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I don't think it is reasonable to expect cops to put their lives on the line in a society that affords them no additional respect. As the saying goes, "you get what you pay for", and I mean "pay" holistically in cash but also in social status and respect. The left wants cops to be culturally conversant therapist mental health experts fluent in six languages, the right wants them to be warriors ready to give up their lives in an instant, but most cops are just people that wanted a job. We could hypothetically get warrior poet therapists willing to lay down their lives at the drop of a hat but we would have to pay them exorbitantly and afford them enormous social status in order to attract the rare person able to fulfill those qualifications.
I think of some of this stuff like an RTS game or something where a society can choose how to allocate its units. And as a society we definitely aren't allocating (through incentives) the kind of hyper-competent people necessary to fulfill the left and the right's fantasies of cops to actual police work. So as I said, you get what you pay for. So yea, this cop is shitty, but I don't blame him, that's just the caliber of person we are choosing to allocate to policing.
I don't think the far left wants cops to also be therapists, I think they want to send therapists and protective services in instead of or in addition to cops. I think this is to some degree a stupid idea, but it is different from what you described.
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As others have pointed out, police officers are afforded a great deal of respect in most communities. Once you adjust for the actual qualifications required, it is hard to think of jobs that offer more respect—fireman and soldier come to mind, but there are not many. And in the few places where they aren't respected, they are at least generally well-compensated. To take an admittedly extreme example, Palo Alto publishes salaries for city employees and you'll often see fairly junior officers managing to pull in 200-300k compensation with the benefit of overtime.
Even outside of HCoL areas, being a police officer can be more lucrative than you'd think. Most departments offer full pensions after 20-25 years, and it is not uncommon for a cop to retire with a full pension from one department and then start over at a second department and collect another pension. (My elite psychiatrist grandfather had a summer house in a highly desirable part of Long Island, and his neighbor was a former NYC police captain who had employed this strategy to great effect.) Additionally, in places like Texas many cops can make more money on the side by moonlighting as armed security. Claude informs me that pay can be anywhere from 25/hr in the worst case, to 150/hr in the best, with 60/hr being typical, which is not bad for what is often just sitting around and watching a concert.
Cops also have excellent insurance and protection for any eventuality. Unlike a civilian or a private security guard, an on-duty cop can know with certainty that any medical expenses incurred will be covered, that disability payments will be generous and indefinitely provided, and that in the worst case, their family will be looked after. The family of a cop killed in the line of duty receives: a one time tax free $420,000 federal pay out, typically the full pension of the dead cop (until death or remarriage of the surviving spouse), as well as department life insurance and additional support from state programs (child subsidies, tuition assistance, state payouts—Texas gives the surviving spouse another 500k!) and private charitable orgs. Basically, society has set things up so that it is fairly easy for a cop to make the heroic decision.
So I don't find the Uvalde officers sympathetic. They took respected, well compensated positions in their community that came with a small condition: a tiny chance that they might actually have to be heroes, rather than just collect the respect and the pay for it. And they failed. I understand it can often be hard to truly know how one might behave in a situation where death is a possible outcome, but I want cops to be composed of the small fraction of the population that doesn't have a hard time answering this question. And in the event a cop that is unlucky enough to be tested finds he made a good faith mistake about his tolerance for danger, I want him to act anyway, because to not do so is incredibly corrosive to the institution of policing and to society at large.
Cowards look at the Uvalde incident and now tell themselves, "hey, I can be a police officer, and in the worse case, if it gets scary, I can just hide." In so doing, they steal the resources society has apportioned to support a warrior, as well as the equipment, the training and the badge. Citizens post Uvalde will look at the police and feel less respect, reducing the effectiveness of law enforcement, the quality of recruits, and the safety of the community. Society is coarsened more generally when the people who are entrusted to "serve and protect" others behave in such a flagrantly selfish manner. Many will look at the low standard set by the Uvalde officers and feel comfortable setting an even lower standard for themselves: "If the police, with their insurance and pensions and line-of-duty death protections can sit by and watch a bunch of little kids get murdered, why should I bother to take the slightest risk to help somebody else?" This is all unacceptable; there need to be consequences.
What consequences? In another time, perhaps shame could have sufficed. But we live in a shameless, atomized society with a lot of mobility, so I don't think shame will do. Instead, I think legal consequences were required: consequences of the sort that would clear out the cowards who know themselves to be cowards and who are currently wearing a badge; consequences that would drive the coward police officers who don't know they are cowards into gunfire, should such a situation arise, because the alternative of hiding would be still more frightening; consequences that would make it clear to citizens that the moral bar for everyone is much, much higher than what happened in Uvalde. For me, it is not about extracting revenge or making the Uvalde officers suffer (I honestly feel badly for them, and I'd personally treat them with a measure of kindness); rather, it's about excising a dangerous rot before it has a chance to spread.
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It depends on risk. I don't expect a cop to sacrifice themselves to save a civilian, but I expect a cop to at least shout from a distance at an unarmed man.
I think it was these cops' duty to intervene. This case is more like the latter scenario: there was risk, but one shooter against multiple cops with bulletproof vests doesn't seem like much for the cops. It's especially egregious that they prevented parents from intervening. They did worse than nothing.
