I wasn't talking about Obama drinking water responses, I was talking about putting local police, sheriff in jail, thus why I linked the articles doing exactly that as examples. I would like to see congressional oversight via committee, thus making it more difficult to influence all the members rather than having it in the control of local or even state officials. You would have people from different states and party affiliation providing more obstacles to prevent having any one politician in their pocket. There is no " perfect" system, the best we can do however is put as many obstacles as we can to prevent corruption and actively work to improve it and maintain it.
I think reducing police budgets and numbers of officers would actually make it MUCH worse, not better. Before you jump on that hear me out... Less pay and less people to spread the work out always equates to overworking the few and paying them less which directly results in less quality of employees, more stress for each person and increases the likelihood of mistakes. Part of the problem with the police department as it is, is due to it being a horrible job with horrendous pay, they are not able to recruit and keep good officers instead they only attract people who want the job for it's " perks". The " perks" that are attracting these sort of people is to be able to use violence on others without going to jail, the adrenaline rush of the violent confrontations and the shoot outs when they bust down someone's door. Due to the current low pay, the job as it is designed now is attracting the very people we never want to be cops at all. In order to change this we actually have to INCREASE pay and benefits and make the job safer by increasing the number of officers AND reducing the way they handle and/ or exposed to violent situations. You attract better officers who are better equipped for deescalation training rather than adrenaline junkies getting off on escalating violence as we have now. Attracting officers who want to take care of their families and come home at the end of the day will have more motivation to deescalate violence than come in guns ablazing for the high of it all.
By increasing our training of officers, and increasing their pay and benefits, we are making a larger investment in the individual officers themselves and we want to keep GOOD quality officers both alive longer and on the force longer allowing them to take better care of their families and the officers themselves then too will have an investment in their community and their job. Currently, far too many good officers leave because they cannot support their families on the crap pay and they worry due to the current policing culture is making it too dangerous to them and their families. They don't want to leave their kids without a parent and they do not want their families targeted due to something someone in their department did to make the people angry with them. For good quality officers, that is too much to risk, so they understandably leave the force. THOSE are the ones we actually want to keep. We need to make their shifts shorter and less stressful and more family oriented so they can be there for their families and increase their pay for the time they are there. Having officers who are there as a part of the community are the ones we really need, and we need to drive the adrenaline junkies out all together. If we take away the adrenaline junkies ability to feed their violence addiction they will either get caught and get kicked and/or prosecuted or leave on their own bored. That should be our goal for dealing with both trying to attract well trained high quality officers who care about their families and their community and do not wish to harm either and get rid of the current officers who want to get off on abusing people.
We don't want to limit their contact with the public, we want them to be a part of it, be proud of it and see those they are interacting with as their own family and treat them as such, not further isolating them. Instead, we want to change how their job and role is designed with the primary focus on deescalating situations and directing people to the help they need via social workers and psychiatrists and keeping people safe by changing how they even approach or arrest people all together. I really liked how some nations use the " many officers" with shields and defensive approaches and what not to contain a suspect rather than one guy chasing them with a gun like they do in the US. We need to however, have them trained defensively and deescalation rather than offensively, increase their numbers so they work less hours and under less stress so they make fewer mistakes , for higher pay so we keep the good ones, prosecute the bad ones to get them out of here and redefine their role entirely. That would be a massive improvement to what we have now.
I see cutting pay, hiding them away and cutting numbers just makes them worse quality officers , over worked means more stressed=more mistakes and hiding them away from the public means they are not there when you need them, the community is more suspicious of them making it harder to do their job and more dangerous to them because people will more likely see them as a threat rather than someone there to help. That makes it worse on every level.
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