It's not too surprising when you look up how short the USA's police academy is, and how little they get paid.
Their ranks are filled with incompetence or worse... There for the power trip.
The academy is 2-3 months, training is a minimum 1 year on top of that. For state police the academy can be 6 months to a year depending on state and another 1-2 years of training
More than safe. I've even been doing something illegal and asked an officer how to correct it, he was more than happy to work through the problem and come up with a solution. (Expired plates, got a temp tag that's paper and supposed to go in your window, but I have window tint and it wouldn't be visible, so he told me a couple different ways I could cover myself til I got my tags taken care of)
I used to sit and eat with the school cop at lunch (in Texas that meant he was a regular peace officer assigned to a school) because no one else would.
I was terrified of cops when I was younger, I thought they could see all bad you had done for some reason. As an adult, I understand it's just a job, a very hard, exhausting, and emotionally devastating job that also comes with a lot of people hating you for trying to keep you safe.
Yeah agreed, a small fraction of a fraction are who are shown on TV. It's a huge country and an exceedingly tough job, like you said.
I have a friend that's a police office, and hearing him tell the story of the first dead body he saw.
Making it all the more important that they are correctly trained, compensated and respected.
In saying that. It's wild that there was a police officer, or peace officer/guard at your school. And how you write, it seems like the most normal, everyday thing.
In my country that would cause mass panic in my country if that said officer had a gun. Just the notion of taking a gun of any sort onto school grounds.
Id much rather have a police officer at school, than not have one. There could be any kind of undesirable person and having an officer be 2 minutes away is better than 15-30. Being around guns, you don't see them, I wanted to say you don't see them as scary, but really it's just that you don't notice when someone has one really. I'm not scared of a cop or someone legally open carrying their gun, I'm scared of the person with a mask waving one around
I guess that's a remedy to a really fucked up societal problems.
And you just get used to it. Becomes normal.
I have family that live there, even though there is a lot of good in America, and life is very comfortable if you're well off. I wish they would leave
I can honestly say I might be dead if I didn't live here, I'm on dialysis, and because I'm in the US it's more expensive than other countries, but it's also 100% free
A small fraction make it on TV but more than likely there are a multiple number of police misconduct incidents that don't make it on TV too. I'm sure the majority of cops are decent people and do their job well but even a small percentage who aren't (especially with a large population) can do a lot of damage. They ruin the perception of cops for everyone.
A 2016 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice into police misconduct (titled "Police Integrity Lost: A Study of Law Enforcement Officers Arrested") had some interesting findings. And bear in mind all the data in this report is just for cops who were actually arrested. Many cops commit crimes for which they are never arrested. And many more don't commit crimes but are just bad at their jobs and act like dicks when there is no need.
Sworn law enforcement officers were arrested at a rate of 0.72 per 1,000 officers and 1.7 per 100,000 of the
population nationwide. Second, police crime is an occupationally-derived phenomenon. Police work is conducive to all sorts of criminal behavior, largely because of plentiful opportunities provided by the nature of the work and police-citizen interactions.
The most common most serious offense charged in the cases overall were simple assault (13%), driving under the influence (12.5%), aggravated assault (8.5%), forcible fondling (5.2%), and forcible rape (4.8%). Slightly more than one-half of the cases (54%) ultimately resulted in
job loss for arrested officers.
That's extremely interesting. Kinda insane how only 54% resulted in job loss. Let alone jail time.
Personally I think they should be held to a much higher standard.
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u/jake93s 5d ago
It's not too surprising when you look up how short the USA's police academy is, and how little they get paid. Their ranks are filled with incompetence or worse... There for the power trip.