Minneapolis may not need to defund their department to get rid of it. It was already seriously understaffed leading to them being unable to respond at all to 6700 emergency calls for service last year. Current strength was roughly 800 officers. Already this month in June, there have been 14 officers who have quit and 46 who have filed for some sort of retirement.
I’m willing to bet there are similar numbers in every department that has suffered serious rioting. Departments already can’t find enough qualified applicants (clean record and ability to pass physical and psych test). Even fewer are going to apply now.
How long before America comes pleading for the cops to come back? Because we’ve seen on a small scale what happens when the police go away - the murder and violent crime rate in Baltimore went through the roof when the police stopped all pro-active policing. What happens when there aren’t even enough police to respond to your emergency calls. Ever seen the Road Warrior? That is our future.
About ten times more than we get now. Every police officer without exception feels training is inadequate, especially in use of force as it applies to arrest and control techniques. Right now most officers are lucky if they get hands on use of force training every other year or so. Some get it less. And then its a couple of hours with partner who isn’t actually fighting back and your doing it all at about 25-30% speed because if you do it faster injuries tend to really mount. Even at that low speed people get hurt - I’ve seen broken ankles, ripped up shoulders, and many severely torn muscles. Then your out an officer for a while which means overtime to cover his shifts.
Do it more someone will say without any understanding of staffing problems. I’m going to use my dept’s numbers since I’m quite familiar with them and thus can speak with 100% accuracy. It will be the same issues at other departments.
Let say our department wants to have a 4 hr arrest and control class and put all patrol officers through it. We have 45 patrol officers covering the city 24 hrs a day / 7 days a week. At best, assuming no one calls in sick, is on vacation, or is out for an injury we have 7 to 8 officers per shift. Its a pretty rare day that all are actually there. So how do you get all of them through it while still maintaining staffing? Oh the teachers from these classes are other officers who have been through extensive training on the subject and achieved an instructor certificate from the state in these subjects. They are out of the rotation for the duration of the training.
If that was all we had to train in maybe it could be done. But we have to train in firearms multiple times a year. Mental health training. Riot / Crowd control. Investigation of (insert your topic) training. Etc, etc, etc. Many of these classes can last days or even a week. Crisis Intervention Training, which is the current fad training for cops to deal with the mentally ill, is a full week of training.
What it comes down to is you might on average get a couple a hours a month of something but with all the stuff we have to get training on, we never get adequate training on anything. Every time there is a training the shifts run short and overtime goes up. If its a training like arrest and control you will always end up with a few officers injured who then miss time on shift.
So when you see cop video where the cop is on the ground struggling with someone and it ends up in punching its probably because thats all the cop knows how to do. A couple of hours of training a few years ago at 30% speed against a compliant person is useless when in the field against someone actually resisting and who won’t be playing by the rules of training (no groin shots, no eye gouges, etc).
To get adequate training you drastically need to increase staffing at departments. This is a fairy tale since departments nationwide are chronically understaffed and can’t find quality applicants. Personnel increases mean a huge increase in the budget. In my impossible fairy tale world every officer would get enough hands on training in arrest and control to rise the level of purple belt in Brazilian Ju-Jitsu - this is an intermediate level and if you make it your going to be proficient enough to handle most people you deal with via hands on techniques. This is an impossible fantasy though.
When the police are removed, the gangs will be the po-leece. 911 won’t work. They may have to get the gansta’s phone numbah and call him directly. But you are correct. We will be fine in the burbs. All of our services will work.
To be brutally honest, I don’t give a flying **** what goes down in the big cities. They can do whatever they feel they must do. If it works fine. If it doesn’t work, they are **** out of luck.
All this talk about defunding police in the big cities will go away once passions calm down. It is not really a plan, just a shout of anger by the populace of the cities. I am not really taking it all that seriously.
Even if they follow through with it, they will soon have buyer’s remorse and reverse the cuts.
