Police departments already have absolutely enormous budgets, and the "more money for training" card has been played for more than 50 years. Seriously. After the Watts riots in 1965 (and those were real-by-god riots), the recommendation for the police? Better training and more investment in police and community relations. After every single time the police get so out of control a commission or some such is formed, that is the conclusion. And it has done sweet **** all, and it will continue to do sweet **** all.
We don't need to investigate the facts: the facts have been investigated over and over and over and over. The problem is that the police have near-impunity for their actions, and a mentality summed up in an oft-repeated police mantra: "it's better to be judged by twelve than carried by six". In other words, it's better to kill someone and take your chances with the legal system.
What the police need is to be shrunk dramatically, and in many cases whole police departments need to be disbanded and re-formed. The same organization should not be in charge of handling people having mental health issues and also have access to mine-resistant armoured personnel carriers. The police have suffered such profound mission creep, and have cultivated such a toxic internal culture, that you aren't going to train it out of them. Imagine being told for twenty years that you are a warrior and the only thing standing between civilization and its complete collapse, and that the only people you can trust are your brothers in blue, and then you have an eight-hour seminar telling you that you should stop beating civilians and also you should turn in any brothers in blue who act illegally. You think that's going to change anything? Of course not. It's madness to believe it is.
Absolutely, they should get rid of the gun issue in the US, too. But here's the thing: gun violence in the US has fallen dramatically.
All violence in the US has fallen dramatically. Even violence
against police has fallen dramatically.
Well, almost all. The one type of violence that hasn't? Police violence. I'm sure that sounds like hyperbole. I'm sure it sounds like it cannot possibly be true. But it is. Here's a scholar from the
right-wing American Enterprise Institute who, after setting out to examine the numbers, concluded that the police are (in his words) "engaged in a 20-year-long riot against the republic" (there's a whole thread, it's worth reading):
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The police have responded in this fashion because they have been given weapons of war, and been told to think of themselves like soldiers, yet they have been given none of the training that soldiers receive regarding use of force. The solution isn't to give them military training, though. It's to get rid of all the yahoos who think they're ****ing Rambo.