Should they face jail time for not doing so? Personally I lean towards no: the cops aren't a danger to society, and I think jail should be reserved for more obvious (serious, direct) crimes. But jail time wasn't mentioned in the NYTimes article, it may not have been certain. The cops should definitely be fired and shamed, and fining them seems reasonable (especially if the fines go to the parents).
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My former boss was a part-time police officer for the town where he lived.
The amount of stuff people would do for him completely out of the blue when he had to drive the police cruiser was surprising. We're talking 'people paying for his meal in the drive through' level of surprising.
Nevermind the attention from women he'd get when out in uniform.
I've seen a little how the sausage is made, so to speak, so I'm not going to pretend that law enforcement has an easy job, but to say that society affords them no additional respect doesn't line up much with my experience.
Gotta double-check on that one. Their Hinge profiles are full of ACAB and I personally heard some woman I know talking about finding out her date was a cop and getting the ick.
It's about hit rate, not miss rate. If 90% of women are ACABers and 2.42% are badge bunnies, then their dating pool has
tenfive women per man (better than college, which is around 1.5). As long as the selection effects aren't too severe (and the numbers are anywhere close to my wild-ass guess), that sounds pretty good.See also serial killers. They are unattractive to the vast majority of women, but still massively outnumbered by female fans.
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He'd work alot of local festivals/events(cause, y'know, part-time Police Officer) and he'd get alot of women coming up out of the blue to flirt with him. (He already had/has a girlfriend/partner, so it wasn't as if he was actively looking.)
It was just one of the more amusing things I noted.
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'Badge Bunny' is the search term you're looking for.
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Like most things, it will depend on location. In my flyover Red area, a cop is going to do way better on the dating market than I would as a defense attorney (if I were still single).
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"Part Time" and "Town" are giveaways. The kind of town with part time officers will almost always be low crime, and cops will be respected culturally. His main job would be writing speeding tickets to out of towners, writing DUIs (but only to the REALLY DRUNK drivers), amd responding to domestic incidents. In the latter two his judgement is respected by the community and if he deems the person arrestable, they lose an immense amount of social status, regardless of conviction (which is basically guaranteed).
That has almost nothing in common with the experience of a police officer in Chicago or Memphis.
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Cops in most places (almost certainly including Uvalde) get shitloads of "additional respect". Uvalde ain't Minneapolis or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle.
It may be afforded some additional respect at a low level, but it isn't really afforded prestige, maybe that's a better word for what I'm driving at. If you came from a wealthy, elite family and attended Phillips Exeter or something, would "cop" be considered a valid and respectable career path your family would be proud of? Not really. Tech, finance, doctor, lawyer, academia, those would be considered prestige jobs that would be acceptable for a son of the elite. So while police officers get some ground-level respect at the local diner, it's not really a high prestige. Nobody with a son at an elite private school is saying "I hope he grows up to become a police officer!" And basically the same goes for the military, of course it wasn't always this way but it is now.
Upper class cops are FBI agents.
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It honestly depends. You are talking about rank and file. But most elites wouldn’t be embraced about having a military son who is an officer that goes up the ranks (eg colonel is still very prestigious). But a sergeant? That’s low class.
Most would probably see a local cop as kind of low status. But an FBI agent that moves up the ranks? That’s prestigious.
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Aside from the fact that ‘military officer’ is perhaps the single most acceptable career for elite young men, most people are not and never will be elites. Cops get some additional respect, and that’s all they need.
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Military can still be high status but it’s far more narrow today. In WW1 from what I’ve read the British elite took a lot of military deaths. If you go into Special Ops - Seal Teams/Delta it has a lot of respect. Lesser Green Beret. Some of this is fitness bro respect. I guess this is dated now but the Pritzkers and the governors brother is a colonel (also a tranny now). It’s more narrow now but there are some paths with military prestige.
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If you're a cop, you can beat up people in tech, doctors, lawyers, academia, judges, and well, pretty much anyone else with impunity. Maybe not politicians. You may not have the prestige of a top doctor, but you have deference from the legal system and respect from the community. This is certainly more than enough to support being required to actually do your job when it involves the sort of things that would actually justify that respect.
What? From article
“Raffaele says he was struck when he came upon officers wrestling with a man wielding a pipe.“
So you can hit a judge if you’re a policeman if the said judge jumps into a fight when a dude is beating you with a pipe. But to be clear you can’t as a policeman just pick a judge and beat the shit out him.
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Speaking as a German, I have a relative who became a cop and I am totally fine with that. It is an important job and we need qualified and well-adjusted people for it. I would be much more reluctant to admit to admit having a relative working in marketing or yellow press journalism, actually. (Of course, Germany might have a different police culture than the US. While I did have unfortunate interactions with police, on the whole my experience is that they are generally friendly and competent.)
American cops are also generally friendly and competent. They’re rarely particularly bright or outside the box thinkers, but the cops killing people makes headlines because it’s so rare(and most of those killings are justifiable and well within the range of normal police behavior in Western Europe). Our police are genuinely less likely to randomly beat the shit out of people than euro cops, though.
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