Florida deputy Jesse Hernandez screamed “shots fired,” and frantically fired his gun after an acorn fell onto the roof of his squad car, making him jump.
Unpopular opinion: Cop pay and training is inadequate. If you want professional cops, you need to hire professional people and train them professionally.
The only people that apply to become officers are morons and the power hungry. People with integrity don’t apply because the money is shit.
Any job that trades money for fraternity is a job that’s garbage. And boy oh boy are cop houses frats.
Vet as well that worked with a few police departments and was planning to transfer to a department post service.
I was completely dismayed that I had better training in every single aspect of policing than the departments I had worked with, as a combat arms trade.
A fun hint would be nearly any job involving vehicles is as dangerous as being an officer and those involving dealing with people as well make that job much more dangerous.
I mean it’s partially a myth in terms of pay, but I wouldn’t really be opposed to officers having more training, especially for crisis intervention, and shit like that, training for when they actually have to interact with people face to face, rather than pseudo-military tacticool bullshit.
I’m with you there but I’d go so far as to say I’d rather they be trained enough to earn the money they are currently making. I’m my state a barber has more training and certification then a state certified officer.
Cops in my area get paid about 70-100K USD yearly, but it’s a high cost of living area. Sergeants and above, though, make bank. We’re taking $120K and above. They’re just as shitty as cops in the sticks. It’s anecdotal, but I wonder if fixing income alone has little effect.
The other thing is that the bar should be for going over not under. They have standards for maximum intelligence and won’t hire people who are too smart.
That’s not strictly or universally true. Yes, there was a federal (SCOTUS?) case about that, I think for New Hampshire, and the rationale was that people that were too smart (>120 IQ) tended to get bored on the job and quit, which costs the city more in training. BUT I don’t think that all police departments use the same hiring practices.
I can’t speak for all police agencies, but over a decade ago I applied for Chicago PD, because I figured that it didn’t take much to be a better person and cop than Jason Van Dyke, or Anthony Abbate. The application test was pretty easy, except for recognizing faces (mostly because the pictures were photocopies that were 1" square). The problem was that they had a lot of things that moved you up on the selection process, like, did you have an immediate relative that was a cop, did you have prior military service, did you go to public schools in Chicago, etc… That meant that people with cop relatives ended up getting hiring preference over people that were smarter and better suited for the job.
In retrospect, I’m really glad I didn’t get high enough up in the lottery to get an offer; the more I learn about policing, the less I like police agencies in general, even if there are individual cops I can respect.
The median gross pay among Seattle PD’s more than 2,000 employees 2020 was about $153,000, not including benefits, with 374 employees grossing at least $200,000 and 77 making at least $250,000
There should be a 2 year criminal justice degree requirement. It requires more schooling to be a fucking barber than it does to be an armed police officer, and a massive number of them couldn’t quote basic laws, let alone explain them.
I would also posit there needs to be at least 6 months of situational simulations in proper threat engagement and another 4 months in situation de-escalation training. The fact I had more peace-officer training as a combat arms trade is ludicrous.
There’s vastly more to being an officer of the law than just hitting the target range and that shows with the number of issues presented every year.
For what though? That’s the problem. They have to do a lot of different things, and they’re not trained well in any of them.
They have to deal with homeless people who are trespassing. They have to deal with people having mental issues. They have to deal with domestic disturbances. They have to deal with violent crime. They have to investigate thefts. It’s really a grab-bag of different jobs, and they’re not trained well in any of them.
Making it worse, the training they do receive focuses on violent crime. And, in particular, the training is how to survive the most violent possible criminal who is actively trying to kill them. That’s what the TV shows are all about, but it’s not what the job is about 99.99% of the time. Only 27% of officers say they have ever fired their guns in their entire careers. If they’re always thinking about this worst-case scenario, they’re not going to be doing very well at any of the other jobs.
And from what I’ve been lead to understand from people who discuss policing issues in the US, cops are made to feel terrified of those ‘worst case scenarios’. Fear is instilled deep, deep in their psyches and it is pervasive in every facet of their work.
Any human with a job should have a living wage and proper training imo. Cops are no different.
I don’t think that training (of which they have a lot, most of it to my knowledge teaches them that they are at war with citizens and always in danger) is the entire answer.
We need to figure out what we want cops to do.
To my knowledge:
Cops have no duty to protect citizens
Cops can steal our property (in traffic stops)
Cops can murder us with minimal justification and expect minimal consequences. Indeed even lawsuits are paid by the city and not the police budget
Cops are immune to prosecution in most cases.
So, why do we have them? They seem to be an armed gang that waits for us to commit a traffic infraction and then write us a ticket and possibly kill us or steal our property. They have no duty to protect us from criminals or disasters and if they get scared and kill us, at worse they transfer to a new department.
I think we need law enforcement and police, but the current system is irrecoverably broken imo. They have had decades to reform themselves and haven’t done so unless under duress from a court. We need to rethink why we have them and what their job is. Indeed if we want them to have a dangerous job where they protect us from “things” and put themselves in harms way they need to be compensated properly, but I don’t think we can fix the current system.
I think it’s a pretty common narrative that police agencies came about as a result of slave catchers and strikebreakers, thought I’m not sure to what extent that’s true, and to what extent that’s been the case with, say, police in the UK, or other countries, who obviously still have police forces with different reputations than those in the US.
In any case, even if the narrative might not necessarily be accurate, it’s still somewhat reflective, to me, at least, of what police are supposed to do in the modern day. They have no duty to protect citizens, they steal our property, they can kill us, and they’re immune to the law. They are the law, is basically what it is. They are an armed gang, they’re an armed gang that the city pays in order to manage all other forms of violence which might happen in the city, even systemic violence which the city might create from, intentional or otherwise, resource mismanagement. They deal with the homeless, and mentally ill, and push them into a prison system where for-profit and public prisons can use them for free labor and generally lock them away into chaotic, meaningless, and authoritarian microcosms of society.
We also need homelessness to be rampant as a kind of threat, which we can levy against labor, since a population which can quit their jobs and go and still have a house obviously has more leverage against their employers, a higher capacity to unionize and strike. Homelessness also means housing is in more demand which helps drive up housing prices as long as you are trafficking the homeless away from the housing, when, otherwise, homelessness would generally decrease the value of the housing in a neighborhood since they would just kinda stick around, being, even formerly, embedded and tied to a community. Drugs need to be illegal as a form of protection on intellectual property laws, enforced at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who want to monopolize particular sectors of the market, and sell to our extremely privatized hospitals at an absurdly high premium. The police serve these interests, and more. That’s their purpose. They just exist as an extension of society and serve it’s whims. They exist, basically, to maintain status quo, good, or, in this case, bad.
I haven’t done a nationwide investigation personally, just several areas I looked into and a couple that reached out toward the end of my service had dogshit pay for the level of stress.
It’s not that they don’t get enough training. They are trained to do the wrong things. A lot of their training is basically desensitizing to shooting at people. They are trained like soldiers: you see something - shoot at it. They should be trained in de-escalating instead. No additionally to the desensitizing, instead.
As a former soldier who has worked with officers they are 100% not trained anything like us.
Your comment is entirely baseless and comes from someone who doesn’t actually understand nor have any experience in either policing or military service.
“Desensitization” is not a specific course offered by either services. The entire point of training in military service is to ‘train how you fight’ there is NO desensitization training, there is training that promotes self control, self discipline and of course trigger discipline, learning when not to shoot is as important as learning when to shoot.
Police are given inadequate training in all avenues and if they had anything remotely resembling military training (especially our de-escalation and negotiation training) they wouldn’t be even a quarter as trigger happy as they are currently.
So in military you don’t train by shooting at human shaped targets? You’re not trained to shoot quickly at pop-up targets? You don’t have hand-to-hand combat training? What do you think it’s all for? Self control? BS.
Police does the same. They often run simulation after simulation in which they have to fire quickly at simulated people. It all serves the same purpose: remove the natural mental blockades people have that stop them from killing other people. Is desensitize them.
