Ride Along

 It's that time of year again for one of my police posts... I've said it before, I'll say it again. Go on a ride along with a police officer sometime! Especially if you think that every problem with police could be solved by "more training" or "defunding police" or "just deescalating the situations" without ever even asking an actual police officer what their job is like. The best idea I have heard yet is for anyone involved in police reform to be required to do 60 hours worth of ride alongs. THAT will teach them so much more of what they need to know about their job.

1. Training. Could police use more training? Always. But at the same time there is no way to train for every situation they will ever face. You could pick the ideal amount of hours that you feel would sufficiently train a police officer and at the end of the day they will still make mistakes sometimes because they are human. They will still face life or death situations that require split second decisions that are near impossible to just train for. They make instant decisions that take months for a lawyer to make. You can make up ideal scenarios for a perfect world all day long, but reality is that the world is not perfect. It's sticky and messy and life is never fair. So they do the best they can to serve and protect the most people possible and to make the best decisions they can with the information available in that instant. It is not realistic to expect police to simply deescalate every person in crisis. They already have to get CIT certified, but there isn't always time when death of a human in imminent. Bottom line, policing will never be perfect. All deescalation tactics in the world cannot dictate how someone else will choose to behave. Police have to react to what others choose to do and when a suspect chooses to point a gun at an officer, it is not the officers job to die because they weren't able to talk someone down before a deadly weapon was pulled out. It is also not a police officer's job to risk bodily injury so you can safely resist arrest. Go to a virtra "don't shoot" training and see just how soon you would pull the trigger yourself before being killed. They do use of force training, defensive tactics, EVO, CIT, firearms, state law, criminal investigations, patrol procedures, first aid, and are required to complete so many hours of additional training each year. But still policing will never be injury less or be the desired outcome for every person involved. There will always be more to complain about and they will never win. Because instead of celebrating the one black girl's life that was saved, the headline will still scream about how cops are racist murderers.

2. Law Enforcement. Police are not the ones making the laws that they are enforcing. When a police officer shoots and kills a felon fleeing with a weapon, they did nothing wrong because they acted within the law. So instead of spreading hate about officers, use your energy to change the laws they have the job to enforce. Police aren't getting fired all of the time because they are usually doing their jobs correctly. The public just doesn't care to understand what that job is. Other laws that police have to work within include acting to save victims so that they don't get charged with dereliction of duty or failure to act. They can be sued civilly for negligence. So what would you like them to do? Pretty soon they will just stop responding to the calls and wait for the harm to happen and clean up the mess when it's all over. So hope it's not your child getting stabbed to death... But that is what will happen if society keeps letting the mob rule without even waiting for the facts of the case to be seen. That is how many other countries function. Qualified immunity is there to protect police when they have done their job right. It doesn't protect them when they have done something wrong. Getting rid of qualified immunity only decreases your chances of quality people wanting to apply for the job even more.

3. Quality Candidates. Something that would help police is if they could raise the bar higher on who they hire. But there is already a shortage of officers so yes, sometimes they have to take what they can get. Some are not of the highest quality, but they do still have to pass an extensive background check. Why don't more people want to be officers? Maybe cause they can't mentally handle possibly dying every day they go to work, maybe they are too worried about being put in prison for making human errors on the job, or maybe they prefer a lifestyle that requires more than 60K per year. You want officers to be required to have a degree? Well then, they need to get paid more money. Nobody wants to spend the time and money for higher education in order to only make 60K. After 8 years. With overtime. So where would the money come from? Well, your taxes would have to be raised. It requires MORE funding. Not less.

4. Abolish police. If you think that you don't need police it is because the police in your area are doing their jobs so well that you feel safe enough to get rid of them. That is privilege! Police make almost 400 million contacts a year. Media talks about what, like 20 of them? Those are quite a lot of contacts going right to never get a mention. What about all the times they do talk people down? What about all the suspects that do get to walk out alive? What about all the peaceful solutions and lives that are saved? What about all the times they didn't take the deserving person to jail, gave people the break, and the times they didn't write the citation?

5. Body cam. The problem with body cameras is that even when they show that the officers course of action was justified, society still wants to talk about how the officers were wrong. And maybe when you cannot see the entire context of the situation leading up to what the body cam shows it seems like it. Know what else the body cam doesn't show? The human emotions of fear, anxiety and stress an officer is feeling during life threatening situations. The ones that society, sitting in safety and comfort, second guess at their leisure. The body cam doesn't show that the man they are confronting has a protective order for raping the woman he has now come back to harass, with a knife.

You want to know what could improve policing? MAYBE ASKING A POLICE OFFICER.

Why are police officers TRAINED to shoot to kill? Ask a police officer.

Why do police not "just shoot once", "that is so unnecessary"? Ask a police officer!

It's police officers that know the lives that have been saved by being "too militarized" because they were there when 13 rounds nearly penetrated the windshield of their armored vehicle. And how the man shooting at them still got to walk out alive. It's police officers that get to respond to the call of a college girl with all of her broken limbs wrapped around the back of her body because a drunk driver decided to drive up the off ramp of the freeway. It's police officers that go to the calls of a wife that stabbed her husband one week and then get called back again to the same house the very next week cause he took her back and they are fighting again. They know about all the white people that also get shot and killed for choosing not to comply in a life threatening situation. They hold teenage boys while they breathe their last breaths because said boy decided to get high before climbing a mountain and falling off of it. The calls of schizophrenics that insist on suicide by cop, the calls of lost children and then getting yelled at for wanting to search the home first because that is where a majority of "lost" kids are found, the calls of a SIDS deaths, and the traffic stop where the car that smelled like weed insisted there was no weed, about 20 minutes before finding the weed... And that is just a sample from one week. Perhaps right before your traffic stop where they probably don't care to hear about the excuses for why you were or were not speeding. Because they ride a MASSIVE emotional rollercoaster every day and in the grand scheme of things being lied to yet again about the stupid things seems pretty insignificant. They have to just keep going to the next call and you have no idea which one they just came from. Makes it that much more frustrating that the criminals keep being defended. Stop defending criminals and start defending police.

The evil they see is the what, but the good they see is their why. Thank you for the good you do.