Current Affairs The " another shooting in America " thread

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On policing with better training, the ironic example of the Dallas PD:

Washington Post:
What Dallas’s historically low murder rate can teach us about policing

Here at The Watch, we’ve praised Dallas Police Chief David Brown and his staff for the department’s community-oriented approach to policing, openness and transparency about excessive force, its rejection of law enforcement as a revenue generator, and its First Amendment-friendly approach to protest.

Now, there’s some evidence of a payoff.

Dallas’ 2014 murder rate was its lowest since 1930 — the year Bonnie and Clyde met at a West Dallas house party.

And the Dallas Police Department’s preliminary count of 116 murders last year — there is one unexplained death awaiting a ruling — would be the lowest yearly murder tally since 1965. It’s also a notable drop from the 143 murders in 2013 and it’s fewer than half the murders recorded in 2004.

Police officials say their crime-fighting and crime-prevention strategies have played a major role in reducing homicides, the rarest of major crimes. Others say outside variables — medical advancements, changing demographics and better social services — deserve much of the credit.

But they all are marveling at the figures.

“I’m really amazed at how low that number has gotten,” said Dallas ISD Police Chief Craig Miller, who became a Dallas police officer in 1982 and later headed the homicide unit.

Miller said police technology, such as surveillance cameras, has helped deter criminals. He also said paramedics and better trauma care have played big roles. Dallas Fire-Rescue has touted improved response times in recent years. And officers also are now equipped with tourniquets and gauze. One officer used the aids last week to help save a gunshot victim in South Dallas.

But it isn’t just the murder rate; the overall crime rate also continues to drop in Dallas.

In general, I think there’s too much of a tendency to credit or blame policing tactics for crime rates. The massive crime drop we’ve seen across the country since the mid-1990s occurred in places that both did and didn’t engage in mass incarceration, did and didn’t engage in “broken windows”-style policing, did and didn’t commit to real community-oriented policing, did and didn’t use a widespread stop-and-frisk policy, and so on. It’s quite possible that the drop had nothing to do policing strategy at all and instead was the product of rising standards of living, an aging population, or even environmental factors like a decrease in childhood exposure to lead.

None of which is to say we don’t need cops — only that crime rates may well be driven more by larger, society-wide trends than individual approaches to policing. The evidence for this is that it isn’t just crime that has dropped since the mid-1990s; nearly every social indicator has been moving in a positive direction for the past quarter-century or so.

All of that said, in a free society we should want our law enforcement officers to use the least amount of force, confrontation and violence possible, while still maintaining an acceptable level of public safety. Dallas is just the latest evidence that the old song about freedom and security being a zero-sum game — that when you increase one, you’ll always get less of the other — is a canard. You can embrace policing policies that are community-friendly, open and transparent, and dedicated to minimizing the use of force and violence . . . and still enjoy the same or greater drops in crime we’re seeing elsewhere.

And it isn’t just in Dallas. My hometown of Nashville also has embraced community-oriented policing for a while now and has seen correlating and historic drops in crime. Salt Lake City also has a police chief who puts a priority on minimizing the use of force and on engaging with the community. Crime is falling there, too. Historically, community-oriented police chiefs like Joseph McNamara in San Jose in the 1980s and Jerry Wilson in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s instituted similar policies and watched crime drop in their cities as it soared in most of the rest of the country.

There are far too many other factors that contribute to the crime rate to specifically or exclusive credit this sort of policing for the increase in safety in the cities that have tried it. But if we can get the same or better public safety results by training police officers to deescalate, to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve a confrontation, to engage with the community and to opt for conflict resolution over violence . . . why wouldn’t we?
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Buzzfeed News:
Here’s How Dallas Built A Model Police Force

After a deliberate shift in police training, excessive force complaints against the Dallas Police Department dropped by 64% between 2009 and 2014. The number of arrests and officer-involved shootings also declined in recent years.

five police officers were killed and seven more wounded by snipers in Dallas on Thursday night during protests over two separate police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota this week.

The attacks have shined a tragic light on a police department that has seen decreases in excessive force complaints, arrests, and officer-involved shootings.

“This police department trained in de-escalation far before cities across America did it,” Mayor Mike Rawlings told reporters on Friday morning. “We’re one of the premier community policing cities in the country and this year we have the fewest police officer-related shootings than any large city in America.”