No need to get triggered. I’m not saying cops are trained as well as soldiers. Just that they often use the same techniques.
Shooting a target is not the same as situation control and personal control.
If I was triggered I would be lobbing personal insults at you, I’m trying to make you understand that you are slightly misrepresenting what both services train for and what access each service has to effective training.
Police do not use sims in the same way the military does, and in fact most precincts barely have any de-escalation training when you compare to combat arms trades. (Which I find unbelievably fucking stupid; a major part of RoE training is de-escalation and warnings, depending on the area and scenario of planned engagement [sometimes the rules of engagement note everyone in your area as hostile)
Target practice is maybe 1/100th of what is in military training and maybe 1/10th of what’s in police training (This should be reversed or at least the same). Sims are used to present a wide variety of scenarios to train when and who to shoot during stressful situations, presenting a note that officers have similar access to sims is easily one of the largest misunderstandings I’ve come across online.
We do not use round targets as it is unrealistic when training to fire on humans that either intend to harm others or the operator. That’s why we learn to group shots on human shaped targets, so we can effectively take down aggressors. (these targets neither present a dehumanizing training nor desensitizing training, it simply helps to better aim shots on a human target so those shots don’t hit innocent bystanders).
The army then has negotiation and de-escalation training, then mix that in with simulated combat training of hostage situations, patrol situations, non lethal engagement situations while exposed or not exposed to various non lethal riot control measures [cs gas sucks to inhale btw] (usually trying to take a group of high value targets alive), point defense training and a significant amount of drills and stress training between fake and live munitions (which directly contributes to self control and discipline in tandem with a variety of drills).
Police don’t get most of this and what they do get is not enough to be considered ‘professional’ in my opinion.
Negotiation and de-escalation training is incredibly important for both services, for when deployed and stationed as defenders in various allied locations, we have to work with local police or act as local police until locals are willing to be trained to police the area, and when trained our military personnel are swapped out over time with the newly trained police force. (because police should and need to be trained to de-escalate and preserve life whereas military members exist to defend and attack land points)
Military can train police members, but it’s not advised because, as you said, we are trained to be lethal, we do train with non lethal munitions but it’s not a primary requirement of our jobs and until I worked with a few precincts I had believed that police got a vastly superior ratio of negotiation and de-escalation training,
I also realize at this point when I am referring to sims you may not understand what I am talking about:
All units I worked with in the army had access to this type of equipment, not a single one of the precincts I visited or worked with had access to it: https://youtu.be/GdqPYYxomVk this is a public example of what I’m describing when I mention sims.
These simulators are extremely important but they are ridiculously expensive and a major reason why combat arms has them and cops tend not to (budget differences). A major oversight in the bill that allows old military equipment be sold to police departments is that these training sims do not appear to be included in the ‘old equipment’ list.
I would also posit the military requires more training overall and is not necessarily as trained as you might believe, they’re just objectively more well trained than police officers and that’s what I’m trying to note.
Police are supposed to be well versed in de-escalation and negotiation but a lot of their training is by incompetent civilian contractors (thanks police unions) who only understand policing (and military) affairs from movies and internet forums whereas military instructors are trained in house and need a wide variety of qualifications before being allowed to instruct others in ‘proper procedure’.
In my own training we had about 7 civilian instructors (out of 53) and every instructor was a retired former military member with decades of experience (legit retiree’s that could beat down recruits).
Again, to note, this isn’t to insult or denigrate just explain the core issues I’ve seen from my own perspective both as a grunt by itself and as a military member that had to work with police on a few occasions for work.
As a final note I would posit that the largest issue holding back police from getting the training they require is the police unions that appear to be run by a mix of incompetent former officers and uneducated civilians.
The following is a perfect example of a journalist misrepresenting reality to push their views rather than an objective view presenting what’s actually going on, however she does have several decent notes, it’s just that she seems to fundamentally miss the point in regards to de-escalation training and stress training to improve self control; additionally the author fundamentally doesn’t understand what a paramilitary organization is or does, and continually makes the case that police are such an organization when it’s either unwarranted or inaccurate but her notes about incompetent instructors following movie gimmicks is ENTIRELY accurate for the problems in police training: https://archive.ph/kZAeG
This is a more comprehensive explanation of simulation training and why it’s useful, I would also posit that how it explains the usefulness of the simulations also explains why current training in police forces (and some mil units) is not adequate:
https://whatfix.com/blog/simulation-training/
You know, maybe more of a kind of theoretical, or heady point, I would make here, but I’m gonna make it anyways and then just kind of give you free reign to tear it apart, since it’s been on my mind for a little bit, and you seem like you know what you’re talking about.
So, desensitization isn’t an explicit course, but it’s obviously it’s still a factor in the training, right? To be able to be trained how to fight, you have to become used to fighting, pretty simple idea, you train for what you do, you do what you train for. Not necessarily desensitization to murder, mind you, just desensitization to shooting your gun and hitting human sized targets, you know. What happens afterwards is entirely circumstantial. But enough of me shitposting at you, in any case, you already broached that whole deal, and I don’t know what the military service entails in terms of conflict de-escalation or whatever.
No, what I really wanted to talk about was passive desensitization through language, through framing. It’s pretty common, and easily lambasted media literacy 101 type shit, to look at police headlines and kind of tear them down. A bullet left the officer’s gun and struck the suspect, right, rather than, oh, this policeman shot someone, type shit. One uses passive language for the officer, it was just a kind of cosmic event that happened, and the other one uses more active language. Partially as a result of a 24 hour instantaneous news headline news cycle, and partially because reporters are just easily willing to swallow and regurgitate whatever authoritative information they come across, these events are framed in such a way, and are framed, usually, devoid of external context. Events are described with passive language framing them. Events happened, that was it.
Now this is partially because there’s a pretense of objectivity, right, you just give the viewers the authoritative information, and what they decide to do with it is up to them. But this pretense is kind of problematic, because, you know, we’re not actually critically analyzing any of what’s been presented, it’s just a random event that happened, and then we push on and kind of uncritically assimilate it into whatever superstructure it is that we’ve evolved in order to deal with this very quickly. And which frame of mind strikes you as the one people are more likely to evolve in a contextually devoid vacuum? The one that’s simple, where they just say “oh, yeah, the officer shot that guy because that guy was bad”? Or the more complicated and emotionally burdening one, where they say “oh, because of the litany of factors that lead everyone to this moment through the long arm of history, that guy got shot by the officer, that kind of sucks and is a tragedy.”? So, without any real framing of the issue, with just presenting “objective” information, we can kind of just passively trust the reader to arrive at certain conclusions. If not all the time, right, then we can at least trust the majority of our headline-only stooges to arrive at those conclusions, which is realistically all we wanted to do anyways.
So, that’s a point I would also make for the military, right? We don’t actually have to charge, or frame things in certain ways, we don’t have to actively attempt to desensitize people to whatever they’re doing. And actually, it would be worse if we did, because then we would be focusing on it much more, and kind of playing our hand to what’s happening here. I dunno about how you feel about the WMDs in iraq, for instance, or the vietnam war, or what have you. Instead of looking at these wars and kind of thinking about them from the top down, though, the viewpoint is forced into that of a pure tool, you are just presented the information, and then you’re trained to respond, and the reasoning you’re doing internal to the process isn’t expounded upon. Sink or swim. People just are expected to evolve whatever opinions and viewpoints will help them to be more functional in the field, because they’re presented information that is just kind of, right in front of them, matter of fact, and it’s harder to think long term when you’re kind of swamped in a constant state of emergency or danger or, to put it more charitably, when you’re constantly processing information that’s right in front of you.
