or has performance and quality always been an issue and people are now paying more attention?

There has always been questionable performance, but stigmatizing the professional has made recruiting quality candidates difficult. Several of the cops who killed Nichols had previous convictions... they were hired under a program titled "more diversity means less brutality" which lowered standards to get more diverse recruits instead of raising pay and training to grow them in-house.

youd hope there would be more lenny briscoes and Enos's and less John Coopers and only a smattering of Rosco Coltranes

Bammer and Bi_3 a point. This sort of thing never happened until the pandemic shrunk the work force and police forces had all the funding they asked for. It's probably just desperate hiring practices.

Heh, I laughed a little when I implied that police forces don't currently have all the funding they ask for.

Are you really implying 'defund the police' should now be read literally?


The problem isn't funding, it's that in many areas no one wants to be a cop:

https://www.actionnews5.com/2022/01/25/ ... s-bonuses/

So you end up with C-grade officers and then bad things happen. If you better officers then you need to re-establish a sense of pride in the job, like every other profession.

Memphis spends $280 million, or $420 per resident, to maintain a police department of 2,000 officers. Oklahoma City, a city the same size as Memphis, has half that many officers.

Memphis has 3.18 officers for every 1,000 people, compared to 2.43 officers per 1,000 people in Las Vegas.

This particular task force was organized just a few years ago, to the tune of $28 million.


Derek Chauvin had 17 incidents of accused excessive force in his file before he killed George Floyd. The “has a past history of“ part of a caught cop story is so common (and has always been so common) that it’s more surprising when it doesn’t show up.

Here’s my pitch: maybe the world really is just as simple as it seems. Maybe when you pay too many people nowhere near enough money to do a mostly boring job, and then you give that same cohort a position of power and violence-backed authority unencumbered by oversight, you are setting them up. You are building the house with the mold and rot already in place. By paying them too little and turning a blind eye to every cruelty you can plausibly deny, you are ensuring the creation of a professional culture that is more susceptible to corruption than the average bear.

Cops experience their frustrations, temptations, and corruptions inside an echo chamber of other cops. A culture of bitterness, self-entitlement, and hidden violence is always going to be capable of sprouting in a department under those conditions. Shared acrimony and reflexive justifications sour the milk of fellowship, as cops become more loyal to cops than they are to the ethical framework of their profession. Cops. Do. Not. Rat. On. Other cops.

Maybe “increase the police budget“ continues to not solve the problem because all by itself, it can never solve the problem. Memphis needs fewer cops who are much better paid and trained, and who are consistently fired or sent to prison when they misuse or overreach their given authority. Every city needs that. No one with 17 accusations of unnecessary violence should be on the streets, and no cop who stands there and watches their partner kneel on someone’s neck is fit to be a cop, either. A cop who responds to a call for help just a little bit slower today out of bitterness over some policing protests that happened the night before is a disgrace, and so are their salary and the expectations we hold them to.

I'm very sorry that people won't be cops unless their allowed to kill unarmed Black men with impunity.

C-grade cops have been the norm for decades. The problem isn't that cops have become shitty. The problem is that they remain shitty.

This thread started in 2014!

is that actually happening? i just thought it was a dumb slogan kids use

I agree that fewer and better paid (I think Bernie said something like 'Professionalize') is a plausible solution. The issue I see is that like any other employer, the cops will need a pipeline to replace those who retire or are hurt or commit a crime themselves, which means you need people to want to be cops. Particularly cops who are demographically matched to the citizens they work with (because like it or not that makes a difference in both directions). That isn't going to happen if it's "white supremacy" this and "slave patrols" that, just like it's not going to happen if cops won't root out corruption internally. It has to be both.

the easiest way to get people to be cops is to root out the problems instead of pretending no problems exist

each police department knows who the bad cops are, who the good cops are and those who are indifferent. just like any workplace. get rid of the bad ones and do a much better job screening future applicants

Just make sure none of the bad ones are pregnant before you get rid of them.

I could be wrong but aren't most, or at least a lot, part of unions? If so it makes it incredibly difficult to get rid of bad ones unless it's egregious.

The cops fired by Memphis PD could theoretically be reinstated by their union (if they have one) if they aren't convicted. Firing a cop takes a long time, and there's no way the department followed the contract mandated process to a T over a two or three week timeline. Public sector unions are a scourge.

