A Barbarian’s Issues with Law Enforcement: Some Understanding

The general public has many misconceptions about law enforcement that are not problems in them selves though they could lead to or exacerbate other problems.

Lack of training

I went through a year long 40hour a week academy. I can tell you that its not a problem of minimum hours of training its the content of the training. I would say that 50% or more of the time i spent in academy was spent on things that don’t matter, and they were stretched out much longer than necessary. While things that do matter and would make cops better were left to the way side. A topic that could be covered in an hour, required 8. This left us sitting on our hands or stuck in lectures that are unnecessarily long taking away time from training that should have had more time dedicated. Or training that is typically reserved for the department inservice trainings is left out of academy completely.

In the age of woke and pronouns this will only get worse. More time will be spent on DEI than on differentiating from medical incidents and driving under the influence. Trainings involving autism and other disabilities. More training time will be taken away from learning the law, and rights more so than it already is, though this might be by design……

I will say that my academy did cover law very well for the state i was in at the time, but I also know that it is not the case in all academies and that time is often taken away from learning the law for other topics. Law class ran almost the entire time of the academy and covered statue law and constitutional law and case law. Though case law only covered those that benefited the cops or threatened them not that benefited the public.

My academy spent a good amount of time on report writing but what that means is that were were trained the formatting and the “buzzwords” to use to cover our asses and the departments ass regardless if the report was 100% accurate to what happens by using those buzzwords. “Through my training and experience” Is a popular one. Time was however taken away from things such as negotiation/crisis intervention (talking down suicidal people).

Dark Humor

People need to understand this because it is not just law enforcement. Anyone that spends the majority of their time in stressful or tragic circumstances will develop a dark sense of humor in order to process it or they will not make it out alive. This applies to cops, soldiers, firefighters, social workers, and Drs. They may be there for the worst day of your life, but this is only the 3rd worst day of a life they have been in today. They may still have 12 more hours of worst days before starting it again tomorrow. You get to process and deal with this day, they have to shake it off move on and go back to work.

Misconceptions that could be problems

Racism

This is not systemic as most would have you believe. Not at the country level or most organizations. They think this because there is info going around that law enforcement started with slave catchers when in reality law enforcement traditions goes back to Europe before the US was even a thing. Racism however can be a problem on an individual level just like in any other profession or industry. The problem is when departments or other officers will cover for bad officers in order to try and avoid looking like Its a department problem, inadvertently creating the department problem they were trying to avoid.

Cops not policing their own areas – This is another popular one that people like to complain about. Cops living in one city and policing another. I get why this happens, and it happens in fire departments too. People don’t want to deal with seeing people they know, shot, killed, robbed, committing suicide, and so on.

There is however an argument to be made that by doing so they do not have any ties to the community and therefore have no incentive to do right by the community.

Thinking everyone is armed

This comes up constantly, and when said out loud it sounds fine. “Cops shouldn’t act like everyone is armed” but you have to when your in a job where you might have to go up against an armed felon even if that likely hood is low.

This is the real world people hurt other people, and in reality its not just cops that should think about other people being armed. Especially when people are getting assaulted for no reason on the streets. Everyone needs to think about it and prepare themselves because one day it might be you in that confrontation.

I would argue that the over reaction comes from people being afraid of weapons and not people holding them. These are the cops you see drawing down on someone who says they have a concealed weapons permit, or a hunter who has a rifle slung. They equate weapon and death instead of looking at the entire situation. This fear is also where you see cops so amped up that they give an order and then shoot the person for complying with the order. This is proven time and time again every time a citizen goes into a police training trying to prove this wrong and ends up “shooting” an unarmed person.

We have now come to the end of limits for my benefit of the doubt and understanding when it comes to law enforcement. Part 3 will start to cover actual misconduct in law enforcement as well as the misunderstanding by the public in the design of the system.