I’ve even heard stories, pretty commonly, where people get into the service, and then retroactively come to conclusions that “oh this kind of sucks I don’t think we’re doing anything good here”, and then they still continue to go along with it, because like, of course they do, what else are they supposed to do? They get dishonorably discharged, that’s gonna blow for any career prospects, you have to be immoral to do it, and you’re abandoning your squad. Are they supposed to pretend to be insane? There’s not really any backing out, there. You know, and that’s especially going to be the case when the only people who ever know shit about the military are the people who are in the military, you know, the people who are more likely to have evolved opinions that are functional to what it is that they’re currently doing.
Also a relative sidenote, but something that stands out to me is the use of acryonyms in the military. It’s like, fetishistic, almost. Theoretically, right, this makes it faster to refer to things in emergency situations, but then, people would just use codes for whatever they’re doing in those situations anyways, right? So I would think that the only thing it would really serve to do would be to save printer ink. More importantly, though, I think maybe it serves to obfuscate and isolate the military world from the civilian world, even more than it already is. Even to the point where you can start calling things UFOs, and then switch to UAPs, because they’re lockheed-martin in-camera phenomena from fighter jets, right, pretty obviously, and then mainstream media is like “guys, we have aliens. They admitted we have UFOs.” basically regardless of whatever you’re doing. Just because the previously internal, somewhat unprocessed information is public, and then the public can process it however they choose, basically. I dunno, shit just strikes me as weird.
In my experience we got desensitized on ops and during our ‘free time’ when the leading NCO would pull us aside and we’d watch videos of whichever enemy we were engaged against committing various war crimes on civilians and military members. Some stuff is in the public venue via sites like live leak (RIP) and others were very much in-house either as personal footage from their operations or footage from helmet cams usually used to review how the operation went and what everyone did correctly or incorrectly so we can improve for next time.
In regards to passive desensitization I wouldn’t say it’s overly explicit in the way you’re presenting so much as the humour. The humour we engage in is abhorrently dark and, to those that have survived perilous situations, be it in the military or in civilian life, extremely hilarious. However the level of dark humour, I would say, is what, out of everything, inadvertently promotes desensitization via language as well as passively teaching the troops a positive coping mechanism. The passive influence of language as you describe doesn’t really start to have an effect until several months into the deployment and by that time it’s likely everyone has already been ordered onto body detail and is thusly heavily desensitized by that point. (Body detail is easily one of the most negative aspects of military service and not really something anyone applying thinks about before they’re in the field and they’re ordered to deal with the remains, regardless of state. And I would say the desensitization peaks when observing the sheer number of civilian dead compared to enemy dead, especially in COIN operations (counter insurgency), these are the operations that current forces deal with and out of all the operations have the highest likelihood of doing permanent psychological damage, likely on par with shell shock from ww2. I would posit that many people begin to not only keep the fact the enemy is human at a distance but the civilians as well. Because if you don’t you will break from the amount of dead you see, especially the number of kids.
Now I do want to clarify that not everyone handles this well and everyone has different breaking points. Some people I saw break before the end of basic training quitting or, as two people from my own platoon chose, jumping from the top of the tallest building on the base or slipping a link (remove a 5.56 round from the belt of the training LMG’s) and go to a blue rocket with their service rifle and end their service prematurely. Others would last for years, offering to go out again and again, but I think, for those that have seen the most operations and, from my POV, were the most mentally tough, even they either chose to rotate out or were forced (by the chain of command) to rotate out of deployed duty after about ten years (usually becoming an instructor at this point given their wealth of experience).
I think it’s also important to note that no one I’ve met in the army sees themselves as a ‘good’ person. I think this objectivity of the self helps keep people grounded for a while. A lot of people in the army don’t ‘hate’ the enemy, they just see them as another individual with a job that’s counter to theirs. We could easily drink with or break bread with the people we kill, it’s all just a matter of circumstance and who lives is decided by the amount of training and luck the ‘victor’ has.
I think the military mindset is completely inappropriate for a police officer to have and would go so far as to say former military should only be SWAT or similar specialized officer team. I think, from my experience discussing these topics between military, police and firefighters that it should be a requirement for police officers to have a precinct councilour or psychiatrist in order to be able to have officers that engage in combat to keep themselves from dehumanizing people they don’t know which would make it easier to take life but also make it easier to break mentally.
In regards to media presentation of the facts, I agree with you that they don’t need to be like this, I think they should be taking an objective view entirely from both the officer and the potential criminals standpoint until a verdict has been reached by the courts. We don’t live in judge dredd and humans are completely fallible so I think automatically assuming everyone that dies (especially given some precincts proclivity for covering up the crimes of officers) is a criminal is counterproductive to the general public’ view on the matter as well as their ability to feel safe in their own country. While there is still violence these days, we are in one of the least violent times in human history and I think it’s important that the news reflect that, if not in content then at least in context. For the police presenting reports to the media, for sure they take a more objective view from the officers standpoint, especially these days, where the blue mafia is almost as bad as the green mafia (I wouldn’t say actual mafia more a reference to the influence of brass to have the officers or members essentially take a ‘fraternity over all else’ stance; although there is some organized problematic groups in both services). I feel that the media a lot of the time will jump to frame the individual the officer shot to be ‘as bad as possible’ in order to gain clicks, but this has become an issue as they keep presenting everyone that this happens to as ‘the worst of the worst’ without presenting any real nuance for what ‘bad’ or ‘good’ really is and people that take the news at face value seem to be parting ways with their education and accepting the world as a ‘black’ or ‘white’ world and not the ‘grey’ that it actually is.
You are correct in regards to the not intentionally desensitizing people aspect. Desensitization of the individual in service comes over time, regardless, and going out of your way to desensitize people in combat roles will inevitably end up with a German SS situation, where ‘orders over humanity’ reigns and improper conduct is swept under the rug because ‘the enemy isn’t human’. That’s an oversimplification and a particularly over-the-top example but the only military I can think of that had anything resembling desensitization training was the SS in the 40’s.
The WMD bullshit about Iraq has permanently destroyed my trust of mainstream media. The fact journalists that were reporting on it got fired and blacklisted from the industry had me suspicious initially but when I did learn that all the lives we wasted in the end were literally over nothing more than the eurodollar market and oil company profits it marred my belief in the system. It further infuriated me that all investigations into the corporate landlord taking out a multi billion dollar insurance contract just before 9/11 just added more suspicion to anything I see now days, regardless of source. I only take peer reviewed research reports at face value these days and even then I wait until the report has been replicated at least three times by different and wholly unrelated parties before I trust it because even the academic industry has been tainted by constant fraud, willingly overlooked by various institutions in order to have their “prestigious” name on more popular papers.
“oh this kind of sucks I don’t think we’re doing anything good here”
Yes. Very much so. I would say most people that join, myself included, thought a good idea to serve the country was to join the army as an NCO, assuming the systems in place were not necessarily as problematic as some of the people in place. I learned some pretty rough lessons, as did hundreds if not thousands of others, and by a few years in we had all accepted that what we are doing is simply a job and if we don’t do it someone else will. There is an underlying ethos of ‘warrior culture’ that kind of gets ingrained in everyone over time, but it’s not necessarily one which everyone would admit to. I don’t know if anyone seriously see’s themselves as warriors, as much as paid killers, and I think this line of philosophy is what inevitably leads people to go to a higher paying position in a mercenary private security company. (A key chant we end up memorizing even before basic is complete “what makes the grass grow?” BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD)
Most people I know that want a job with a guaranteed pension sign 25+ year contracts. However of the people I know in the military a vast majority of them do not renew their contracts. The first contract, depending on trade, is 3-5 years (unless you went for a specialist trade and had the government pay for your education then you’re likely doing a minimum of ten years plus) the second contract depends on your performance but most people are offered the option between 12-25 year contracts with an increasing amount of days off per year (and significant pay boos) as you increase your rank.