I can't speak for every other city, but if Seattle is any indication ... yes. You may come to know the name Kshama Sawant in the near future as she is coming to a city near you. She was part of a very legitimate attempt to Defund the Seattle Police Department by 50%. She spends most of her time decrying the general life conditions for the "black and brown communities" and among the fallout from this defunding attempt was the resignation of Seattle's black female police chief. Congratulations.


Which applicants would those be? Per a comment earlier, it may not necessarily be about taking actual dollars away from police departments but rather the court of public opinion (depending on who you ask) surrounding the movement. Coupling this with vaccine mandates didn't help ... Lord knows how many fewer cops we have now along with firefighters, ferry boat workers, snow plow drivers, etc. Anyway, back to police. I have probably mentioned this before but I work with two former cops. One of them left the force in 2015 in his late 20's, knowing that he didn't want to spend his entire career there. He had seen too many lifelong cops that he just felt were generally unhappy. The other guy was only a cop for about a year or two, and quit around the age of 23 or so ... this was about 2 years ago roughly ... he didn't like being vilified everywhere he went simply for wearing a badge (a piece of shit cop’s actions in Minnesota shouldn’t translate to a cop in Washington that had absolutely nothing to do with it). The experience of the latter guy can be attributed directly to the movement. He's a fantastic guy, and the police force is worse off for losing him. I don't think they've exactly got a line around the corner of people who are as good as he is waiting to replace him. I don't know what the percentage is in any given city but I think it's pretty widespread that numbers are down by an appreciable percentage. Public shootings around here are WAY up. The state passed a law basically banning vehicular pursuits. When cops finally are able to arrest someone, the fucking court system lets them out the same day. It always seems like the perp in these stories has a mile long criminal history and never has to do any real time. Rinse, wash, repeat, people don't really want to be cops anymore. So now the departments desperately need to fill the jobs and may be taking people they otherwise wouldn't have taken. They are trying to pluck cops away from other cities. I got a buddy from college who would have LOVED to be a cop, but there's no way he would have passed the mental stability test (in my opinion). I worry that a department might take on someone like him these days.

Remake police academy. That was a great movie.

All jobs that you should try paying more before blaming society.

If you’re asking people to police the most heavily armed society on earth, pay them like it. Pay them well enough to live in the city they patrol. It’s silly to act like the quickest way to improve recruitment problems, retention problems, and candidate quality problems isn’t an increase in pay.

If you want to advocate for the police, advocate for that. People’s attitudes are never going to change as long as stories like this one keep happening. And stories like this one keep happening until we pay cops better and hold them to a higher standard. Without that we are stuck in a perpetual loop, and will still be doing this twenty years from now.

I mentioned in my response to bi that these stories always have a “has a history of…” portion to them. It seems like most of these headline incidents were forewarned by previous violent behaviors, and were only not prevented due to a need for reliable and capable staff. So pay for one?

You can’t come in here and tell me that nobody wants to be cops because the community didn’t choose to like them enough. What do you think you’re going to resolve with that argument? What is actionable about it? People’s attitudes towards cops will not change until stories like this are less often, less brutal, and less obviously preventable. You’ll never scold them away from that.

Here’s what immediately pops into my head whenever I hear “so-and-so has 17 prior complaints filed against them for unnecessary use of force”: a complaint isn’t filed every time it happens. In fact I have no idea how many times it happened. So many other cops must’ve seen it at some point. Seen and not done or said a thing. If good cops can be that at ease with bad cops, then there are no good cops. It’s like saying “she was a great teacher, other than helping to cover up whenever a colleague touched a kid.”

Now, I don’t really feel that way. But every time I hear a new story about a cop with prior reports hurting someone, you bet your ass I do for a few seconds. Every time.

That’s why the way to advocate for cops is to advocate for ways to stop these things from happening. That’s why people’s attitudes can’t change until the stories stop feeling like they are a part of our routines. None of this can stop happening until the people with 17 prior complaints are rendered unemployable. The people with 17 prior complaints won’t be unemployable until the job pays competitively. The resolution you want starts here.

My one firefighter buddy is paid well.

I don’t think ferry boats have much of an employee quality problem, I was just saying that is one of the industries which lost numbers because vaccine mandate, which didn’t help anything.

Yes cops, teachers, etc. should be able to afford to live where they work. Around here it wouldn’t be realistic (I don’t think) to compete with Amazon tech bro salaries and therefore I think the solution lies in targeted (“affordable” = “subsidized”) housing. Washington state is looking at re-zoning single family up to 4-6 units with incentives for affordable units. We can’t sprawl here. Locked in by mountains and water. Gotta go up.