Los Angeles, CA—Police training has taken a fascist turn here along with our political leadership. One only has to look at the prison population to understand we are in a police state growing by the second into something no rational human beings will want.
Police work is sometimes dangerous. Criminals despite laws and every kind of gun ban still rape rob and murder. We insist on maintaining the miserably failed Drug War keeping illicit profits and government corruption at an all time high. Our liberty and freedom has been at an all time low as a direct result.
We’ve turned street cops into urban commandos raiding homes (many by mistake) at all hours. The result is far more dangerous than the outlawed drugs themselves.
We want our cops alive and train them to take no chances. The hero cop is really an endangered species.
I was trained differently. We had no ballistic vests and carried six-shot service revolvers as we worked the mean streets of Chicago. We understood two things; deadly force was to be a last resort and to weigh the moral consequences of any deadly force used.
We were taught that mental illness often brought on people’s violent reactions and that we need to be as humane as possible. Bringing suspects to justice alive was the goal. Bringing them in dead was always considered a serious failure.
Frankly the average Chicago cop in a busy district could kill as many as 12 suspects a year with complete justification. Instead cops looked for every reason not to pull the trigger. Of course where there was no option whatsoever bullets must fly.
