Reuters, one of the most reliable journalism orgs, said...

[unsunghero]

Originally Posted by Danth [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Maybe, maybe not. Some of it wouldn't take so much as a dollar to change--got to change the mindset.

--Stop discriminating against hiring people who are too smart (this is true, many departments actually do this).
--Stop preferentially hiring people based on military experience. Being a good soldier does not necessarily translate to being a good LEO. Police are not an Occupying Army, and the public is not the Enemy.
--Reduce equipment to what's ordinary for the area. Police should not be heavily-armed commandos. Ordinary beat cops do not need military-style rifles in their cars and certainly do not need to be carrying ammunition or implements for use against their own citizenry, which would be outlawed on the field of battle.
--Walk back "officer safety" to where it was thirty years ago, and go back to needing actual justification to shoot beyond, "He scared me or might've been maybe reaching for something for a second."

Most of all: Accept it took us decades to get to this point, and chances are it'll take many years to fix it too. Even once fixed, public trust has eroded enough that it'll take years to recover. This is NOT going to go away overnight. This is going to be the largest stumbling block prohibiting real change because the public expects instant results and when that doesn't materialize tends to lose interest in favor of the next outrage-du-jour.

Danth

I agree with these too

There's even been a push for police to ONLY come from the city they live in, and not e allowed to be hired from outside that city and commute. This is actually being done in places like Philidelphia and others if I recall

The reason is that there is a belief that an officer is more likely to be more sympathetic and understanding to those that they police if they see them as from the same city as them. Makes sense to me

The problem is, like you said, systemic. There happens to be a shortage of police in Philidelphia, and that's why the department hires from outside the city. The more they reduce the hiring radius, the more shorthanded they get and the longer response times get

And with all this negative attention on police, I have a feeling that recruiting police is going to be even more challenging in the years ahead. So a restriction on where you are allowed to hire from is going to add extra challenge, possibly longer wait times. Is it worth it? Could be debated either way, did a longer wait time cost a life?