I also live in the EU and sometimes I get annoyed by how soft our police are.
I've seen multiple officers unable to take down one violent criminal. Why is there not hand to hand training and strength training? With proper training surely they could do it cleanly without injuring the perp.
I've seen (videos of) cops just walking away from armed criminals, letting them rob a store then tracking them down 6 months later after they do the same thing twice more.
When I look at the US I see the opposite problem. Police shooting a man in the back multiple times. Police using excessive force when arresting people for non violent crime. Police just generally power tripping.
From that perspective I can see why you would want to defund the police but I really would hesitate to do that. The EU is fine with a softer police force because we mostly have no guns and when there are real terrorists we can still bring in armed police. That is not the case in the US plus you are talking about fully defunding the police. Seems like a dangerous experiment to me. Why not reform instead?
I think for the same reason you see high-speed chasedowns in the US, and you don't really see that in Europe. The risks involved in catching that perp are significantly higher than simply arresting them later. (Both risk economically, as well as risk to human lives).
I think they should focus on demilitarising the police in the US, with that you also reduce the funding of the police. As a lot of the money goes into buying military-grade equipment. I really don't know why the police needs a tank (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police)
Sure, with brute force you can take a suspect, usually the decision whther or not a person is a criminal is up to the courts. The reason why European police aren't doing that, is exactly that brutality. They simply try to not hurt or seriously injure a person.
I know a couple of police officers, funny enough from martial arts training (kickboxing, BJJ and so on). These guys can take a person down all by themselves, sure. But at the risk of serious injuriy. This kind of brutality is exactly what peple are demonstrating against.
Als, IMHO, this whole "everyone is carrying a gun" narrative is a little bit lazy. Sure, the US has a gun issue. But just throwing it out there, is just a means to justify police brutality and use of deadly force. If there is such a problem with guns, there are couple of ways to deal with it:
- stricter laws (seems to be dificult)
- specific and adequat police training to deal with it. That explicitly means to not shoot first
I've seen multiple officers unable to take down one violent criminal. Why is there not hand to hand training and strength training? With proper training surely they could do it cleanly without injuring the perp.
I've seen (videos of) cops just walking away from armed criminals, letting them rob a store then tracking them down 6 months later after they do the same thing twice more.
When I look at the US I see the opposite problem. Police shooting a man in the back multiple times. Police using excessive force when arresting people for non violent crime. Police just generally power tripping.
From that perspective I can see why you would want to defund the police but I really would hesitate to do that. The EU is fine with a softer police force because we mostly have no guns and when there are real terrorists we can still bring in armed police. That is not the case in the US plus you are talking about fully defunding the police. Seems like a dangerous experiment to me. Why not reform instead?