On the note of acronyms I don’t see it so much as fetishistic as much as necessary. The considerable amount of information you are required to learn, even as a simple combat arms trade, is easily on par if not surpassing what I did for my double major. For people that don’t have a particularly sharp mind they need easy ways to remember the information and acronyms make things vastly easier for remembering various plans, ways of cleaning, rules for various situations, etc. Additionally, you can write all the acronyms down in your pad and just have those as your reference for what you need to do instead of listing out each word and using a ton of paper. Additionally if you get killed or captured and someone gets a hold of your notepad they’ll have a hard time figuring out what all the acronyms are, especially since new ones are made every day, especially for plans of attack and various forms of engagement.
Specifically to note the UFO/UAP situation, they did that so that they wouldn’t be associated with the mentally unwell within the UFO community
Interesting, you gave me a lot more than I was anticipating. I’ve had a couple friends in the military, and even in high school, it was pretty common for them to be watching liveleak videos and shit like that. I guess, yeah, it would make more sense as something that’s kind of like, that’s kind of something that people promulgate themselves, just sort of internally. People are a little bit fucked up, huh? I’ve also heard from them that it’s pretty common that someone offs themselves in basic almost every time, or you get attempted suicides, I think one of them was talking about some guy that tried to snap his neck with something heavy thrown out of a window, might’ve been a forklift, or something to that effect, can’t quite recall. I’d be interested to know whether or not that’s an abnormal amount of suicide, or if that’s just kind of the expected rates for what I would assume to be a heavily male subset in an environment where there’s easy access to firearms and a bunch of other potential ways to kill yourself.
Also I gotta ask, and I’m sure I could find this out via google, but do they still use quicklime for body detail, or do they have some sort of other chemical disincorporation that they’ve moved to? Pretty grim stuff, in any case. I don’t envy that, not a big fan of mindlessly digging a bunch of holes. Makes sense that most people wouldn’t be prepared for it, I’d imagine the smell is also pretty bad, in combination with the sight of it. People don’t really think about it much, but while you can close your eyes, or avoid trying to look directly at something, you can’t really shut off your sense of smell in the same way.
I dunno, it’s interesting because on one hand, the humor is used to inoculate you to traumatic shit, right, but on the other hand, it’s also a kind of like, if only aesthetically, comedically, the humor presents a kind of functional ideology to people. It’s going to propagate because of the environment, because it makes the job easier, and then the job is selecting for people who will naturally not be disgusted by the humor, who will find it funny, and, you know, the cycle feeds back into itself. Same shit as why rich people litter their house with self-help books, so they can get rid of their wealth guilt.
Also yeah, the whole like, it’s just a job, is also kind of concerning. Basically everyone I know that got in, got in just for the free college alone, which, you know, also having healthcare and a steady job right out of high school is nice, if you can swing it. I’ve never really encountered anyone, outside of old people, that kind of view the military as being something that they have a kind of moral calling to. If they do, that’s sort of a thing that comes as like an “also, I think it’s a good thing”, rather than their primary motivation. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, right, I would expect it to be a job, but it’s just kind of weird, mostly. It’s like an extreme disillusionment. I dunno whether or not it’s a good thing, to be able to morally recognize and then square away that, oh, this isn’t a great thing, right, we can dispel the illusion that we’re morally righteous and are fighting a “good war”, but at the same time, it’s just replaced with nihilism, and the effects end up working out to be the same. Such is our postmodern condition, I suppose.
Also, yeah the acronyms make sense, when you consider the amount of information, sort of a self-contained mnemonic. It’s self-referential, isolated, standalone, compared to calling, like, a cigarette a “cowboy killer” or something, which might rely more on external information. It’s a good point. I’m sure they have some sort of evidence based thing related to how they train it, but I do kind of wonder like, just a general thing, about the lingo, the jargon, of a bunch of different fields. Like how science uses latin all the time, or how engineering disciplines can call something a flange, programming calls shit bits and bytes, or folders and documents and desktops, since it’s all digitized bureaucracy. It’s fascinating because the things kind of evolve into whatever is functional for the field, but it’s also entirely and completely arbitrary, and things end up carrying a lot of baggage.
So I dunno. We moved from a kind of, and this was true of broad culture at the time, I suppose (maybe, I might just be an dumb zoomer idiot though), but we moved from a kind of culture where things were named relatively arbitrarily, right, nicknamed, or just named after whoever the designer was. Oh, that’s the jerry-can, oh, they have shell-shock, stuff like that. Now we have PFCs and PTSD. We went from picture boxes, to televisions, to TVs. I dunno, maybe that’s just a result of a kind of rapid systematization of things, everything needs formal codes that you can write down and file. Maybe a side effect of digitization, more than post-war. Maybe as a result of having so much information to digest, right, for the troops, but also it might be having so much information to digest even for the people actively working with it. Oh, we need a clever new word for this new thingamabob! uhhh, uhh, I dunno, maybe we just give it a kind of protracted, proper name, and then we just shorten it to an acronym. Easier than trying to give it a “clever”, natural name, that’s maybe going to rely on external reference or information to get across. We can just say the full name once or twice, and then have a self-referential piece of information we can refer to now, very easily.
Edit: also about the UAPs, I find it really funny that they tried to distance themselves from it by changing acronyms, right, but then everyone still basically did the same shit they did with UFOs to it, and just treated it exactly like a UFO. Word substitution. Strikes me as a very funny, especially military kind of decision to make about it. I don’t know why, but it does.
Yet the example of the sim you posted (the exact type I had in mind) is from police training. This is exactly what I was talking about: police using military style training and using it in way that desensitizes officers.
I’m not saying the training is exactly the same as in military, I’m not saying it’s as common. I’m saying that cops are trigger happy (as in the original article) because of this type of training. In many countries police are trained to shoot only as a last resort (or don’t even carry guns). IDK, maybe it’s different in US but most people have natural blockades preventing them from shooting others. That it’s so easy for US cops to shoot at people for me means that they are trained to do it. All the effort that goes into this type of training should go into de-escalation training instead.
I think it’s kind of a multi-tiered issue. What you say is true, but police are also kind of structured in the way they are in the US because we have so many issues that we basically use them as a band-aid for, so we spread them very thin and kind of go with a quantity over quality approach. Which hasn’t ended up working out very well, except in that, sometimes, and particularly for your white middle class neighbors that are going to call the cops for a noise complaint, cops appearing is basically the only thing that they needed to do. It’s just for security theater, just so you can have an interlocutor that can do all the work of dealing with someone else for you, at your behest. A cop is just kind of meant to be around in order to make your dwindling population of middle class white people feel safe, more than they’re supposed to actually make everyone safe. Such is why private institutions in a lot of places basically just have their own LARP cops in the form of security guards, who just stand around 95% of the time, and eat up way more in salary than they would save from product losses, or increased insurance premiums on product.
You pair this with the actual built environment in a lot of places, where cops have to be even more spread out than they otherwise would be, enforcing traffic tickets and shit like that, and it’s kind of an obvious formula for a shitshow. Even if you gave police departments just straight up more money, three times as much, you’d still probably see complaints that they’re underfunded, because they’d just spend all the money on hiring more people, and more equipment, rather than making a smaller number of people who are maybe better equipped to deal with, say, psychological problems that somebody might have. And obviously, in such a case, you’re not going to get a better return on investment, than had you, say, dumped all the money into infrastructure that could’ve benefited your community, created jobs, lifted people out of poverty, and decreased the systemic causes of crime.
Unpopular opinion: Cop pay and training is inadequate. If you want professional cops, you need to hire professional people and train them professionally. The only people that apply to become officers are morons and the power hungry. People with integrity don’t apply because the money is shit.
Any job that trades money for fraternity is a job that’s garbage. And boy oh boy are cop houses frats.
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OFFICER DOWN!!
I see what you did there. Bravo.
Vet as well that worked with a few police departments and was planning to transfer to a department post service. I was completely dismayed that I had better training in every single aspect of policing than the departments I had worked with, as a combat arms trade.
Needless to say, but I didn’t become a cop.
The fire service also usually gives preference points to veterans.
Although I don’t know why anyone would want higher pay, better benefits, and people not hating them.
they dont want professional cops.
