in over his head.
Honestly, I lay very little blame at these people's feet. If you keep moving up the chain of command, eventually you will get to someone with the mental capacity to know this is wrong, and this is where the responsibility lies. Or, if this person's peers are so corrupt that he is literally powerless to do anything, then you move up one more level. Somebody somewhere is responsible for the way this is being handled, but it ain't the guys at this level. Expecting effective police policy to be set (at least entirely) at the local level is....unwise.
I'm not sure how the idea that we hand undisciplined teenage boys firearms and power over the rest of the population any less horrific than what I described.
I'm not saying it's not horrific, it just to me kind of makes this otherwise surreal state of affairs make sense. A grown man who doesn't know how to responsibly wield power to me seems extremely similar to a teenage boy not knowing how to properly behave with new strength and freedoms. Put a bunch of these similar people together with no responsible authority to control them, and you often end up with toxic and dangerous cultures.
If you think of them as undisciplined teenage boys in over their heads, given a job for which they have not developed sufficient levels of mental maturity and responsibility, it kind of seems less nonsensical.
> Rhoads, the Fairfax County police lieutenant, was upfront about this mind-set. He explained that it was standard procedure to point guns at suspects in many cases to protect the lives of police officers. Their firearm rules were different from mine; they aimed not to kill but to intimidate. According to reporting by The Washington Post, those rules are established in police training, which often emphasizes a violent response over deescalation.
Another teenaged boy in over his head.
Honestly, I lay very little blame at these people's feet. If you keep moving up the chain of command, eventually you will get to someone with the mental capacity to know this is wrong, and this is where the responsibility lies. Or, if this person's peers are so corrupt that he is literally powerless to do anything, then you move up one more level. Somebody somewhere is responsible for the way this is being handled, but it ain't the guys at this level. Expecting effective police policy to be set (at least entirely) at the local level is....unwise.