[ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition

[William Flynn Wallace]

Just what we need:  borderline psychopaths with full armor and buoyed by a
lack of ability to be sued, give them lethal weapons and turn them loose on
lawbreakers.

I support the police just as much as any conservative rightwinger does (I
was even polite to the ones who gave me speeding tickets.), but many of
their practices have gone beyond reason.  I posted the other day about
education in the US getting our teachers from the bottom third of the
group, which Singapore used the top third.  Why can't we do that with the
police?  We hire from the bottom, men and women who probably dropped out
school before or during college.  We do not screen them adequately, train
them for a few weeks, and turn them loose.  Oh, and pay them poorly, so
much so that they need second jobs to support a family, just like
teachers.  Bottom line:  we are not paying people according to their
importance

The large majority of them will be OK, I think, though befuddled by complex
situations.  But a few will be killers with the mentality of the worst
criminals, just looking for a fight.  Any adequate screening would have
caught them before they entered the police academy.  But I have never heard
of adequate screening.  Have you?

Wars starting with Vietnam gave us data about men with weapons who did not
fire them in combat.  Has the Army studied those people, or just kicked
them out?  You know my guess.  Or how about those who just fired at anyone
in sight and mowed down entire Vietnam villages? We need personality
profiles of both types - and more.

Yeah, I am for hiring tons of psychologists and finding out who turns out
to be good cops and who bad cops, not that there's a neat dividing line -
never is.

I think proper screening would solve more problems than anything else we
can do.   bill w

On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 1:24 PM Anton Sherwood via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 2020-8-07 03:11, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote:
> > Abolishing the police is stupid and advocated only by crackpots
>
> According to some of them, stripping the police of some of their legal
> immunity to torts would be tantamount to abolition.
>
> --
> *\\*  Anton Sherwood  *\\*  www.bendwavy.org
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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