Why has American police culture changed so much?

[morpen]

Is it because of more police officers coming from a military background?



Nice feelings bro. Here's some facts.

There being less crime because society is generally improving, doesn't rule out that crime there still is has gotten more hardcore/gang related.
Ii didn't say crime was on the rise you idiot.

[Svifnymr]

Is it because of more police officers coming from a military background?

It does vary by area, obviously, but in South Florida they don't really go for military background folks as much anymore. They want people to learn the systems they have in place without preconceived notions of how to act. The poor firearms training in general probably leads to more errors among police. There was also a trend to think of ex-military as all having PTSD after Gulf. It might be easy to think of military background leading to more violent altercations, but military has rules of engagement drilled into them much more than police.

Nice feelings bro. Here's some facts.

If it went back to the roaring 20's they'd probably see a similar spike during prohibition to that 80's/ early 90's bit of drug war. I think the drug war marked a huge escalation as it becomes easier to actually track interstate crime and prosecute folks. Drugs became very profitable, but it arose with a particular apathy towards trying to lay low and escape vs shooting it out. Gun technology hasn't changed significantly from the roaring 20's when dueling tommy guns punctuated things, but the average cop has left behind the the old revolver because now they're actually expected to break up drug operations rather than drinking with the buddies at an illegal bar during prohibition.

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At that point, you'll be issued a $200 tax stamp allowing you to buy one machine gun of your choice...if you have around ~$20,000 lying around and can find a Class III firearms dealer. They're fairly rare.

You did miss the one important thing of "banned in 1986", you cannot manufacture new machineguns after 1986 for us mere peasants. You can only buy machineguns registered before 1986, which is why they run $8000 and way way up. The $200 tax stamp is a transfer tax, but is tied to a specific transfer of a specific weapon, rather than getting the stamp, then looking for a product. You buy the product, file the form with $200, then wait for approval (currently about a year).

I do not know if Class III weapons are subject to the same FFL rules as regular guns (meaning, I don't know if you can do the transaction online and have it mailed to any regular FFL dealer; the dealer side of the law isn't my forte).

An FFL can get his Special Occupational Tax (SOT) for $500 a year, which allows him to transfer to/from other SOT dealers without the $200 tax on each transaction. Otherwise he would pay the $200 tax each time.

On topic, I would presume the whole shaved head thing is simply so that suspects could not leverage the officer's hair in the event of an altercation. I don't really see anything spooky beyond that.

More worrisome is how many of the young men are clearly losing their hairline!

[Hotmail]

The rule of law is absolute. Why? Because when it's not, you get fanatical rednecks who go around shooting up gay bars and killing everyone for their sins against God. Shame on you.

[Deletedaccount1]

I don't understand a lot of the sentiments in this thread. It is extremely obvious that most American cities are wildly under-policed. You can go almost an entire day of driving around in a decent sized city and only see one or two cop cars. In Japan and other countries with less serious crime problems, you see a police station every block or two in major cities.

[Spectral]

Chatting with my wife yesterday, we were talking about this and some surrounding issues. My hypothesis is that the United States combines a peaceful Western European level of tolerance for criminality, plus a population that's much more criminally inclined than Western Europe, plus an unwillingness to take genuinely extreme measures (significantly increased levels of exile, capital punishment, or corporal punishment). So, we get a series of twisted half measures like a massive carceral state, huge surveillance apparatus, and police behavior ranging from low-level harassment to outright violence. No one much likes this arrangement, but it's hard to see a path to significant improvement.

[oplawlz]

Is it because of more police officers coming from a military background?



Nice feelings bro. Here's some facts.

Yeah, the police toughening up in the early 90's really improved the nation as a whole.

[Kraenen]

Sort of a nit-pick but isn't the first picture of Canadian police?

[vincink]

I keep my head shaved year-round because (1) my hair grows out thick, making it hard to maintain, and (2) the head is the warmest part of the body, so keeping my head cool is a high priority (especially because I become dehydrated easily) even in the winter, and (3) because I sweat a lot, shorter hair retains less moisture, so the sweat evaporates quicker.

Please stop generalizing that men who shave their heads are trying to "send a message". It's fine if you don't like my shaved hair style but please, for the love of God, forego the judgement.

[Themius]

Chatting with my wife yesterday, we were talking about this and some surrounding issues. My hypothesis is that the United States combines a peaceful Western European level of tolerance for criminality, plus a population that's much more criminally inclined than Western Europe, plus an unwillingness to take genuinely extreme measures (significantly increased levels of exile, capital punishment, or corporal punishment). So, we get a series of twisted half measures like a massive carceral state, huge surveillance apparatus, and police behavior ranging from low-level harassment to outright violence. No one much likes this arrangement, but it's hard to see a path to significant improvement.

