I know it’s a TV show, but this reminds me of the air traffic controller in Breaking Bad.
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Agreed. Police should probably do the same for the people they serve and protect.
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Well and the other thing is that even your BEST will make mistakes.

I don't know Dane - but he seems to have done very well in his profession. He hasn't batted 1.000 though - nobody does. And there's some degree of condescension involved with people who will put cops on blast for that sort of thing.

If you're early in your career and make a mistake - you were new and needed to gain some experience and learn from it in most professions. As a LEO if you're new you "shouldn't have been on the streets" as though you were ever going to learn from a textbook. Mahomes wouldn't have been better sitting in '18 - he needed to get out there and THROW.

Or if you're in the middle/end of an accomplished and generally sterling career and make a mistake, eh - I trust the guy and it was just human error in most professions. In law enforcement you screwed up despite clearly being qualified because you just didn't care or you're racist.

Suddenly fallibility can't exist and every negative event is indicative of poor character, competency or culture. As much as we'd like to say that humanity can be culled from certain professions, it just can't. That's not the way it works.
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To me, the analogy is apt.

We shouldn't expect a plane to crash to occur due to pilot error, just as we shouldn't expect a police office to brutalize or kill a suspect when it's absolutely unnecessary to do so.

Yet here we are, talking about yet another person who's been unnecessarily brutalized for no apparent reason.
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You're right.

People that spend (and risk) their lives patrolling impoverished and largely minority communities don't see those communities as human. They kinda feel like they're just there stocking shelves and are doing it for a civil servant's paycheck.

Maybe - just maybe - 'Police' aren't a monolith.
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I agree that no one is perfect. But in the case of Mr. Floyd, the officer accused of killing the man had 18 prior complaints.

Obviously, that officer is far from perfect but IMO, he should have been fired or removed from duty after the 5th complaint, not after the 19th complaint, in which a person lost their life unnecessarily.

Heads need to roll in that police department and others around the country need auditing as well.
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It’s absolutely apt.

But as long as planes are piloted by humans, they’ll be crashed by them. Normative philosophy does nobody any good. It doesn’t mean you’re happy or even accepting of it.

But ‘defund the airlines’ ain’t the answer. If you want planes, you have to acknowledge it. And if you want law enforcement over anarchy, it’s something you have to recognize as an unfortunate byproduct.
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Absolutely - the Floyd incident is largely indefensible and even I haven’t given that a shot.
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Agreed. I’m just speaking to the human element and everybody has bad days and hard times.

With some jobs, a bad day can lead to complete devastation. It’s very unfortunate, but it’s a reality we have to accept.
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Just as maybe, just maybe, the "we" from your quote doesn't represent a monolith, either.
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How about that. They got the Commissioner to say it.

We, the NFL, condemn racism and the systematic oppression of Black People. We, the NFL, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest. We, the NFL, believe Black Lives Matter. #InspireChange pic.twitter.com/ENWQP8A0sv

— NFL (@NFL) June 5, 2020

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It is most certainly an unfortunate byproduct.

But there also needs to be a change in the way these guys are screened, hired and assigned because I think we can all recognize that police brutality happens far too often, and far more than it should.
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What are you gonna do when bloody and violent revolution comes to your parents doorstep, or yours?

Cry out... “I’M ON YOUR SIDE“?

You may be a bigshot medical pro, but you have the common sense of a doorknob
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I'm surprised the did it almost word for word.

I'm also not surprised that they did it on a Friday night.
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And when the conversation takes that turn I just have to tap out because I don't think many of us have the knowledge base to speak to it.

I can speak pretty well to what a central Kansas department trained on 20 years ago but that's IT. And they all have variations on a largely central theme. Ultimately, though, if there were some clearly deficient version of the training, this stuff wouldn't be as widely distributed as it is. It would be more isolated and even in less isolated instances, they would have similarly identifiable training elements you could trace across geographically diverse departments.

I haven't attempted to do that and near as I can tell nobody that would specialize in that sort of thing has identified said training elements to this point in time.

And I'm not a profiler or psyc expert so how can I say what screening may be necessary or appropriate? From my laymens perspective, again - these incidents are coming from departments with different screening mechanisms as well. And ultimately I just think many of these things are things you cannot see in a profile or interview process. They surface under fire.

So if we've been unable to identify what training (or lack thereof) is causing it and we've likewise been unable to identify what type of screening would prevent it - how can we say with that "it happens too often"? We're missing two of the 3 necessary variable to the algebra problem here. If we can't identify how much is the attainable amount, then we sure can't say how much is too much.

Now where I do agree with you is again, the Floyd case and instances like them. Police Unions (and by extension/association, police departments) are WAAAAAY to slow to take the message. When a guy has a confirmed and credible complaint against him every year - maybe 2-3 years in it's time to consider if he shouldn't seek success elsewhere. And when you're trying to confirm said complaint or determine if it's credible - maybe be more thorough in how you do it. Don't rubber stamp stuff and 'protect the shield'.

Where I think department are failing is that they're not acting on credible intelligence, so to speak. And to some degree I think that's a result of being held hostage by police unions. The same people that will scream to the hills that Unions are invaluable will refuse to acknowledge the role they play in the continued employment of bad cops, teachers, lineman, etc...

Sometimes you can't just circle the wagons to ensure your dues keep getting paid. There has to be more serious self-evaluation. But that won't come through outside enforcement and heavy-handed regulation - it HAS to come from within or it will turn to an even more strident "us against them" attitude from law enforcement and will only be given lip service at best. But when you see an incident like Buffalo where Union members resign rather than demonstrate any kind of introspection, you just have to wonder what the hell else could make that happen?

So what's the right amount? Well I guess I'd start by saying the amount we have minus the amount enabled by the 'protect the shield' culture inherent in police unions and ultimately departments. But beyond that, I think we're guessing.
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