"The Breakfast Club" with the same actors but now they are cops waiting for a review board.

I think "arrogant adrenaline junkie" is actually pretty insightful for what makes a cop bad. An adrenaline junkie is someone who's looking for danger and violence -- who is both going to see them where they don't exist and actually do things to create them where they don't exist. And arrogance about your ability to understand and predict people and situations from first impressions is going to be a great way to turn any racial stereotyping you have in your head into acting racist.

Cops have to be people who can function well in dangerous or violent situations, but it's not a good idea for them to be people who enjoy situations like that rather than wanting to defuse them.

That's who wants the job. It's the supervision you need to watch.

Right, you can't control who applies, but you could train the people you get to think of the policing ideal as a calmly imperturbable type who wants everything to be as lowkey as possible and is doing everything possible to keep it that way.

I just don't think that "enjoys diffusing situations" is an existing personality type in any significant numbers.

Every good schoolteacher fits, right? Someone who sees chaos and wants to restore peaceable order without blowing up the situation further.

I thought they just wanted summer off.

Many professions have a specific institutional problem: The people who choose particular careers are going to have particular qualities.

The military and police are necessary professions (I believe), and they have a completely natural tendency toward attracting people who are above-normal in violent and authoritarian tendencies.

If you concede these two points -- that cops are necessary and they tend toward violence -- it's only a baby-step from there to say that people like Derek Chauvin are inevitable. But making that concession has always been wrong, and it is becoming increasingly untenable (I hope).

I think 8 gets it right, and contra 6 I think schoolteachers who *like* that are rare. People go into teaching because they like to see people learn (or historically because it's the most interesting job allowed to young women) or because they want to make a difference in kids lives, the diffusing is something they do because they have to.

One thing that's special about the military and the police, but especially the police, is that they have relatively homogenous training and professional backgrounds. What you want is some situation where you can start as aa social worker, or in the forensics lab and work your way up to leadership positions, or start as white color crime investigator and work your way into leadership positions, and not have everyone carry a gun for their job (though of course many people still will).

Just because it will drive me mad if it goes on, you "defuse" a tense situation. "Diffusing" is what you do if you're one substance gradually spreading out through another substance.

This has been your daily episode of LB's Prescriptivist Thoughts.

What if "tension" is a substance?

And I'm not suggesting that there are a lot of people who are really thrilled by calming a situation down. But it's not unusual at all to walk into an upsetting situation and want it to be calmer -- to dislike adrenaline-ridden situations. My sense of the personality you want for a cop is someone who can handle excitement/danger/tension and keep functioning, but who wants it to stop. Someone who isn't daydreaming about an exciting car chase that leaves him looking like a hero, but who is instead naturally inclined toward working to avoid the necessity for that kind of thing.

10.1: Wait, aren't those the same concept? Like the tense situation is a dark cloud hanging over the situation and you're diffusing it? Now that I think about it that's clearly wrong and defusing comes from bombs, but literally TIL.

At least metaphorically, you're taking the tension of a few people and spreading it across more actors to make it less likely to result in violence.

And of course my industry has it's own cultural problems often caused by a similar uniformity of training and background, so it's not just policing. But policing and academia are strong outliers this way.

14 before seeing 13.

You can diffuse the tension with a knife and a very strained metaphor.

I think "arrogant adrenaline junkie" is actually pretty insightful for what makes a cop bad. An adrenaline junkie is someone who's looking for danger and violence -- who is both going to see them where they don't exist and actually do things to create them where they don't exist.

But this doesn't get at planting evidence, for example, or lying on the witness stand. Those cops are bad in different ways!

I learned defuse/diffuse here on Unfogged, in a previous iteration, having had the same reasoning about spreading the tension thinner and fanning it out so that it dissipates.

I mean, obviously I'm wrong. But still like my way better.

15: Journalism sucks, too. Everybody sucks. The linked article is excellent, and it demonstrates an institutional strength: the willingness of journalists to listen and let people tell their own story. But it also shows a fatal weakness of the profession, to wit:

In the aftermath of a national tragedy, we are supposed to come together and say "never forget," to agree on the heroes and the villains, on who was at fault and how their culpability must be avenged. But what happens if we can't agree? What if we're too busy arguing to face what really happened?

"We" aren't having any trouble agreeing, and "we" aren't too busy arguing. Some of "we" are bullshitting, and others are objecting to bullshit. The story itself makes that plenty clear, but the journalist, speaking in her own voice, has to identify herself -- and all decent people -- with the bullshitters.

18: I'd put that sort of dishonesty -- the kind that isn't about personally enriching the cop -- in a category that's got a lot to do with arrogance. That happens when a cop, or a police department generally, believes that they know what has to be done to "put bad guys away" or "protect the public" and that it requires lying, cheating, and breaking the law. Putting yourself above the law like that is arrogance.