"We need to kill more people"

We have studies on this saying that doesn't work so...

You think we need a tougher system when we have one of the toughest in the western world to begin with? What foolishness is this? "let's be even more tough!" when it clearly isn't working.

Significant improvement is rather easy, we do what other countries do.

Firstly get rid of the most of the fucking police departments. We have far too many leading to differing degrees of standards. It also makes it hard to take a bad cop and move them to another department when the department is one per state. You wouldn't end up with an officer in Florida being moved from one district to another because he falsified confessions and was given the option to go to jail or move... so he moves and then locks up any black person and charges them with an unsolved robbery. Shit like that doesn't happen when you have a single state wide department.

Training becomes standardized everyone within a single state has one form of training you don't get departments implementing their vastly different own sense of training.

You also don't get officers who are rivals to other officers because they're from another town. This is a pretty big problem in New Jersey and I imagine it is the same in other places. Where officers in Jersey City give officers from Secaucus shit because... they're from differing towns. The tribalism dies when everyone is a single department.

There is no need to have sheriffs, and town officers, and state officers we don't need over 18k departments with over 18k different training methods and different standards.

The answer is to condense departments, standardize training, require higher bars.

Violent crime rates in the UK are about the same to higher than the USA so this idea that "we're just violent people" is unfounded.

[Endus]

Chatting with my wife yesterday, we were talking about this and some surrounding issues. My hypothesis is that the United States combines a peaceful Western European level of tolerance for criminality, plus a population that's much more criminally inclined than Western Europe, plus an unwillingness to take genuinely extreme measures (significantly increased levels of exile, capital punishment, or corporal punishment). So, we get a series of twisted half measures like a massive carceral state, huge surveillance apparatus, and police behavior ranging from low-level harassment to outright violence. No one much likes this arrangement, but it's hard to see a path to significant improvement.

With regards to the bold, it's necessarily combined with an unwillingness to consider and implement social reforms to address the underlying socioeconomic factors contributing to that increased criminality.

Western Europe and Canada and Australia don't all have lower rates of criminal offense, and particularly violent offense, by accident. And there's really nothing about the USA's circumstances that provide any insurmountable expectation, here.

And it isn't that those nations have stricter penalties for crime. Pretty typically, the opposite.

You need to be willing to discuss and implement policy to address underlying socioeconomic factors if you really want to address the problem of crime. This isn't a wild hypothesis; it's standard policy practice pretty much everywhere.


As for police culture in particular, there seems to have been a shift among American police forces from seeing themselves as serving and protecting their communities, to approaching crime as a "war" against the "enemy", said "enemy" being that same community, or at least sections of it that are indistinguishable from the rest.

In Canada, if I get pulled over by a cop while driving, he's going to saunter up, tap on my window, we'll have a conversation, he might give me a ticket, that's pretty much it. In the USA, the officer usually approaches weapon drawn, and is in many cases ordering the civilian to step out or show their hands or the like; it's presumed to be a violently hostile situation. That shift in approach matters. It means civilians are, quite rightly, afraid of the police, rather than seeing them as protectors. It means every interaction with an officer starts out negative, and is likely to get worse. It means that not only do the police see the people as their enemy, the people see the police as an enemy. Wrap that up and let it cook for 50 years, and you get the modern United States.

[Weeps]

What I find hilarious is that in towns like mine, which rank in the top 20% safety-wise...

Yes, we have had a murder but it was because the kid was schizophrenic. The most crime that happens are marijuana busts, domestic disputes and petty larceny... it's a joke.

My town is like the most boring place a cop could work in, it is so safe.

Even the residents are getting mad about people gettin' jailed over marijuana lol, "Do something else, leave them alone it's about to get legalized!" It really is about to, btw. with total expungements.

I will say this though... the cops in this town are A+. They are really good people and I like 'em all.

[Spectral]

In Canada, if I get pulled over by a cop while driving, he's going to saunter up, tap on my window, we'll have a conversation, he might give me a ticket, that's pretty much it. In the USA, the officer usually approaches weapon drawn, and is in many cases ordering the civilian to step out or show their hands or the like; it's presumed to be a violently hostile situation.

Snipping out a lot of inaccuracy to focus on one particular bit of inaccuracy. The rest of your post is about as accurate of a grasp of the United States as this dystopian fantasy. There's no point addressing a longer post when the basics aren't even close to right.

[Reaper0329]

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You did miss the one important thing of "banned in 1986", you cannot manufacture new machineguns after 1986 for us mere peasants. You can only buy machineguns registered before 1986, which is why they run $8000 and way way up. The $200 tax stamp is a transfer tax, but is tied to a specific transfer of a specific weapon, rather than getting the stamp, then looking for a product. You buy the product, file the form with $200, then wait for approval (currently about a year).