They want hyper aggressive bullies that have no problem with getting down and dirty with the corruption.
Profesionals would be a threat to cops. Which is why they try so hard not to hire anyone that would actually be qualified for such work.
That’s a fun myth not at all backed up by fact.
My job is orders of magnitude more dangerous and I make less than an officer with the same amount of experience.
For reference average around here is ≈40k while an officer with equivalent experience to me is 90-100k.
What sort of job?
Probably a delivery driver.
One of the most dangerous jobs out there, and average pay is aright around 40k.
A fun hint would be nearly any job involving vehicles is as dangerous as being an officer and those involving dealing with people as well make that job much more dangerous.
Landscaping is as dangerous.
I mean it’s partially a myth in terms of pay, but I wouldn’t really be opposed to officers having more training, especially for crisis intervention, and shit like that, training for when they actually have to interact with people face to face, rather than pseudo-military tacticool bullshit.
I’m with you there but I’d go so far as to say I’d rather they be trained enough to earn the money they are currently making. I’m my state a barber has more training and certification then a state certified officer.
Cops in my area get paid about 70-100K USD yearly, but it’s a high cost of living area. Sergeants and above, though, make bank. We’re taking $120K and above. They’re just as shitty as cops in the sticks. It’s anecdotal, but I wonder if fixing income alone has little effect.
Low bar and high pay? Huh.
Yeahhh they need a higher bar. And then the pay to match that.
The other thing is that the bar should be for going over not under. They have standards for maximum intelligence and won’t hire people who are too smart.
That’s not strictly or universally true. Yes, there was a federal (SCOTUS?) case about that, I think for New Hampshire, and the rationale was that people that were too smart (>120 IQ) tended to get bored on the job and quit, which costs the city more in training. BUT I don’t think that all police departments use the same hiring practices.
I can’t speak for all police agencies, but over a decade ago I applied for Chicago PD, because I figured that it didn’t take much to be a better person and cop than Jason Van Dyke, or Anthony Abbate. The application test was pretty easy, except for recognizing faces (mostly because the pictures were photocopies that were 1" square). The problem was that they had a lot of things that moved you up on the selection process, like, did you have an immediate relative that was a cop, did you have prior military service, did you go to public schools in Chicago, etc… That meant that people with cop relatives ended up getting hiring preference over people that were smarter and better suited for the job.
In retrospect, I’m really glad I didn’t get high enough up in the lottery to get an offer; the more I learn about policing, the less I like police agencies in general, even if there are individual cops I can respect.
The median gross pay among Seattle PD’s more than 2,000 employees 2020 was about $153,000, not including benefits, with 374 employees grossing at least $200,000 and 77 making at least $250,000
Income and proper mental health management as well as proper holiday/forced holiday’s post stressful engagements.
There should be a 2 year criminal justice degree requirement. It requires more schooling to be a fucking barber than it does to be an armed police officer, and a massive number of them couldn’t quote basic laws, let alone explain them.
I would also posit there needs to be at least 6 months of situational simulations in proper threat engagement and another 4 months in situation de-escalation training. The fact I had more peace-officer training as a combat arms trade is ludicrous.
There’s vastly more to being an officer of the law than just hitting the target range and that shows with the number of issues presented every year.
For what though? That’s the problem. They have to do a lot of different things, and they’re not trained well in any of them.
They have to deal with homeless people who are trespassing. They have to deal with people having mental issues. They have to deal with domestic disturbances. They have to deal with violent crime. They have to investigate thefts. It’s really a grab-bag of different jobs, and they’re not trained well in any of them.
Making it worse, the training they do receive focuses on violent crime. And, in particular, the training is how to survive the most violent possible criminal who is actively trying to kill them. That’s what the TV shows are all about, but it’s not what the job is about 99.99% of the time. Only 27% of officers say they have ever fired their guns in their entire careers. If they’re always thinking about this worst-case scenario, they’re not going to be doing very well at any of the other jobs.
And from what I’ve been lead to understand from people who discuss policing issues in the US, cops are made to feel terrified of those ‘worst case scenarios’. Fear is instilled deep, deep in their psyches and it is pervasive in every facet of their work.
Any human with a job should have a living wage and proper training imo. Cops are no different.
I don’t think that training (of which they have a lot, most of it to my knowledge teaches them that they are at war with citizens and always in danger) is the entire answer.
We need to figure out what we want cops to do.
To my knowledge:
So, why do we have them? They seem to be an armed gang that waits for us to commit a traffic infraction and then write us a ticket and possibly kill us or steal our property. They have no duty to protect us from criminals or disasters and if they get scared and kill us, at worse they transfer to a new department.
I think we need law enforcement and police, but the current system is irrecoverably broken imo. They have had decades to reform themselves and haven’t done so unless under duress from a court. We need to rethink why we have them and what their job is. Indeed if we want them to have a dangerous job where they protect us from “things” and put themselves in harms way they need to be compensated properly, but I don’t think we can fix the current system.
I got off on a tangent, my apologies.
I think it’s a pretty common narrative that police agencies came about as a result of slave catchers and strikebreakers, thought I’m not sure to what extent that’s true, and to what extent that’s been the case with, say, police in the UK, or other countries, who obviously still have police forces with different reputations than those in the US.
In any case, even if the narrative might not necessarily be accurate, it’s still somewhat reflective, to me, at least, of what police are supposed to do in the modern day. They have no duty to protect citizens, they steal our property, they can kill us, and they’re immune to the law. They are the law, is basically what it is. They are an armed gang, they’re an armed gang that the city pays in order to manage all other forms of violence which might happen in the city, even systemic violence which the city might create from, intentional or otherwise, resource mismanagement. They deal with the homeless, and mentally ill, and push them into a prison system where for-profit and public prisons can use them for free labor and generally lock them away into chaotic, meaningless, and authoritarian microcosms of society.
We also need homelessness to be rampant as a kind of threat, which we can levy against labor, since a population which can quit their jobs and go and still have a house obviously has more leverage against their employers, a higher capacity to unionize and strike. Homelessness also means housing is in more demand which helps drive up housing prices as long as you are trafficking the homeless away from the housing, when, otherwise, homelessness would generally decrease the value of the housing in a neighborhood since they would just kinda stick around, being, even formerly, embedded and tied to a community. Drugs need to be illegal as a form of protection on intellectual property laws, enforced at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who want to monopolize particular sectors of the market, and sell to our extremely privatized hospitals at an absurdly high premium. The police serve these interests, and more. That’s their purpose. They just exist as an extension of society and serve it’s whims. They exist, basically, to maintain status quo, good, or, in this case, bad.
Currently the police nationwide live up to the saying ‘police exist to protect home prices, not lives’
The money is only shit if you’re ethical. https://divestspd.substack.com/p/nearly-50-seattle-patrol-officers
Cops in central IL were making 100k+ easy in 2010. Who knows what that is now. It is pretty good money compared to similar training and risk.
Afaict the money is pretty good.
You’re totally right about the training though.
I haven’t done a nationwide investigation personally, just several areas I looked into and a couple that reached out toward the end of my service had dogshit pay for the level of stress.
They literally reject candidates who are too intelligent.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
It’s not that they don’t get enough training. They are trained to do the wrong things. A lot of their training is basically desensitizing to shooting at people. They are trained like soldiers: you see something - shoot at it. They should be trained in de-escalating instead. No additionally to the desensitizing, instead.
As a former soldier who has worked with officers they are 100% not trained anything like us.
Your comment is entirely baseless and comes from someone who doesn’t actually understand nor have any experience in either policing or military service.
“Desensitization” is not a specific course offered by either services. The entire point of training in military service is to ‘train how you fight’ there is NO desensitization training, there is training that promotes self control, self discipline and of course trigger discipline, learning when not to shoot is as important as learning when to shoot.
Police are given inadequate training in all avenues and if they had anything remotely resembling military training (especially our de-escalation and negotiation training) they wouldn’t be even a quarter as trigger happy as they are currently.
