Currently in the United States far-left extremists have been rioting for over half a year, causing several billions of dollars in property damage and dozens of deaths (some of them actual murders), one of their demands being a complete reform of the policing system in the country. Unsurprisingly, the entirety of the Democratic Party has joined this rhetoric.
I think this might well be a case of being right (at least partially right) for the wrong reasons.
Their rhetoric is extremely hostile, extremist, inflammatory, provocative, accusatory and outright racist. They are blaming the problem with the policing system on alleged problems, most of which are largely imaginary and exaggerated, such as "structural racism" and "white supremacy". They are completely blinded by any statistics or arguments given to them against there being a disproportionate amount of racist crimes and killings committed by the police against black people, compared to police killings and abuse of white people, or to black-on-black crime, for instance.
Their rhetoric is so vile, so accusatory, so provocative and often so misguided and detached from actual reality that it's easy to dismiss their demand for police reform as just another form of trying to grab power and destroy the country they are living in.
As said, I think they have a point in the whole "police reform" front, but for quite the completely wrong reasons. I'm not saying that racist prejudice isn't prevalent among the American police, nor that there are no individual police officers who are deeply racist and can't wait their opportunity to shoot black people. However, I'm convinced they are quite a minority, and not the actual problem in the American policing system.
The policing system in the United States has more fundamental problems than that.
For starters, do you know how much training and education police officers are required to go through before giving them a badge and a gun? In the worst cases it's as low as 10 weeks, ie. 2 and a half months.
It's my understanding that this is almost unprecedented, especially in western countries. For example in Finland all police officers need to go through police academy, which is for all intents and purposes a polytechnic university for police applicants. Do you know how long the curriculum to become a police officer is in Finland, which every single police officer needs to go through and pass?
4 years.
In the United States it can be as short as 2.5 months.
It's no wonder that so many American police officers are so clueless about the law. A very significant portion of Finnish police academy is studying the law that all police officers should know, which gives them a good understanding of what they can and cannot do, what are and are not crimes that need intervention, and what to do with suspects and perpetrators.
In America, however, many police officers are largely clueless about the laws of their own country and state (as becomes quite clear for example when one watches so-called "First Amendment audit" videos).
A large part of police academy in Finland is also training on how to deal with the public, how to de-escalate situations, how to proactively act to prevent crimes from happening, and how to stop ongoing crimes as quickly and efficiently as possible. In America this kind of training is rare.
In Finland there are no riots, there is no looting, there are no masked terrorist larpers blocking and disrupting traffic and harassing people on the streets. "Antifa" activism is pretty much non-existent. Do you know why? Because in Finland the police actually upholds the law and arrests people who are committing crimes, much unlike is happening in the United States (and has been happening for years and years).
Police officers in the United States are also extreme spineless cowards.
Do you know why the police doesn't intervene and stop the crimes that are happening in front of their eyes, and simply watches from the sidelines doing nothing? Because they are cowards, that's why. They are not so much scared of the masked larpers. They are scared of losing their careers and pensions. They are too scared to disobey the orders given by higher-ups, or to criticize them. They just obey the orders, no matter how corrupted and wrong they be, because they are scared of losing their jobs
They are nothing but spineless cowards who have no balls. They are so cowardly that they will handcuff 8-year-old boys, apparently because they are so scared shitless of them.
In any other country, no matter which political system, if a police officer were to do that he would be prosecuted for child abuse. Not so in the United States.
All that really needs to change. Police officers need to be actually taught the law, and trained properly to engage with the public. They need to actually start upholding the law, and they need to stop being fucking spineless cowards.
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