Meaningful solution suggestions:
1) require body cams on all police and for the cams to be turned on in all interactions with the public
2) require all police to have a college degree
3) pay police more because they all have a college degree
4) require all law enforcement agencies to accurately report any interactions with the public that result in injury or death to a national database, along with the body cam video of that interaction
5) end all local practices of requiring police to make quotas so as to increase income for that locality
6) make any police officer who falsely supports an offending police officer's story, equally liable as an accessory to the offense
Those are just off the top of my head.
2) require all police to have a college degree
Will any degree do? Thats unrealistic because -
1) Having a degree doesn't equal integrity
2) Generally, people who have degrees aren't interested in police work
7) inform all police officers and the general public of the reality that law enforcement is not even in the top 10 of deadliest occupations in the US
No, but its one of the most miserable occupations.
(aside: POTUS is the most deadly of occupations. 9 of 44 have died in office. It seems like a pretty miserable occupation to me, too, but the pay and the perks are okay.)
Since a Supreme Court Judge can keep the position for life, of course most die in office, how could it be otherwise? Very few resign before dying since they don't have to..
I am all for people in inherently miserable, but needed, occupations getting paid accordingly. So we pay cops more, not only for being competently educated, but also for doing a miserable job. If we pay enough, many, truly competent, people will be interested in police work, miserable or not. And we don't necessarily have to rule out everyone without a degree if some sort of valid, reliable equivalency testing can be devised.
Re: police with degrees, I simply recall that there are much fewer problems like these done by cops with degrees. One would think a degree in a field related to law enforcement or social studies might be preferable, but it may just be as simple as weeding out those who can't think clearly enough not to do stupid things like kill people unnecessarily.
That's not it. The cops with degrees are not fighting street crime.
LLIn your initial comment above, in red, I think you were thinking SCOTUS, in response to where I said POTUS.
Re: your 2nd comment, in red, have you seen information that supports your hypothesis that cops with degrees are simply not put in positions to have direct interactions with the public that could go terribly wrong? If so, then perhaps it is not reasonable to require them to have degrees.
But even so, I strongly suspect that smarter police are less likely to have things go wrong than not so smart police. Police in our country all carry guns, and are, in effect "licensed to kill". They can kill, justly or unjustly, and will not be held accountable for the "unjustly" kills, as long as they claim that they were in fear for their life or someone else's life, and there is no obvious evidence to the contrary. A cop with only borderline intellectual functioning would still be able to follow that simple rule, i.e., to say "I shot because I was in fear for my life." But a cop with such a low IQ, I think would also, be more likely to confront people for no good reason, and to interact with people in such a way that it leads to problematic circumstances, and to then wind up killing someone, and then be left to claim (what all police must claim when they kill someone) that they did so because they were if fear for their own life or someone else's.
Yes, I read it wrong.
As for cops with degrees. i have no specifics, but it seems to me that a degree should count for something. If they're sent out on the streets whether they have a degree or not, what's the use of getting a degree?
Lois