Most officers get less than six months of training.
In other countries (with much lower rates of officer involved homicides), officers receive years of training.
It is exactly perceived threat.
But they're so untrained that they perceive many things as threats that are not threats (a man with autism rocking back and forth on the ground while holding a toy firetruck, for example).
I think better training might help, but the problem isn't pre-job training, it's the training they get once they've been on the job.
Surely, most average people's first instinct isn't approach any interaction with hand on weapons? I doubt that's due to lack of training. I think that's due to an entirely wrong sort of implicit and explicit training.
Walking around with a gun + license to kill + fostering sense of us vs them for years will probably teach you that escalation and confrontation is the way to get people to back down. So that's what you do.
By incentivizing them to take a second look at their assumptions, maybe we can make progress?
I'd say just the opposite. Normal people don't react to others this way. The violent hair trigger that cops are set on is a result of their training - they're taught to do this.
The solution is not to train them more. The solution is to change the relationship between police and the public, and train them to respect that.
Police are presently trained to shoot first, to pull out their guns first, and perhaps not formally trained for this but they're taught by at least their peers and mentors to be hostile and aggressive first.
Better training changes this. Better training fosters their membership and relationship with the community. Better training gets them to pull out their guns only when they intend to use them, not when they first pull someone over. Better training will get NYC cops to stop shooting passerbies while trying to kill suicidal people (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/nyregion/unarmed-man-is-ch...).
The present training is overly focused on violent intervention. And for the majority of police-civilian interaction no violence is intended by the civilians or needed by the police. But their mindset is entirely predicated on "be violent before they are".
I've been on psychiatrist-prescribed meds for a little over two years now. I've gotten a better job, my salary has increased by 52%, I live with less stress, I have a (mostly) tidy home, I am no longer dependent on alcohol, I care for a wonderful dog, I am cultivating healthy relationships and friendships, and I am more involved in my community.
I've also been seeing a cognitive-behavioral therapist for about three years to work through anxiety, depression, gender identity, and trauma from several childhood sexual assaults.
But maybe I don't count, because I'm not a 'guy' :) but I'm doing absolutely fucking amazing, thank you very much.
I've learned coping skills to help me deal with what I take the meds for - coping skills that I could not practice / get good at while I was not being treated. I'm not as good as I am when I'm on them, but I'm a whole lot better than I used to be. (How do I know? I take regular doctor-sanctioned drug holidays. Luckily the meds I take do not need to be tapered.)
But you don't really care about that. Or any valid piece of evidence that disputes your already-formed opinion.
I used to be really against psychiatry too. Had docs in high school that didn't ask the right questions. Got misdiagnosed. Spent my 20s a shambling (semi-functional, but shambling) mess.
I'm privileged that I'm able to afford my mental healthcare team (neither of them take insurance). I wish access to quality mental health professionals was more easy to obtain. It's a double edged sword- the practice has a hard time recruiting, and health insurance is often pretty terrible for it. So many people who would benefit from a mental health provider cannot / will not get it.
If you go off your HIV meds you get AIDS and die. If you stay on your HIV meds you have a life expectancy is similar to someone who does not have the virus. (1)
Do you then conclude HIV meds are bad? Or HIV patients need to just suck it up?
Your question only highlights your ignorance. For the vast majority of meds, they should be used in conjunction with therapy to resolve the underlying problem. The meds are not (always) a cure, but rather a treatment of symptoms to make the cure easier to achieve.
I've often wondered about those that commuted long ways for school. Was it because the school was better, or because there was no closer school? If it was just a better school, do you think it was more beneficial overall to have that time used on the bus when it could have been put to work on something else, or was the local school unsafe?
I was lucky enough to always live very close to my schools, so hours spent commuting to school is entirely alien to me, and barring safety issues, I'm not sure a directed extracurricular learning program wouldn't be more beneficial (and if the student or parents care enough to commute, I imagine they could work out some program from available sources). Then again, I've never been put in a situation that young where it relied that much on my own motivation.
It was a magnet school that had resources (one of the best performing arts departments in the state; one of the only AP comp sci programs in a 45 mi radius) that my locally assigned high school did not.
The primary reasons the school-bus commute was long was a) meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop and b) a 20 mile trek on the highway at 45mph.
If I had been able to drive (or carpooled), my commute would have been less than 35 minutes.
I guess that makes sense. It's not just "better" in the sense of different schools in an area may be better or worse, but also highly directed in certain areas. I can see the draw of that.
> meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop
Yes, come to think of it, people that rode the bus at my school probably had at least a 40-45 minute ride in the earlier stops just from this. I think I rode the bus once when going to a friend's house after school, so this didn't come to mind. The rest of the time I always walked (High School was literally across the street from my house, Middle School was a 20 minute brisk walk). Like I said, alien.
The weird minicars are not what they've been road testing. The ones they've been road testing for ML look like regular cars.
And they have yet to hit a pedestrian or decapitate a driver with a semi. Be real; Tesla's is basically a smarter cruise control. It can't actually deal with complicated scenarios.
Most officers get less than six months of training.
In other countries (with much lower rates of officer involved homicides), officers receive years of training.
It is exactly perceived threat.
But they're so untrained that they perceive many things as threats that are not threats (a man with autism rocking back and forth on the ground while holding a toy firetruck, for example).