So in military you don’t train by shooting at human shaped targets? You’re not trained to shoot quickly at pop-up targets? You don’t have hand-to-hand combat training? What do you think it’s all for? Self control? BS.
Police does the same. They often run simulation after simulation in which they have to fire quickly at simulated people. It all serves the same purpose: remove the natural mental blockades people have that stop them from killing other people. Is desensitize them.
No need to get triggered. I’m not saying cops are trained as well as soldiers. Just that they often use the same techniques.
Shooting a target is not the same as situation control and personal control.
If I was triggered I would be lobbing personal insults at you, I’m trying to make you understand that you are slightly misrepresenting what both services train for and what access each service has to effective training.
Police do not use sims in the same way the military does, and in fact most precincts barely have any de-escalation training when you compare to combat arms trades. (Which I find unbelievably fucking stupid; a major part of RoE training is de-escalation and warnings, depending on the area and scenario of planned engagement [sometimes the rules of engagement note everyone in your area as hostile)
Target practice is maybe 1/100th of what is in military training and maybe 1/10th of what’s in police training (This should be reversed or at least the same). Sims are used to present a wide variety of scenarios to train when and who to shoot during stressful situations, presenting a note that officers have similar access to sims is easily one of the largest misunderstandings I’ve come across online.
We do not use round targets as it is unrealistic when training to fire on humans that either intend to harm others or the operator. That’s why we learn to group shots on human shaped targets, so we can effectively take down aggressors. (these targets neither present a dehumanizing training nor desensitizing training, it simply helps to better aim shots on a human target so those shots don’t hit innocent bystanders). The army then has negotiation and de-escalation training, then mix that in with simulated combat training of hostage situations, patrol situations, non lethal engagement situations while exposed or not exposed to various non lethal riot control measures [cs gas sucks to inhale btw] (usually trying to take a group of high value targets alive), point defense training and a significant amount of drills and stress training between fake and live munitions (which directly contributes to self control and discipline in tandem with a variety of drills). Police don’t get most of this and what they do get is not enough to be considered ‘professional’ in my opinion.
Negotiation and de-escalation training is incredibly important for both services, for when deployed and stationed as defenders in various allied locations, we have to work with local police or act as local police until locals are willing to be trained to police the area, and when trained our military personnel are swapped out over time with the newly trained police force. (because police should and need to be trained to de-escalate and preserve life whereas military members exist to defend and attack land points)
Military can train police members, but it’s not advised because, as you said, we are trained to be lethal, we do train with non lethal munitions but it’s not a primary requirement of our jobs and until I worked with a few precincts I had believed that police got a vastly superior ratio of negotiation and de-escalation training,
I also realize at this point when I am referring to sims you may not understand what I am talking about:
All units I worked with in the army had access to this type of equipment, not a single one of the precincts I visited or worked with had access to it: https://youtu.be/GdqPYYxomVk this is a public example of what I’m describing when I mention sims.
These simulators are extremely important but they are ridiculously expensive and a major reason why combat arms has them and cops tend not to (budget differences). A major oversight in the bill that allows old military equipment be sold to police departments is that these training sims do not appear to be included in the ‘old equipment’ list.
I would also posit the military requires more training overall and is not necessarily as trained as you might believe, they’re just objectively more well trained than police officers and that’s what I’m trying to note.
Police are supposed to be well versed in de-escalation and negotiation but a lot of their training is by incompetent civilian contractors (thanks police unions) who only understand policing (and military) affairs from movies and internet forums whereas military instructors are trained in house and need a wide variety of qualifications before being allowed to instruct others in ‘proper procedure’. In my own training we had about 7 civilian instructors (out of 53) and every instructor was a retired former military member with decades of experience (legit retiree’s that could beat down recruits).
Again, to note, this isn’t to insult or denigrate just explain the core issues I’ve seen from my own perspective both as a grunt by itself and as a military member that had to work with police on a few occasions for work.
As a final note I would posit that the largest issue holding back police from getting the training they require is the police unions that appear to be run by a mix of incompetent former officers and uneducated civilians.
Additional source examples: https://www.police1.com/military-methodologies/articles/how-a-military-approach-to-training-could-improve-police-skills-IlWt9UJET8X7NujR/ (I don’t completely agree with this, I think a lot of it is useful to police but they should prioritize life and liberty over aggressive action)
The following is a perfect example of a journalist misrepresenting reality to push their views rather than an objective view presenting what’s actually going on, however she does have several decent notes, it’s just that she seems to fundamentally miss the point in regards to de-escalation training and stress training to improve self control; additionally the author fundamentally doesn’t understand what a paramilitary organization is or does, and continually makes the case that police are such an organization when it’s either unwarranted or inaccurate but her notes about incompetent instructors following movie gimmicks is ENTIRELY accurate for the problems in police training: https://archive.ph/kZAeG
This is a more comprehensive explanation of simulation training and why it’s useful, I would also posit that how it explains the usefulness of the simulations also explains why current training in police forces (and some mil units) is not adequate: https://whatfix.com/blog/simulation-training/
The following link presents a comprehensive comparison between how a military member might have engaged a situation that police already did, killing the accused rather than engaging from a proper training form to de-escalate and capture: https://archive.attn.com/stories/9720/difference-between-police-and-military-firearm-protocol
You know, maybe more of a kind of theoretical, or heady point, I would make here, but I’m gonna make it anyways and then just kind of give you free reign to tear it apart, since it’s been on my mind for a little bit, and you seem like you know what you’re talking about.
So, desensitization isn’t an explicit course, but it’s obviously it’s still a factor in the training, right? To be able to be trained how to fight, you have to become used to fighting, pretty simple idea, you train for what you do, you do what you train for. Not necessarily desensitization to murder, mind you, just desensitization to shooting your gun and hitting human sized targets, you know. What happens afterwards is entirely circumstantial. But enough of me shitposting at you, in any case, you already broached that whole deal, and I don’t know what the military service entails in terms of conflict de-escalation or whatever.
No, what I really wanted to talk about was passive desensitization through language, through framing. It’s pretty common, and easily lambasted media literacy 101 type shit, to look at police headlines and kind of tear them down. A bullet left the officer’s gun and struck the suspect, right, rather than, oh, this policeman shot someone, type shit. One uses passive language for the officer, it was just a kind of cosmic event that happened, and the other one uses more active language. Partially as a result of a 24 hour instantaneous news headline news cycle, and partially because reporters are just easily willing to swallow and regurgitate whatever authoritative information they come across, these events are framed in such a way, and are framed, usually, devoid of external context. Events are described with passive language framing them. Events happened, that was it.
Now this is partially because there’s a pretense of objectivity, right, you just give the viewers the authoritative information, and what they decide to do with it is up to them. But this pretense is kind of problematic, because, you know, we’re not actually critically analyzing any of what’s been presented, it’s just a random event that happened, and then we push on and kind of uncritically assimilate it into whatever superstructure it is that we’ve evolved in order to deal with this very quickly. And which frame of mind strikes you as the one people are more likely to evolve in a contextually devoid vacuum? The one that’s simple, where they just say “oh, yeah, the officer shot that guy because that guy was bad”? Or the more complicated and emotionally burdening one, where they say “oh, because of the litany of factors that lead everyone to this moment through the long arm of history, that guy got shot by the officer, that kind of sucks and is a tragedy.”? So, without any real framing of the issue, with just presenting “objective” information, we can kind of just passively trust the reader to arrive at certain conclusions. If not all the time, right, then we can at least trust the majority of our headline-only stooges to arrive at those conclusions, which is realistically all we wanted to do anyways.