An FFL can get his Special Occupational Tax (SOT) for $500 a year, which allows him to transfer to/from other SOT dealers without the $200 tax on each transaction. Otherwise he would pay the $200 tax each time.


More worrisome is how many of the young men are clearly losing their hairline!

I knew I missed something...lol that's what I get for typing up law on downtime at work. Good catch, and thank you.

[Powerogue]

Yeah... look at those two racist black police officers going after that black criminal. They must have targeted him because he is black... like they are.

You are aware of the context of those photos right?

I was not, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_campaign Reverse image searching works wonders. Yikes. What kind of damage would police dogs do in situations like that? It's hard to tell from a still image. Either way, absolutely insane stuff. All this as recently as the 1960's.

I have to wonder how they justified this insanely evil BS to themselves in a country that's supposed to have a right to protest.

[Drusin]

No, you can't.

The operative part of that is the "Federal and State laws" bit. Ignoring the state law component, legally owning what the statute classifies as a machine gun requires compliance with the National Firearms Act. In order to comply and get the $200 tax stamp, you'll need to undergo an extensive background check (I want to say that's done by the FBI but don't quote me on that one), get the approval of your local sheriff, submit your fingerprints to the BATF, and wait about six months for everything to clear. At that point, you'll be issued a $200 tax stamp allowing you to buy one machine gun of your choice...if you have around ~$20,000 lying around and can find a Class III firearms dealer. They're fairly rare. I do not know if Class III weapons are subject to the same FFL rules as regular guns (meaning, I don't know if you can do the transaction online and have it mailed to any regular FFL dealer; the dealer side of the law isn't my forte).

The Virginia statute doesn't make an exception to that presumption of offensive purpose for possession outside of one's premises for ranges or practice, which I find interesting. It's also interesting the law would specify empty shells, but that's more legal musings than anything else.

Not calling you out or anything; I just find that's a common misconception. You can get things that look like machine guns all day long, but getting an actual machine gun is usually prohibitively expensive and legally onerous.

On topic, I would presume the whole shaved head thing is simply so that suspects could not leverage the officer's hair in the event of an altercation. I don't really see anything spooky beyond that.

You say you can't but then go on to say how you can lol

A person being poor isn't the issue here just whether or not it's possible.

[Reaper0329]

You say you can't but then go on to say how you can lol

A person being poor isn't the issue here just whether or not it's possible.

And it's not possible. Your original claim was that a person can go into a department store and walk out with a machine gun. You cannot do that. The only way to get an automatic weapon is 1) from a vendor allowed to sell such items and 2) after a strenuous background check and legal loopholes, and 3) only for a limited set of weapons manufactured before the act came into effect.

[Mormolyce]

There being less crime because society is generally improving, doesn't rule out that crime there still is has gotten more hardcore/gang related.
Ii didn't say crime was on the rise you idiot.

Hardcore crime involving fewer violent crimes?

Like what, they listen to thrash metal while committing their fewer crimes? LOL.

[Ghostpanther]

You say you can't but then go on to say how you can lol

A person being poor isn't the issue here just whether or not it's possible.

It is a issue when most people cannot buy one. Also, link the last time a person used a machine gun ( as defined by the FBI as being a machine gun ) to commit a crime.

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I was not, actually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_campaign Reverse image searching works wonders. Yikes. What kind of damage would police dogs do in situations like that? It's hard to tell from a still image. Either way, absolutely insane stuff. All this as recently as the 1960's.

I have to wonder how they justified this insanely evil BS to themselves in a country that's supposed to have a right to protest.

We have the right for peaceful protests. And in a lot of cases, permits are needed to do such in some places. Blocking access for other citizens to a public building or road, is not legal unless you get a permit which allows for such. If one is denied a permit, there are legal ways to challenge it. Otherwise, you can create violence by acting unlawful. Dogs are still used by the police and have been found to be very effective tools for them.

[Monster Hunter]

1950s



present



Where did this shaved head bs come from?
https://newrepublic.com/article/1416...ior-philosophy

Should American police work harder to attract a more classy recruit?

Should we enforce more hair in the police dress code?

There's probly some deep shit to unpack here around the heavy use of ex military men and the mentality of the "war on drugs" and its effects in the culture outlook of a police force.

[neocount]

In the USA, the officer usually approaches weapon drawn, and is in many cases ordering the civilian to step out or show their hands or the like; it's presumed to be a violently hostile situation.

This has not been my experience or the experience of any of my friends (among which there is a good mix of ethnicities). I've had several encounters with police over the years and I have never once had a weapon drawn on me or have seen police behaving with anything other than professionalism. One even talked about surfing with me while I was living in Florida. People's perceptions are seasoned by what we see in the media. I suspect those incidents, while numerous, are still a relatively small portion of the total police and community interactions which surely number in the tens of thousands every day.