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Soundwave on 31 August 2017
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Kuksenkov said:
Johnw1104 said:

Well I'm not much concerned with the woman "being worried" given she was drunk driving.

Otherwise, that's an incredibly stupid thing to say, though not surprising. The police feel every bit as under attack as anyone, and one needs only look at any trending story that involves cops on social media to see people expressing unabashed hatred towards the police.

Meanwhile, they're out there every day working one of the highest-stress and most dangerous jobs in a country where any person they approach may be carrying a gun; the many thousands of interactions a day that go well will not be reported, but every time some racist or sadist does something terrible it will be plastered across the internet, with many people coming to view this as being representative of the police force at large.

I have a few relatives that were cops for a time, and they're endlessly stressed about the situation despite not being involved anymore. It's a job that, when done right, is still hugely stressful and risky; when things go wrong, it's potentially deadly. When I think about being asked to confront a dozen or so people a day that either are doing something illegal or appear to be, fully knowing the odds of them carrying a gun are quite high, I can understand how the job not only begins to manifest symptoms akin to PTSD in many officers, but can also engender hostility, hatred, and (in some cases) even racism towards those they're confronting every day.

I got a bit wordy there, but as I love my relatives who were cops and know them to be good people I feel an obligation to offer some defense for them. This guy here said something incredibly stupid out of frustration, but I really think he might need to be fired even if it was a morbid joke to a drunk moron in a car, and at the very least must face a lengthy suspension; when you're in a position of authority you are morally obligated to be the more patient party in any encounter, and you need to know that many actions and words are off-limits to you as you hold real-world power over the people around you.

I don't have any solution for this issue (outside of decriminalizing a number of things and ending the War on Drugs, which seems unlikely)... While social media is great and useful in exposing injustices such as the systematic racism in our policing and such, we as a people have shown ourselves far too immature to make use of this information responsibly. More than anything, social media engenders animosity, hatred, and blanket generalizations, which then leads the attacked party (in this instance the police) to get defensive rather than looking to correct such issues as they would in a calmer environment.

There is one thing that I think would help a good deal, though: the police need a lot more mandatory, paid vacations. It's absurd to treat policing as if it were some conventional job, and these people truly require far more time to rest their minds and get away from the overwhelming stress and anxiety of their daily jobs which, in many ways, requires a combatant's mentality. As things currently stand, we have a police force full of overwhelmed members who are often unknowingly falling victim to their own anxieties and trauma when interacting with others.

This is a great comment.

 

The officer was in the wrong for saying that, but I don't think it merits getting fired. 

What exactly does a police officer have to do to get fired? 

Seems to me like they are able to kill civilians and just get a slap on the wrist of "paid leave" and don't even get fired for that. 

Let alone it's the *public* that pays their salaries (last time I checked that includes black people). They are not some private defence force that gets to operate on their own rules above the public interest since it's the public that pays their freaking salaries. They work for the citizens, not the other way around. 

Cops are able to do all types of shit that would get you fired 10 times over in virtually every other job. It's a shame that good cops get thrown in with the bad ones, but the problem is the police rarely get rid of the "bad ones" unless they do something absolutely heinous like get caught planting evidence, and even then sometimes who knows. So they are complicit in the image they create ... this cop included. Any officer should know better than making a careless, stupid comment like this.