So, that’s a point I would also make for the military, right? We don’t actually have to charge, or frame things in certain ways, we don’t have to actively attempt to desensitize people to whatever they’re doing. And actually, it would be worse if we did, because then we would be focusing on it much more, and kind of playing our hand to what’s happening here. I dunno about how you feel about the WMDs in iraq, for instance, or the vietnam war, or what have you. Instead of looking at these wars and kind of thinking about them from the top down, though, the viewpoint is forced into that of a pure tool, you are just presented the information, and then you’re trained to respond, and the reasoning you’re doing internal to the process isn’t expounded upon. Sink or swim. People just are expected to evolve whatever opinions and viewpoints will help them to be more functional in the field, because they’re presented information that is just kind of, right in front of them, matter of fact, and it’s harder to think long term when you’re kind of swamped in a constant state of emergency or danger or, to put it more charitably, when you’re constantly processing information that’s right in front of you.
I’ve even heard stories, pretty commonly, where people get into the service, and then retroactively come to conclusions that “oh this kind of sucks I don’t think we’re doing anything good here”, and then they still continue to go along with it, because like, of course they do, what else are they supposed to do? They get dishonorably discharged, that’s gonna blow for any career prospects, you have to be immoral to do it, and you’re abandoning your squad. Are they supposed to pretend to be insane? There’s not really any backing out, there. You know, and that’s especially going to be the case when the only people who ever know shit about the military are the people who are in the military, you know, the people who are more likely to have evolved opinions that are functional to what it is that they’re currently doing.
Also a relative sidenote, but something that stands out to me is the use of acryonyms in the military. It’s like, fetishistic, almost. Theoretically, right, this makes it faster to refer to things in emergency situations, but then, people would just use codes for whatever they’re doing in those situations anyways, right? So I would think that the only thing it would really serve to do would be to save printer ink. More importantly, though, I think maybe it serves to obfuscate and isolate the military world from the civilian world, even more than it already is. Even to the point where you can start calling things UFOs, and then switch to UAPs, because they’re lockheed-martin in-camera phenomena from fighter jets, right, pretty obviously, and then mainstream media is like “guys, we have aliens. They admitted we have UFOs.” basically regardless of whatever you’re doing. Just because the previously internal, somewhat unprocessed information is public, and then the public can process it however they choose, basically. I dunno, shit just strikes me as weird.
In my experience we got desensitized on ops and during our ‘free time’ when the leading NCO would pull us aside and we’d watch videos of whichever enemy we were engaged against committing various war crimes on civilians and military members. Some stuff is in the public venue via sites like live leak (RIP) and others were very much in-house either as personal footage from their operations or footage from helmet cams usually used to review how the operation went and what everyone did correctly or incorrectly so we can improve for next time.
In regards to passive desensitization I wouldn’t say it’s overly explicit in the way you’re presenting so much as the humour. The humour we engage in is abhorrently dark and, to those that have survived perilous situations, be it in the military or in civilian life, extremely hilarious. However the level of dark humour, I would say, is what, out of everything, inadvertently promotes desensitization via language as well as passively teaching the troops a positive coping mechanism. The passive influence of language as you describe doesn’t really start to have an effect until several months into the deployment and by that time it’s likely everyone has already been ordered onto body detail and is thusly heavily desensitized by that point. (Body detail is easily one of the most negative aspects of military service and not really something anyone applying thinks about before they’re in the field and they’re ordered to deal with the remains, regardless of state. And I would say the desensitization peaks when observing the sheer number of civilian dead compared to enemy dead, especially in COIN operations (counter insurgency), these are the operations that current forces deal with and out of all the operations have the highest likelihood of doing permanent psychological damage, likely on par with shell shock from ww2. I would posit that many people begin to not only keep the fact the enemy is human at a distance but the civilians as well. Because if you don’t you will break from the amount of dead you see, especially the number of kids.
Now I do want to clarify that not everyone handles this well and everyone has different breaking points. Some people I saw break before the end of basic training quitting or, as two people from my own platoon chose, jumping from the top of the tallest building on the base or slipping a link (remove a 5.56 round from the belt of the training LMG’s) and go to a blue rocket with their service rifle and end their service prematurely. Others would last for years, offering to go out again and again, but I think, for those that have seen the most operations and, from my POV, were the most mentally tough, even they either chose to rotate out or were forced (by the chain of command) to rotate out of deployed duty after about ten years (usually becoming an instructor at this point given their wealth of experience).
I think it’s also important to note that no one I’ve met in the army sees themselves as a ‘good’ person. I think this objectivity of the self helps keep people grounded for a while. A lot of people in the army don’t ‘hate’ the enemy, they just see them as another individual with a job that’s counter to theirs. We could easily drink with or break bread with the people we kill, it’s all just a matter of circumstance and who lives is decided by the amount of training and luck the ‘victor’ has.
I think the military mindset is completely inappropriate for a police officer to have and would go so far as to say former military should only be SWAT or similar specialized officer team. I think, from my experience discussing these topics between military, police and firefighters that it should be a requirement for police officers to have a precinct councilour or psychiatrist in order to be able to have officers that engage in combat to keep themselves from dehumanizing people they don’t know which would make it easier to take life but also make it easier to break mentally.
In regards to media presentation of the facts, I agree with you that they don’t need to be like this, I think they should be taking an objective view entirely from both the officer and the potential criminals standpoint until a verdict has been reached by the courts. We don’t live in judge dredd and humans are completely fallible so I think automatically assuming everyone that dies (especially given some precincts proclivity for covering up the crimes of officers) is a criminal is counterproductive to the general public’ view on the matter as well as their ability to feel safe in their own country. While there is still violence these days, we are in one of the least violent times in human history and I think it’s important that the news reflect that, if not in content then at least in context. For the police presenting reports to the media, for sure they take a more objective view from the officers standpoint, especially these days, where the blue mafia is almost as bad as the green mafia (I wouldn’t say actual mafia more a reference to the influence of brass to have the officers or members essentially take a ‘fraternity over all else’ stance; although there is some organized problematic groups in both services). I feel that the media a lot of the time will jump to frame the individual the officer shot to be ‘as bad as possible’ in order to gain clicks, but this has become an issue as they keep presenting everyone that this happens to as ‘the worst of the worst’ without presenting any real nuance for what ‘bad’ or ‘good’ really is and people that take the news at face value seem to be parting ways with their education and accepting the world as a ‘black’ or ‘white’ world and not the ‘grey’ that it actually is.
You are correct in regards to the not intentionally desensitizing people aspect. Desensitization of the individual in service comes over time, regardless, and going out of your way to desensitize people in combat roles will inevitably end up with a German SS situation, where ‘orders over humanity’ reigns and improper conduct is swept under the rug because ‘the enemy isn’t human’. That’s an oversimplification and a particularly over-the-top example but the only military I can think of that had anything resembling desensitization training was the SS in the 40’s. The WMD bullshit about Iraq has permanently destroyed my trust of mainstream media. The fact journalists that were reporting on it got fired and blacklisted from the industry had me suspicious initially but when I did learn that all the lives we wasted in the end were literally over nothing more than the eurodollar market and oil company profits it marred my belief in the system. It further infuriated me that all investigations into the corporate landlord taking out a multi billion dollar insurance contract just before 9/11 just added more suspicion to anything I see now days, regardless of source. I only take peer reviewed research reports at face value these days and even then I wait until the report has been replicated at least three times by different and wholly unrelated parties before I trust it because even the academic industry has been tainted by constant fraud, willingly overlooked by various institutions in order to have their “prestigious” name on more popular papers.