A modest cop without an inflated sense of their own wisdom and entitlement to do whatever they think is necessary is going to follow the rules.

(Corruption in the bribery/theft/extortion sense is a different thing, I admit.)

18: I'd put that sort of dishonesty -- the kind that isn't about personally enriching the cop -- in a category that's got a lot to do with arrogance. That happens when a cop, or a police department generally, believes that they know what has to be done to "put bad guys away" or "protect the public" and that it requires lying, cheating, and breaking the law. Putting yourself above the law like that is arrogance.

There's also the question of institutional incentives. From the article.

After the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo .... The city council kept making new rules about what they could and couldn't do. He did his best to follow the blitz of reform-minded dictates from above: community outreach, sensitivity training, de-escalation. He took to heart the ideas about better rather than more arrests, he says, only to be penalized for not arresting enough people. Tired of anti-police sentiment and feeling a bit of kinship with the bombastic, abrasive politician, Fanone voted for Trump in 2016.

Writing 23 reminds me* that there is a local issue in which police departments are concerned (or faux concerned) that recent legislative changes about use of force would change how they respond to behavioral health situations.

Several Washington police agencies had signaled their intent to stop responding to calls for service involving non-criminal activities because of HB 1310. That law, which took effect along with several other sweeping police reform measures July 25, instructs officers to, among other things, exhaust de-escalation tactics and "[leave] the area if there is no threat of imminent harm and no crime has been committed."

...

The attorneys [from the AG office] said that Washington courts and law recognize something called the "community caretaking doctrine" and cited a 2019 Washington Supreme Court opinion that called police officers "jacks of all trades" who "frequently engage in community caretaking functions that are unrelated to the detection and investigation of crime."

"Bill 1310 does not prohibit peace officers from responding to community caretaking calls, including mental health calls," the memo concluded.

However, the attorneys included a disclaimer noting that the memo does not constitute a formal legal opinion from the Attorney General's Office, but instead represents the "carefully considered legal opinion" of the authors.

* Note, this is getting away from the original article. I'd just say again, that it's well done and worth reading.

What you want is some situation where you can start as aa social worker, or in the forensics lab and work your way up to leadership positions, or start as white color crime investigator and work your way into leadership positions, and not have everyone carry a gun for their job (though of course many people still will).

This is more or less the model of the federal land management agencies, which historically (and to some extent still) have primarily been oriented around law enforcement of a specific kind, but with larger missions and other paths to entry and advancement.

And better hats.

As a window into the rot that defines modern police culture in America, it was an interesting interview. Fanone seems to really be wrestling with sudden, violent, and traumatic cognitive dissonance from the experience.

I'm not sure that it tells us anything we don't already know though. Even police who believe they have the best of intentions are, at least, only sporadically fighting against an intertwining of culture and institution that is at best contemptuous of and generally hostile to the critiques of progressives and earnest civil libertarians.

It's interesting that in some ways 23 is getting close to something that's basically a general problem with work in the US these days that's not really about policing per se. So much is driven by administrators who have no actual interaction with the job being done and like to do stupid "initiatives" and "trainings" that are busy work that doesn't accomplish anything while at the same time driving incentives through idiotic data gathering that is actually causing many of the problems. See universities, inclusivity training, and student evaluations.

The problem here is that natural and universal frustration getting channeled into "yeah let's vote for a serial rapist in the Russian mob because he'll let us do whatever the fuck we want as long as we do it to his enemies."

That's a problem of scale, right?

At least in k-12 math ed, I'm told that a ton of interventions work fabulously on the small scale of a single school, when you have a personality to sell it and make relationships with teachers and read whether or not they're buying into the intervention, and barely anything works once you try to scale it up.

It is a very good piece and I think it does well paired with this recent Adam Serwer piece in The Atlantic: "The Capitol Rioters Attacked Police. Why Isn't the FOP Outraged?"

Police unions aren't usually bashful about defending officers, but they've been conspicuously subdued in discussing the January 6 attacks.

In one sense there is nothing surprising about any of it, but Serwer lays it out in his usual clear way,

It is abundantly clear that at least at the FOP level the sympathies are strongly with the aims of the rioters (if not their actions). I think law enforcement will be an important prong that will support the current Republican attempts to establish a one-party minority ruled state at the national level.
State legislatures in red/(gerrymandered) battleground states and the courts are the other main ones (and I guess the strategic asshole reserve in the civilian population per Dsquared*).

When it happens in 2024** (or maybe later, the Supremes don't quite have their part it all set up yet and a few of them will want it to not be brazen) it will be much more organized, and "legal." The key is to force the disruptors and demonstrators to be those opposing the Rs rather than trying to cause it as in this case. That way law enforcement can do their part of "maintaining order" and not be forced to confront a massive contradiction in their responses.

*Can't find the link.

**2022 while be a big tell,

Am I being overly alarmist? Maybe. Hard to tell. I feel I was appropriately alarmist in the lead up to 1/6. But I have otherwise often been over alarmist.

