Police Training has become a Danger to Americans

Yesterday I participated in a discussion with a group of Law Enforcement Officers ("LEO's") regarding the use of force.

What I gleaned from the discussion was nothing short of mind bending.

The complete lack of effort on the part of the LEO's participating to understand the mathematical and statistical implications of their assertions compounded by their dismal view of civilian command of military, police, and other civilian authorized use of force agencies left me dumbfounded and disgusted.

Society needs law enforcement personnel. We don't need law enforcement personnel that believe that their authority derives from any other place than the people that they serve. Violent crime is in free fall in the United States. Yet Law Enforcement has become increasingly militarized and desensitized. How did this happen?

This particular group of LEO's was using a video from a police killing from 1998 in which a man exits his vehicle during a traffic stop, acts erratically, and then reaches into his vehicle retrieving an assault rifle and engages in a shoot out with the officer. It appears that the criminal has either killed or seriously wounded the officer and then he drives off.

It is truly a grotesque thing to watch.

In looking at the video and listening to the commentary from the LEO's it occurred to me that using this video for training must be done with great care. Of course LEO's should be trained to handle the incredibly remote possibility that a non-felony stop could result in a lunatic jumping out of his car with an assault rifle. Yet no mention of the dangers to the rest of us from LEO's amped up and traumatized by watching such videos. The people training these LEO's must have a better understanding of statistical analysis and probable outcomes.

How many times per year does a shoot out occur from a non-felony motor vehicle stop? (Please... the response that "if even one shoot out"... is not relevant to the discussion of statistical outcomes. I understand that it IS relevant to an individual officer. That does not mean that the risk of Law Enforcement can be shifted to the citizenry, but of course that is precisely what is being tacitly suggested and accomplished) Now, how many interactions with "innocent" people are escalated into a confrontation? How many of those are due to the officer's stress and "training" (from watching such videos and training for the infinitesimally low probability that an officer will face such a circumstance)? Had it occurred to any of the LEO's that I was speaking with that the risks in any LEO/citizen confrontation are overwhelmingly borne by the citizen? And that those risks evolved this way because of the statistical nature of their training? Not even a little bit. These were all tough guys (and gals) not mathematicians or statisticians.

So what happened when someone with analytical skills approached them to think of this problem in another way? Attacks, insults, invective, etc... they were completely incapable of thinking about this problem in any way other than by training for more use of force and any civilian authority that did not see it their way was not supportive of Law Enforcement.

Something, the stress of this training perhaps, or a lifetime in a media soaked environment of violence in which Liam Neeson solves every problem (on an AIRPLANE!!) with a burst of gun fire, is making some LEO's act in deplorable ways towards the innocent civilians that they are sworn to protect. How many times have we seen videos of LEO's pointing their GUNS at people that were merely recording them with a cell phone? It happened so often that a U.S. Circuit Court had to make a ruling that doing so was a Constitutionally protected right and that any State laws prohibiting such recording were Unconstitutional.

Where was the outrage on the part of Law Enforcement that one of their own would so callously threaten the life of another human being? It was not to be found.

And there is another problem here.

Civilian authority needs to stop using Law Enforcement for tax collection, and Law Enforcement, if it wants to repair its image, must be a leading force for change. Whenever I see a local LEO's patrol car on an interstate highway doing radar duty I cringe. That officer is not serving his local population. That officer is serving his union's and the local fiefdom's need for more revenue. This is occurring precisely because crime is in free fall and the number of officers required to meet the security needs of the community is far less than the number on the payroll, and the rest of us are having to deal with unnecessary confrontations with LEO's, an event the average person views only 2 or 3 steps below having a root canal.

Law Enforcement has a problem here. The U.S. has experienced a rash of police involved killings and shootings of innocent and unarmed civilians during traffic stops and in response to 911 calls in which the caller's description of events is taken at face value and turned out to be nothing but drama - and another innocent person lies dead in the ground with no one being held responsible. Were all of these confrontations necessary to maintain order? The short answer is "No".

I had the poor taste to bring this up with these LEO's. Rather than listen to the view point of a politically seasoned guy with fair statistical and analytical skills I was confronted by an authoritarian know-it-all attitude. Sound familiar?