Sad but true: Many cops (teachers, firefighters, etc.) can’t afford to live where they work.

Answer my question McP. Would that be enough to support you as a basement dwelling virgin in whatever city you live in?

I think that’s terrible and insufficient pay. I honestly think everyone is worth more than that. But I don’t think it’s remarkable compared to other career pay trajectories. Even sinking tens of thousands into student debt gets you a median starting salary of $50,000.

What kind of benefits package does a cop get?

Insurance, retirement, etc. gotta factor that in.

As a cop literally everyone hates you. You get recorded every time you get in a tough situation. You have terrible work life balance. It's just not worth it. Which is why it attracts so many sociopaths.

Do you handle social media for the Raiders?

I have two former cops on my staff who realized they had to get out (under age 30) while they still could and start a different career.

yeah, why?

Excellent interview with the head of the Center for Equity in Policing on NPR tonight. I might try to track down a transcript.

One of his best points was already floated here by someone, that being that traffic stops contribute to a large share of violence between cops and civilians, and that we can probably just stop doing those and avoid a lot of unnecessary death on both sides.

Edit: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/22/989767998/psychologist-examines-what-a-rapid-evolution-in-policing-might-look-like

Transcript for your reading pleasure.

So everyone can just drive however they want? Drunk even?

No, more along the lines of you don't need to pull people over for expired tags and stuff like that, which is the vast majority of traffic stops.

This guy is a scientist who actually takes and analyzes data from the police at their request and helps them figure out reforms. His central point was basically "stop sending people with a badge and a gun to situations that don't require it," and I couldn't agree more.

I’m good with that unless the plate shows up stolen or owner has a warrant out.

Someone said earlier, maybe I saw it elsewhere ... take the plate, mail the ticket.

AI will probably deal with expired tags somehow

How do you track down those without valid registration to get them to pony up? Those that hustle for a living get their registration and utility bills in their mom's name. We gonna start fining moms for the stuff their kid's do?

Its hard for me to imagine a world where pretextural stops are not an effective way to locate those with active warrants.

Unless you want to fund the police 10x to do routine searches for those with active warrants. The criminal threshold for local law enforcement to actively check your place of work and your residence (if either are known to them) is fairly high.

It'd be ideal to get away from pretextual stops, but in under policed areas where local citizens are barred from actively protecting themselves or their property, its a license for petty crime. You have to be incredibly stupid or incredibly unlucky to get caught for a wide range of property crime when pretextual stops are prohibited.q

I dont expect you to defend someone else's position, but how do you know which stops do and don't require the use of force until afterwards? It often appears that experts make these types of arguments by working backwards, which is great is physical sciences like chemistry, but social science is an entirely different thing especially, in my understanding, in regards to the dynamic and rapidly changing relationship between black people and the police. In physical science, and work done in college psychology labs, it's easy to control and eliminate variables in ways that are impossible in the real world. It's why the replications crisis exists today. And frankly, using 2021 Berkley, California, one of the the most progressive places in the nation as your baseline 'cops like this and this is gonna work' example is ridiculous and this guy is clearly smart enough to know that.

Beyond that, there is a fundamental difference here between what is being prescribed and what a significant, if not the majority, of Americans think and that is that if you don't want to have fatal interactions with the police then don't commit crime. He touched briefly on this with something about making bad choices from a list that contains only bad choices, but I don't think most people see it that way. There are always better choices, it's just that some of them are unfairly much harder for some individuals than for others and don't result in identical outcomes (relative privilege), but they exist and one of them is dont break the law. We cannot just pretend that crime victimization goes away as the numbers go down when we stop prosecuting it. Maybe look at it this way, there are two ways to reduce interactions with police that lead to violence: reducing the amount policing being done and reducing the amount of crime being committed. There are far more people effected by crime (far more black people included) than by police violence. It's not even close. And ignoring the agency and behaviors of 50% of the parties involved in a foot/traffic stop while subjectively not enforcing the laws, won't do jack shit to make things better, it just changes numbers in some regression model. The people who are effected most are more than just numbers.

This argument breaks my brain.

Do YOU expect to be killed if you hang an air freshener from your rearview mirror? If you use a counterfeit bill? If you sell loose cigarettes? If you're in the park with a toy gun? If you're asleep in your bed? If you're jogging? If you're having a pool party? If your license plate tag is expired? If you yell at your ex-girlfriend? If your headlight is out? If you sell CDs on the street? If you're watching TV in your apartment upstairs from a cop's apartment?

No. People shouldn't expect to die at the hands of police unless they are immediately endangering the lives of others.

Agreed that no one should be expected to be killed by the police for jogging or lying in bed. And no one to my knowledge, no one was killed because they hung an air freshener or because they tried to pass a counterfeit bill. But ask yourself this: why do you know these examples? Is it because they are so common we have a reasonable expectation of them happening periodically or is it because they are so rare that their occurrence shocks us and sticks in our memories?



Here's older article from the UK that illustrates things:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 77046.html



So what I'm suggesting is not that that fact that 99.99998% of the time no one gets shot is good enough or that reasonable reforms are not needed, but perhaps instead of focusing on not enforcing laws, which will lower the police-involved violence stats (in the same way that a shortened season will reduce total passing yards) but favors protecting the perpetrators over the victims of those crimes, we focus on building environments where people don't choose to commit them in the first place.

I'm pretty sure B was highlighting that your argument, BI, always sounds very "white". And your response is no different. Maybe the cops don't need to patrol some neighborhoods so aggressively, and maybe that leads to a better environment.

And to be clear I don't mean "white" as a bad thing, I just mean you'd probably have a different opinion if you weren't. That's how I try to look at things.

The fact that I can make that list from memory means it is happening too often. I have really shitty memory. There are literally hundreds of unarmed black men dead for minor offenses.

And what was George Floyd killed for if not passing a counterfeit bill. Because he pushed a cop. Also, not a death sentence.

The .00002% should be broken down by race to be more meaningful to the current conversation.