mrklean wrote:The current state of Law enforcement is ****. This did not happen over night.
1. Too many GED cops (80% do not have a college degree)
5. Not enough cops live in the community that they serve. THIS IS THE BIGGEST FACTOR.
6. The so called war on drugs brought rise to the militarization of Law Enforcement. Thank You President Reagan.
This is why I left Law Enforcement in December 2003.
You didn't leave law enforcement- you left being a baby sitter, Turnkey.
I dropped the really dumb points in your post but highlighted the ones above that are non-starters (like wishing the sky was green)
The first one is not accurate. Not having a college degree does not mean you have a GED, but we'll skip over that misleading bit to say that most police departments with more than 50 officers REQUIRE college degrees. This has been a trend since the 1980s. There are plenty of small town police departments and small sheriffs departments that don't have the degree requirement but they do not constitute 80% of police.
Number 5 will never happen. It get repeated by a lot of people who know little to nothing about law enforcement, like you. No way in FUCK was I ever going to live in the Team 1 area in Charleston. One, I;m not going to live where people would be shooting into my house every night. Two, it is a known FACT that police officers are jeopardized when the public knows where they live. If you want to kill a cop, why wait for him to be in uniform? Shott him on his front stoop while he's picking up his newspaper. Make residency a requirement and you'll reap a whole new set of problems that are worse than what we have.
BTW- a sidebar to the residency issue is a tacit admission on your part that shitty neighborhoods are the biggest consumers of police services. This is why police encounter minorities much, much more frequently than whites- because they are summoned by minorities more. The flip side of this is that nobody is going to pay for me to live downtown south of Calhoun Street in Charleston if that is my patrol area. The bottom line is that police are middle class workers and they are going to live where they can afford to just like everybody else. Read up on residency requirement studies and their effects on recruiting and you'll see that this is an ignorant suggestion. The IACP has done a few studies as well as others, if you care to look them up.
The War on Drugs was begun by Nixon and has been strengthened by every single president since then. Nice try hanging it on Republicans, but Democrats have ushered in some of the biggest expansions in the WOD (Clinton) so there's that.