Yes. Very much so. I would say most people that join, myself included, thought a good idea to serve the country was to join the army as an NCO, assuming the systems in place were not necessarily as problematic as some of the people in place. I learned some pretty rough lessons, as did hundreds if not thousands of others, and by a few years in we had all accepted that what we are doing is simply a job and if we don’t do it someone else will. There is an underlying ethos of ‘warrior culture’ that kind of gets ingrained in everyone over time, but it’s not necessarily one which everyone would admit to. I don’t know if anyone seriously see’s themselves as warriors, as much as paid killers, and I think this line of philosophy is what inevitably leads people to go to a higher paying position in a
mercenaryprivate security company. (A key chant we end up memorizing even before basic is complete “what makes the grass grow?” BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD) Most people I know that want a job with a guaranteed pension sign 25+ year contracts. However of the people I know in the military a vast majority of them do not renew their contracts. The first contract, depending on trade, is 3-5 years (unless you went for a specialist trade and had the government pay for your education then you’re likely doing a minimum of ten years plus) the second contract depends on your performance but most people are offered the option between 12-25 year contracts with an increasing amount of days off per year (and significant pay boos) as you increase your rank.On the note of acronyms I don’t see it so much as fetishistic as much as necessary. The considerable amount of information you are required to learn, even as a simple combat arms trade, is easily on par if not surpassing what I did for my double major. For people that don’t have a particularly sharp mind they need easy ways to remember the information and acronyms make things vastly easier for remembering various plans, ways of cleaning, rules for various situations, etc. Additionally, you can write all the acronyms down in your pad and just have those as your reference for what you need to do instead of listing out each word and using a ton of paper. Additionally if you get killed or captured and someone gets a hold of your notepad they’ll have a hard time figuring out what all the acronyms are, especially since new ones are made every day, especially for plans of attack and various forms of engagement.
Specifically to note the UFO/UAP situation, they did that so that they wouldn’t be associated with the mentally unwell within the UFO community
Interesting, you gave me a lot more than I was anticipating. I’ve had a couple friends in the military, and even in high school, it was pretty common for them to be watching liveleak videos and shit like that. I guess, yeah, it would make more sense as something that’s kind of like, that’s kind of something that people promulgate themselves, just sort of internally. People are a little bit fucked up, huh? I’ve also heard from them that it’s pretty common that someone offs themselves in basic almost every time, or you get attempted suicides, I think one of them was talking about some guy that tried to snap his neck with something heavy thrown out of a window, might’ve been a forklift, or something to that effect, can’t quite recall. I’d be interested to know whether or not that’s an abnormal amount of suicide, or if that’s just kind of the expected rates for what I would assume to be a heavily male subset in an environment where there’s easy access to firearms and a bunch of other potential ways to kill yourself.
Also I gotta ask, and I’m sure I could find this out via google, but do they still use quicklime for body detail, or do they have some sort of other chemical disincorporation that they’ve moved to? Pretty grim stuff, in any case. I don’t envy that, not a big fan of mindlessly digging a bunch of holes. Makes sense that most people wouldn’t be prepared for it, I’d imagine the smell is also pretty bad, in combination with the sight of it. People don’t really think about it much, but while you can close your eyes, or avoid trying to look directly at something, you can’t really shut off your sense of smell in the same way.
I dunno, it’s interesting because on one hand, the humor is used to inoculate you to traumatic shit, right, but on the other hand, it’s also a kind of like, if only aesthetically, comedically, the humor presents a kind of functional ideology to people. It’s going to propagate because of the environment, because it makes the job easier, and then the job is selecting for people who will naturally not be disgusted by the humor, who will find it funny, and, you know, the cycle feeds back into itself. Same shit as why rich people litter their house with self-help books, so they can get rid of their wealth guilt.
Also yeah, the whole like, it’s just a job, is also kind of concerning. Basically everyone I know that got in, got in just for the free college alone, which, you know, also having healthcare and a steady job right out of high school is nice, if you can swing it. I’ve never really encountered anyone, outside of old people, that kind of view the military as being something that they have a kind of moral calling to. If they do, that’s sort of a thing that comes as like an “also, I think it’s a good thing”, rather than their primary motivation. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, right, I would expect it to be a job, but it’s just kind of weird, mostly. It’s like an extreme disillusionment. I dunno whether or not it’s a good thing, to be able to morally recognize and then square away that, oh, this isn’t a great thing, right, we can dispel the illusion that we’re morally righteous and are fighting a “good war”, but at the same time, it’s just replaced with nihilism, and the effects end up working out to be the same. Such is our postmodern condition, I suppose.
Also, yeah the acronyms make sense, when you consider the amount of information, sort of a self-contained mnemonic. It’s self-referential, isolated, standalone, compared to calling, like, a cigarette a “cowboy killer” or something, which might rely more on external information. It’s a good point. I’m sure they have some sort of evidence based thing related to how they train it, but I do kind of wonder like, just a general thing, about the lingo, the jargon, of a bunch of different fields. Like how science uses latin all the time, or how engineering disciplines can call something a flange, programming calls shit bits and bytes, or folders and documents and desktops, since it’s all digitized bureaucracy. It’s fascinating because the things kind of evolve into whatever is functional for the field, but it’s also entirely and completely arbitrary, and things end up carrying a lot of baggage.
So I dunno. We moved from a kind of, and this was true of broad culture at the time, I suppose (maybe, I might just be an dumb zoomer idiot though), but we moved from a kind of culture where things were named relatively arbitrarily, right, nicknamed, or just named after whoever the designer was. Oh, that’s the jerry-can, oh, they have shell-shock, stuff like that. Now we have PFCs and PTSD. We went from picture boxes, to televisions, to TVs. I dunno, maybe that’s just a result of a kind of rapid systematization of things, everything needs formal codes that you can write down and file. Maybe a side effect of digitization, more than post-war. Maybe as a result of having so much information to digest, right, for the troops, but also it might be having so much information to digest even for the people actively working with it. Oh, we need a clever new word for this new thingamabob! uhhh, uhh, I dunno, maybe we just give it a kind of protracted, proper name, and then we just shorten it to an acronym. Easier than trying to give it a “clever”, natural name, that’s maybe going to rely on external reference or information to get across. We can just say the full name once or twice, and then have a self-referential piece of information we can refer to now, very easily.
Edit: also about the UAPs, I find it really funny that they tried to distance themselves from it by changing acronyms, right, but then everyone still basically did the same shit they did with UFOs to it, and just treated it exactly like a UFO. Word substitution. Strikes me as a very funny, especially military kind of decision to make about it. I don’t know why, but it does.
Also here’s a video for levity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMhhMx-yDQU
Yet the example of the sim you posted (the exact type I had in mind) is from police training. This is exactly what I was talking about: police using military style training and using it in way that desensitizes officers.
I’m not saying the training is exactly the same as in military, I’m not saying it’s as common. I’m saying that cops are trigger happy (as in the original article) because of this type of training. In many countries police are trained to shoot only as a last resort (or don’t even carry guns). IDK, maybe it’s different in US but most people have natural blockades preventing them from shooting others. That it’s so easy for US cops to shoot at people for me means that they are trained to do it. All the effort that goes into this type of training should go into de-escalation training instead.
I think it’s kind of a multi-tiered issue. What you say is true, but police are also kind of structured in the way they are in the US because we have so many issues that we basically use them as a band-aid for, so we spread them very thin and kind of go with a quantity over quality approach. Which hasn’t ended up working out very well, except in that, sometimes, and particularly for your white middle class neighbors that are going to call the cops for a noise complaint, cops appearing is basically the only thing that they needed to do. It’s just for security theater, just so you can have an interlocutor that can do all the work of dealing with someone else for you, at your behest. A cop is just kind of meant to be around in order to make your dwindling population of middle class white people feel safe, more than they’re supposed to actually make everyone safe. Such is why private institutions in a lot of places basically just have their own LARP cops in the form of security guards, who just stand around 95% of the time, and eat up way more in salary than they would save from product losses, or increased insurance premiums on product.
You pair this with the actual built environment in a lot of places, where cops have to be even more spread out than they otherwise would be, enforcing traffic tickets and shit like that, and it’s kind of an obvious formula for a shitshow. Even if you gave police departments just straight up more money, three times as much, you’d still probably see complaints that they’re underfunded, because they’d just spend all the money on hiring more people, and more equipment, rather than making a smaller number of people who are maybe better equipped to deal with, say, psychological problems that somebody might have. And obviously, in such a case, you’re not going to get a better return on investment, than had you, say, dumped all the money into infrastructure that could’ve benefited your community, created jobs, lifted people out of poverty, and decreased the systemic causes of crime.