This is key. People love to play the "what if the roles were reversed!" game when it comes to race and gender, even though those are just aspects of a person. People choose to be cops; we should hold them to an even higher standard than civilians.
Cops make $30k a year at entry, work insane hours and are closer to a blue collar labor force than a bunch of college grads arguing about microservices.
If you want to hold them to a higher standard, you have to pay them to a higher standard.
Sounds like honest work to me, but this is definitely one of those situations that beg the question, "do we need trained paramilitary personnel to accomplish this task?"
In 2015 (latest year I have good data for), there were just shy of 54,000,000 police interactions in the US.
The same year, there were 1,104 recorded police uses of force.
That's 0.00002% of interactions if I did my math correctly. Even if you think the use of force data is a magnitude off, that's about the same risk factor as shark attacks and lightning strikes.
Oh, I think your use of force data is more than one order of magnitude off. Police shot and killed 993 people in 2015 [1]. It's a safe assumption that fatal shootings are the tip of the iceberg in terms of use of force, not the overwhelming majority of cases.
And use of force is only one type of lawbreaking in which cops regularly engage. Buffalo News compiled over 700 instances of sexual misconduct by officers over 10 years [2]. Anecdotally, I see police commit traffic infractions all the time.
None of this is really relevant to my question, though, so I'll pose it again: how much must we pay for police officers to obey the laws they're supposed to enforce?
In the US, the 10th percentile cops earn about 40K a year. Median local cop salary in the US is 65K. And that's the SALARY.
And let me know if ANY cops in the US have ever complained about overtime -- guaranteed overtime and overtime pay rate are often specified in police union contracts and there are tons of articles every year about cops making $100K+ overtime on top of base.
I'm all for taking nonviolent responsibilities away from ("defund") the police, but I'd rather cops got paid $100k to not work so much overtime. Spend some time with their families, come to work rested, maybe they won't be so trigger happy.
