A good police program redesign would stop the implementation of this bill. What good is a bill if you can’t enforce it. We are in the precursor winds to the storms of change that envelops this country every so often.
It’s a two birds with one stone type of predicament.
How can one teach what one has learned ? Experience is necessary to obtain most of the skills you possess. But is sacrifice necessary in order to learn the skills that compose a good cop.
Furthermore what constitutes a good cop ? Who catches the most perps ? The best shot ? The seasoned? What qualities are we trying to replicate?
I believe a concentration / focus on
hardening / redevelopment of our police force would lead to LESS great officers.
I believe the benefits to this would be:
More familiarity with individual officers.
More picky with fund allocation.
Shift in Rank; the more capable would rise to the top.
Heightened community respect for Officers.
Increased Officer Competency ( there’s a couple cops out there on the streets right now that maybe should’ve went through additional screening)
A condensation of our existing police force would weed out officers who aren’t level headed enough and banish anyone who is using Bakersfield as a fueling stop in search of a better opportunity somewhere else.
But LESS great is typically more effective than MORE mediocre. This isn’t a factory line and we’re not in Detroit. We don’t need the menial tasks broken down and handed to a bunch of pencil pushers fresh out of college with a bachelors degree. We need men and women out there. Trained on deescalation, people who have seen how fast something can escalate, and know that is nothing nobody wants to be apart of.
I think after a living for a certain amount of time , one comes to the conclusion that peace is the only feasible way of life. And conflict avoidance and deeacalation becomes the way. Mediation and diplomacy reign supreme. Unity is the objective.
I guess this ramble is just a cry to assess what’s working and what isn’t. Only you know that much. The rest of us are just watching from the audience Mr. Harless. And the worlds a stage. When they give you your standing ovation, it will be well deserved.
Thanks for the thoughts and perspective! One of the downsides to writing an opinion piece in the local newspaper is they only give you 700 words which makes it difficult to write in dept about anything. One of the things I like about Substack is I can write as much as I want without any limits. If I were a better writer, I would have taken the original opinion piece and expanded on some of the concepts to make it clearer. Since I’m a part time hack, I just uploaded the original.
The spirit of AB89 I would say is based on a false premise. It assumes we have a problem with unjustified and excessive police violence and especially deadly force incidents. This is a false narrative pushed by a corrupt corporate media. I’m not saying there are never incidents of excessive force or unjustified police shootings, there certainly are, I’m only saying they are not nearly as prevalent as certain activist groups would like us to think. I’m all for making cops better and to the degree we can reduce those rare incidents of unjustified force I think that is a good thing. However, is this a top priority problem facing American citizens? Not even close. Now if I were to play along with the premise, just for the sake of argument, and say police violence is a big problem and we need radical change to reduce it, I would not propose the solutions in AB89.
I will try to answer some of your questions. The term “de-escalation” first became popular in the world of policing around 2015. This was a new buzz word based on another false premise. It assumed we only trained officers how to use force to control and hurt people and that we never showed them how to use other methods of conflict resolution. This is absurd. While there is no perfect substitute for real world experience, everything cops do in real life can and is simulated in training. At my agency, we devote quite a bit of time training these skills to create good officers. In a 23-week academy, an officer will get 80 hours of range training, and 120 hours of defensive tactics training. That’s not just shooting and fighting, but it is also scenario-based training in the application of those techniques, and yes, de-escalation. The training has gotten better over the years, but this stuff was being taught long before it became popular for the activists to complain about.
What makes a good cop is a combination of moral character and clarity, physical skills, and critical thinking. There are many other things as well, some of which might be learned in college, but more often than not these are skills learned through real life experiences.
I hope that clears things up a little. Thanks for reading!
A good police program redesign would stop the implementation of this bill. What good is a bill if you can’t enforce it. We are in the precursor winds to the storms of change that envelops this country every so often.
It’s a two birds with one stone type of predicament.
How can one teach what one has learned ? Experience is necessary to obtain most of the skills you possess. But is sacrifice necessary in order to learn the skills that compose a good cop.
Furthermore what constitutes a good cop ? Who catches the most perps ? The best shot ? The seasoned? What qualities are we trying to replicate?
I believe a concentration / focus on
hardening / redevelopment of our police force would lead to LESS great officers.
I believe the benefits to this would be:
More familiarity with individual officers.
More picky with fund allocation.
Shift in Rank; the more capable would rise to the top.
Heightened community respect for Officers.
Increased Officer Competency ( there’s a couple cops out there on the streets right now that maybe should’ve went through additional screening)
A condensation of our existing police force would weed out officers who aren’t level headed enough and banish anyone who is using Bakersfield as a fueling stop in search of a better opportunity somewhere else.
But LESS great is typically more effective than MORE mediocre. This isn’t a factory line and we’re not in Detroit. We don’t need the menial tasks broken down and handed to a bunch of pencil pushers fresh out of college with a bachelors degree. We need men and women out there. Trained on deescalation, people who have seen how fast something can escalate, and know that is nothing nobody wants to be apart of.
I think after a living for a certain amount of time , one comes to the conclusion that peace is the only feasible way of life. And conflict avoidance and deeacalation becomes the way. Mediation and diplomacy reign supreme. Unity is the objective.
I guess this ramble is just a cry to assess what’s working and what isn’t. Only you know that much. The rest of us are just watching from the audience Mr. Harless. And the worlds a stage. When they give you your standing ovation, it will be well deserved.
Thanks for your perspective.
Thanks for the thoughts and perspective! One of the downsides to writing an opinion piece in the local newspaper is they only give you 700 words which makes it difficult to write in dept about anything. One of the things I like about Substack is I can write as much as I want without any limits. If I were a better writer, I would have taken the original opinion piece and expanded on some of the concepts to make it clearer. Since I’m a part time hack, I just uploaded the original.
The spirit of AB89 I would say is based on a false premise. It assumes we have a problem with unjustified and excessive police violence and especially deadly force incidents. This is a false narrative pushed by a corrupt corporate media. I’m not saying there are never incidents of excessive force or unjustified police shootings, there certainly are, I’m only saying they are not nearly as prevalent as certain activist groups would like us to think. I’m all for making cops better and to the degree we can reduce those rare incidents of unjustified force I think that is a good thing. However, is this a top priority problem facing American citizens? Not even close. Now if I were to play along with the premise, just for the sake of argument, and say police violence is a big problem and we need radical change to reduce it, I would not propose the solutions in AB89.
I will try to answer some of your questions. The term “de-escalation” first became popular in the world of policing around 2015. This was a new buzz word based on another false premise. It assumed we only trained officers how to use force to control and hurt people and that we never showed them how to use other methods of conflict resolution. This is absurd. While there is no perfect substitute for real world experience, everything cops do in real life can and is simulated in training. At my agency, we devote quite a bit of time training these skills to create good officers. In a 23-week academy, an officer will get 80 hours of range training, and 120 hours of defensive tactics training. That’s not just shooting and fighting, but it is also scenario-based training in the application of those techniques, and yes, de-escalation. The training has gotten better over the years, but this stuff was being taught long before it became popular for the activists to complain about.
What makes a good cop is a combination of moral character and clarity, physical skills, and critical thinking. There are many other things as well, some of which might be learned in college, but more often than not these are skills learned through real life experiences.
I hope that clears things up a little. Thanks for reading!