Dallas Police Department Chief David Brown has credited this progress to a shift in training and practices, which put greater emphasis on de-escalation and community policing.

As the Dallas Morning News reported last year, instructors taught officers to “slow down” when engaging with a suspect and to speak calmly rather than immediately shouting. The department has also doubled the amount of training for officers on patrol.

“We definitely want our officers to defend themselves and we want them to go home at night,” Brown told the paper. “But we also want to avoid the controversies of a shooting that violates our deadly force policy. You do that through training.”

The dramatic decline in excessive force complaints and arrests trace back to the year Brown, who is black, took over the department in 2010. In 2009, the department received 147 excessive force complaints and made 74,000 arrests. Within three years, arrests were down to 61,000 and within five years excessive force complaints were down to 53. As the number of excessive force complaints and arrests declined, so did the city’s murder rate, which reached its lowest point in more than 80 years in 2014, before ticking back upwards in 2015.

The city has also seen a decline in officer-involved shootings. From 2010 to 2014, Dallas officers fatally shot 34 people — more than half of whom were black — a higher per capita rate than Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.

In 2012, a year in which 10 people were killed by police, an officer fatally shot James Harper, an unarmed black man, sparking heated protests in the city. Chief Brown defended the shooting. The officer was not indicted. In 2013, another officer shot and killed another unarmed black man, Clinton Allen. That officer was also not indicted. That same year, however, Brown fired two other officers involved in shootings. And in the years since 2012, when police shot 23 people, the number of police shootings has decreased each year, down to 11 in 2015. According to the data, Dallas police officers have shot one person this year.

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Laura Buckman / AFP / Getty Images

After a police officer in Ferguson, MO., fatally shot Michael Brown in August 2014, Chief Brown wrote a column in the Dallas Morning News explaining that, in the aftermath of a police shooting, it was important for his department to “immediately” inform the public about “all the facts as we knew them,” release the names of the victim and the officer involved, and, “perhaps most important,” decrease the number of officers in the neighborhood around the shooting scene.

Unlike many departments across the country, the Dallas Police Department has tracked and publicized its number of officer-involved shootings. Following one of the 2013 police shootings, the department published a spreadsheet listing a decade’s worth of statistics showing the yearly numbers of suspects killed and injured by officers. This year, the department released its most comprehensive report on its use of force, detailing how often officers used take-downs, pepper spray, batons, tasers, and firearms.

The department’s tactics for covering protests reflected its community policing focus. “You have a community that is upset, that feels wronged. It’s important to establish trust with them,” Maj. Max Geron told the Washington Post. “The ideal police response to a protest is no response at all.”

And so on Thursday night, the officers around the protest wore normal uniforms, without helmets or heavy vests.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Mayor Rawlings said he wished to “brag” about the progress his police department has made in de-escalation training.

“We are working hard to improve and there’s always room for improvement, but we are best in class, we feel,” Mayor Rawlings said.
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The Police used a remote robot with a Bomb to kill a suspect... Madness. The militarisation of the police forces in the USA is fricking stupid IMO and will only escalate the violence in the future I think.

I'm off for a big fat spliff and a nice cup of PG tips, thank God for the Atlantic ocean.
 
bignev23 said:
The Police used a remote robot with a Bomb to kill a suspect... Madness. The militarisation of the police forces in the USA is fricking stupid IMO and will only escalate the violence in the future I think.

I'm off for a big fat spliff and a nice cup of PG tips, thank God for the Atlantic ocean.
Click to expand...
Drone strikes in Harlem next...
 
A mate of mine posted this today and sums it up for me:

"Thought for an awful morning: You don't need to choose A side. You can be appalled by Dallas, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge. It's okay to stand behind our police but recognize there is an issue with some of the incidents that have happened. You can ask for transparency and independent investigations and not be anti-cop. You can look at a Ferguson or Baltimore and see that the issue is much more entrenched and systemic than the incendiary incident. You can mourn officers from a PD that seemed to be model of community policing. You can recognize police officers for the heroes they are. You recognize that the true protesters are not resorting to violence. You can stop making your decisions about people in groups. You can choose the sides of love, of peace, support those who protect us, and support for those who question whether justice has been served. Think for yourself".
 
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