I think there is a decent chance it will fail, but it will not be for the lack of trying, especially by the Mercers et al. (see Jane Meyers' "The Big Money Behind the Big Lie".

Would be glad to be wrong on this one. But finding out is half the fun!

For all that Fanone is an interesting case, I do think the House should try to get some much more cut and dried testimony from more DC and Capitol police (if they can find individuals willing to do so). The more sensational stuff leads to strident RW media pushback. But then again who I am kidding, mundane stuff would lead to strident pushback, ask any public health official at any level in this country.

So, then: "Defuse the Police" --or "Diffuse the Police"?

Diffund.

Not, God forbid, that anyone here should be in the position of someone who's never done a job but knows much better than those who do how it should be reformed.

Looking at it from the perspective of the Met, ages ago, the outlet for the adrenaline junkies was not fighting -- there was little of the physical stuff except in public order situations -- but driving cars. Police drivers scared the shit out of me because when they got a call they drove like it was GTA through residential streets. That has since been clamped down on and of course we now have the technology to catch such drivers retrospectively. But slamming on the sirens and the lights and driving like no one else had a right to be on the road was a huge adrenaline thing for the immature.

The other problem was lying in court, fitting people up, etc. "Justice is when somebody gets his just comeuppance, even when it was for something he didn't do," as an old, corrupt, chief superintendent told me once. Why tell me, though? Because he knew, or thought he knew, that he was framing guilty men. It was psychologically important that he thought this was serving *justice* -- and sometimes he would have been right. His view was that everyone gamed the system, criminals most of all, and he was simply gaming it back.

That style of policing was largely put out of action by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, and a good thing too. But I thought it was much less of a straight power play, in the situations that I saw, at least, than driving cars was.

35.1: In the US, civilian control of the military is a bedrock principle. I reckon that's a good thing.

I know journalists, even pre-Internet, who were pissed off by having their work publicly criticized -- not the content of the criticism, but the fact of it. Coaches routinely respond to criticism by saying, "What position did you play?" A lot of academics are surprisingly uncomfortable justifying their work to outsiders.

If you conduct your business in public, you are naturally subject to criticism from the public. Again: a good thing.

I'm pretty sympathetic to the wait staff in restaurants, though. They take a lot of unjustified crap. But if they were immune to outside criticism, I suspect the quality of service would decline.

35: Among the interesting facets of this interview is the portrait of a cop wrestling with the myriad ways in which his chosen profession is and has failed the populace. That is to say, a critique of the policing coming from a police.

Weird choice to believe the the public ostensibly served by police cannot and should not suggest how that service might be better provided though.

People say 36.1, but when was the last time DoD was headed by an actual civilian?

Civilian control ultimately rests with the president, but under the relevant law, the Secretary of Defense must be at least seven years separated from military service -- or get a waiver from Congress, as Austin and Mattis did.

Skipping over the six (!) random goofballs who followed Mattis for Trump, Obama's Ash_Carter wasn't a military guy; Hagel was a sergeant after being drafted for Vietnam; Panetta likewise served as a lieutenant in the Vietnam War era.

If Trump wins again, Lt. Calley is still alive.

There is a difference, though, between being criticised at all and being told how to do your job by people who don't understand the constraints under which you operate, and have to.

As a journalist, I hate and despise almost all comments under any article, on principle but also with good reasons. And I don't enjoy being criticised even when it's justified. But there is a huge and important difference between someone saying eg "You're only writing this because you're corrupt/stupid/brainwashed or otherwise dishonest" and someone saying eg "why didn't you talk to X?" or "You missed this salient fact."

Even when I am writing analytical stuff I try to reconstruct the problems that people are actually trying to solve, not the ones I would rather that they did. A very large part of responsible journalism consists in finding out the reasons why intelligent people are doing "obviously" stupid things and then figuring out how to explain that in turn to an audience both ignorant and uninterested.

Obviously the police should be criticised, like every other public service. But, usually, when outsiders put up large simple solutions, it's worth taking a moment to think why no one has thought of it before, and whether it is more complicated in practice than it seems.

I do favor thinking, and will come out strongly on the side of intelligent criticism and against uninformed complaints.

But the OP and the link in 30.1 are just the latest examples demonstrating two things: Something is profoundly wrong with American policing, and American police are nearly overwhelmingly opposed to fixing it. Once the police eliminate themselves as constructive actors and seek to eliminate the influence of non-corrupt cops like Fanone, then somebody with less knowledge of policing is necessarily going to have to deal with it -- until we arrive at a police state. Then the problem is solved.

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Can anyone recommend a reliable wine-reviewing site? As in, input winery and varietal, get non-spam reviews.
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"Interview"? Come on. This is a damn screenplay. Ball sure knows her audience though.

Utterly predictable drivel.