I'm suggesting that the fact that police are killing people way more often than in the past suggests that it is a policing issue. The Kansas City Study that I cited in another post suggests:
- KC had a huge issue with rampant crime years ago
- They brought in a bunch of crime eggheads and tried a bunch of stuff until finally something worked
- That something was to increase patrols in ONLY high crime areas AND begin to pull people ONLY in those areas over for the slightest infraction, tag not lit and visible from X feet away, etc.
- They also trained officers to "read" body language, dig deep, assume they were likely doing something wrong, had contraband, etc. and it turns out in high crime areas they were right most of the time and this yielded great results; that's all good
- Then, and this is where problems started, other police departments took notice of KC and decide to do the "same thing", BUT they did not confine this type of policing to just high crime areas
- Since then, and to this day, you have officers being trained to be very aggressive on traffic stops, assume the worst, etc. and the problem is that this doesn't apply, or work in areas that are not high crime; it would be like me seeing NACAR drivers get from point A to point B quickly and deciding that i was going to drive like that on every road; not good
This, I believe, is the genesis of all these aggressive traffic stops that escalate officer tension by always assuming the worst, make car occupants feel threatened, and cause too many of these to escalate into officers killing people when another outcome was completely within everyone's grasp.
Could the deceased have done something differently to perhaps stay alive? In many cases, probably so.
Should the person armed and charged with "serve and protect" be better any deescalating instead of escalating and killing? probably so
If police departments walked back their training to embrace the reality that most people are law abiding and don't have contraband or any desire to cause officer harm would it make a huge difference? I think so
If that KC study had been adopted and used exactly as it was designed in high crime areas only would it be way more effective for everyone? I think so.
I just think that traffic stops/infractions should not be something that ends in death except in very extreme cases where the deceased is armed and dangerous, and ideally even then de escalation and prosecution is the desired result.
PS: to the dude who accused me of being too lazy to do research, I'll point out again, I think what i think because I'm open minded and have already done the research to see what information is out there. I didn't look any of the above up prior to posting, I already knew it because it interests me and I learned about it some time ago