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An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Unlike Judges and Prosecutors which are a small, relatively cloistered group if need be, ICE is the law enforcement front line. And there is an active threat to dox and murder them. Sure you can prosecute the people who do, but it doesn't un-murder the husbands and fathers.
Cops manage just fine for centuries and they're front line. Also very unpopular in blue areas and yet aren't being murdered in their sleep.
Cops are liked in blue areas,
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You actually see a lot of cop ambushes. Because you don't need to murder them in their sleep when you can literally call them out to you.
Police officers across U.S. face crisis as ambush shootings rise: "It just happened out of nowhere"
Fact of the matter is, policing in Democrat controlled areas is fucked. When they aren't being ambushed and murdered, politicians are throwing them under the bus, or to the wolves, and recruitment has completely collapsed. Nobody wants to police Democrat controlled areas with politicians literally putting targets on their back. I wouldn't pretend everything is all hunky dory in the land of policing.
TLDR: recruitment in one local Democrat city police department does seem to be suffering from poor candidates but the department itself makes recruitment difficult and is likely to make it harder.
Personal story time. I live in a very blue city in a very blue state. You have seen my city in the news many a time regarding its police.
I am also in about month six of the hiring process for my city's police department. The below is only applicable to my experiences with a single department but from what I've heard it's broadly similar to other comparable departments*.
It's not fair to say that the process is broken necessarily because I think it's heavily constrained by the stakeholders as explained below, but it is awful. As I said, I'm in month six. Month six of how many? Haha haha, there is absolutely no way to know but I'd guess at least three more months before I would start the academy (if selected). This means that with the academy and field training it's around 18-24 months from application to a usable police officer.
This department is also about 10% below its previously approved staffing targets. One would assume that with the current numbers and the known recruitment issues, the department would at least keep standards the same if not be forced to lower them. Haha, haha. The physical standards - already way, way beyond the state's requirements - are changing to remove age/gender norming and adding another upper body event. They fully expect that the change will cause large numbers of candidates - I'd guess around 50% - who are currently well above passing to fail in the new system.
My interaction with the other candidates comes via boot camp style workouts that are technically optional but anyone not attending regularly (1-3 times a week for all those months you're in the process) will not have their application moved forward when it hits a certain point. They're better about communicating this now, previously they just silently let you wait. And wait. In a part where it's normal to wait two+ months before you're contacted to start the processing. There are probably people still expecting a call that is never going to come**.
Some of these are relatively relaxed. Others are extremely militaristic and difficult, much worse than anything I remember from actual boot camp from my prior service. 4-6 mile runs with other exercises sprinkled in are not uncommon.
But they do allow a good opportunity to meet and evaluate the other candidates. Now, I'm not a great one myself so I do not brag when I say that I'm probably in the top 25%. I don't know the quality of the people who applied in the past. I would not rate the average highly now.
So the obvious question: why? Why is it like this? Again, some of this is may be specific to my city but my impression is that it's because it benefits no one to fix it. The ACAB / Defund the Police chatter has quieted down nationally but is still very strong at the local level and they fight to reduce the budget for officers - and even previously budgeted spots that aren't filled represent money that can eventually be clawed back. The existing officers aren't really impacted yet outside of opportunities for additional overtime. Why not push for the highest standards possible? Don't we want the best of the best? The city has limited upside but massive downside possibilities when hiring. The benefits of a supercop are real but diffuse and difficult to measure. The price of a bad cop can be calculated in lawsuits - and this is a very litigant friendly state. Plus the more combustible risks. A couple of cops who set their mind to it could probably bankrupt the city and get part of it burned down in riots. Be as methodical and restrictive as you possibly can because the pain felt by residents through underpolicing is also more diffuse and the public will at least partially blame the cops anyway. Win/win.
My prediction is that things will not change unless there's a sufficiently horrifying event that gets recorded and can be directly blamed on understaffing (unlikely) or enough of a crime wave to elect a city government focused on the issue (possible but ACAB).
** Each step is like dealing with the DMV if the DMV was able to tell you to go away and they'll get back to you whenever. One regular at the workouts was rejected near the very end of his process and filed an appeal. In January. The appeal contains all the necessary information because all the relevant investigations have been completed, it's just waiting on yes/no.
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Recruitment collapse is in large part due to the decline in working class human capital. Cops have high standards(reasonably so) and human capital has gotten worse.
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But not, notably, targeted ambushes. A 2014 report claimed somewhat lazily that about a quarter of all ambushes had an assailant that had a prior relationship (broadly and vaguely defined) with the officer. Two thirds were spontaneous. Reading between the lines, the reasonable assumption is that it’s probably more like 1 in 8 ambushes that loosely fits your profile (ambushes themselves seem to be maybe a quarter of all “officers get shot at”). And I suspect ambushes where a very specific officer is the actual and only target is small, even there I’m not convinced their name being public is moving the margins much.
Dont get me wrong policing in general is “fucked”. I wouldn’t want to be one. In the general sense though, we do trade cop deaths for other benefits, much like we trade other deaths for other benefits all the time. It’s normal in a society. Cold as it may sound, it seems the marginal drawbacks to no-mask policy are worth the non-marginal gains in trust. And for that matter, at least naively my first assumption is that ICE agents are more, not less, safe from targeted retribution (presumably mostly gangs and cartels) because they know escalation doesn’t benefit them (stateside).
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No, not in their sleep.
This is a shooting based on anti police sentiment. There’s no strong connection between that and the debate here, which is about anonymity.
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Oh no an almost 10 year old mass shooting in America.
Better let the government get away with whatever they want!
Back then the police was the target of a mass freakout the same way ICE is now, when the Blues stop using their media apparatus to drive a moral panic about ICE the shootings will also stop. It has nothing to do with organic unpopularity.
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