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from the Who-LiveStream's-the-Watchmen? dept.
The Root reports that “Almost half of Americans hate their police department:”
[DrugAbuse.com] examined over 766,000 tweets about sentiment toward law enforcement in each state. The state with the most positive perception of police was New Hampshire. The most negative: Arkansas. The city with the most positive perception of police was Columbus, Ohio, while the one with the most negative was, not surprisingly, Ferguson, Mo. Other “failing” city police departments included Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, New York and Denver. Baltimore, a city still reeling from recent unrest, received a D grade….
“If you talk to young people in Baltimore, I don’t think their feelings about police have changed at all in the last five to seven years,” says [Philip Leaf, a Johns Hopkins University professor]. “There has been a negative perception of police in many communities for a long time. There just haven’t been conversations with these young people or in the media about it until recently. There hasn’t been an upsurge of disconnect with the police. With cellphones, there has been documentation of things that people have been talking about for a long time. People haven’t been believed, and now it’s hard not to believe it, if you see it on TV.…”
“It’s not as if this stuff hasn’t been going on all along for decades, but now it’s being captured for the world to see, and the few bad apples being captured on camera are ruining the entire tree of law enforcement,” says Hassan Giordano, 39, and a candidate for Baltimore City Council. “However, those very same people who have a negative opinion of police will also be the same ones calling 911 when they find themselves in an unsafe situation. It’s a catch-22.”
It's important to note that on the graphs shown in the article, even an A grade represents negative sentiment.
More data and a description of the methodology are available at DrugAbuse.com, including graphs of tweet sentiment involving alcohol, drugs, and marijuana. DrugAbuse.com used the commercial IBM service AlchemyAPI to analyze the tweets.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday August 26 2015, @09:58PM
Crazy insane startup-like idea, they should team up.
Yeah yeah I know long tradition all that BS.
One org for police / fire / ambulance sounds like it would help a lot of social ills.
Never met a fireman or EMT that I didn't like. Cops, well... Averaging out would help.
It would probably help the "public safety officer" mental health to not always be dispatched to madman taking kids hostage with gun every single day. And the improved mental health might result in less unarmed kids shot in the back, as is the modern style of policing.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 27 2015, @01:03AM
Its been tried. (It was a popular idea in Canada for a while).
But it is very difficult to get the same exact bodies trained in all those disciplines.
Training time is too long just to get certified in each.
So you are stuck with a joint command and support structure with specialists in each area.
Its not all that successful. Because Cops form their own clique within the joint service.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Monday August 31 2015, @06:02PM
My medic friends talked about something like this once*. The problem is one of mindset - a first-response medic is going to have the long-standing instinct to assist only as long as necessary to stabilize life signs and move them on to a longer-term care professional. Think of them as mobile triage, like what they do in the Emergency Room ("we do everything they do at the ER, but we do it at 65 MPH"). Police, however, have a VERY different role and state of mind. They need to carefully assess all factors and be aware of peoples' mindsets and the minute details of circumstance in order to fill out their reports that will be used in legal action. Medics do not care who held the gun that shot their patient - they care about stopping the bleeding. You will never effectively combine these roles, at least not if you want them to be done well by any measure.
*actually, relating to an EMS professional who was told to take someone off of life support, which was not their job and screwed them up pretty good mentally
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 31 2015, @07:31PM
I guess I was thinking more combined arms military background / fire team style. Your position for the indeterminate future is machine gunner. Variable roles. WRT relating to the public having someone who is a gunman always paired up with a medic or a fireman might help public relations and provide some mental health support for all involved. The fireman knows he can't get run over while trying to extract someone because his partner arrived on scene with him and he's a cop. The cop who gets all wound up and ready to kill is paired up with a EMT who has at least some mental health / PTSD training. The medic knows the dude who's high on something isn't going to take a swing at him and win because he rolled up with his partner the cop. They seem to work together at incident scenes all the time anyway, so may as well formalize it and just stick them on the same truck.
Also having a cop report to a supervisor who's a senior EMT might have enormous value over reporting to a senior cop WRT violence on the job etc.
I wonder if on a smaller scale there's been embedding work, like during riots I know firemen and EMTs don't dispatch without cops, but I'm talking like instead of sending a cop out alone or on a civilian ride along, just toss an EMT in there officially. Or stick a cop on every fire truck cause practically everything involving a fire truck probably needs a cop to safely direct traffic.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:31PM
That makes a little more sense. However, there's logistics issues involved - not every call requires a cop (majority are hospital-to-hospital), and then there is the fact that many EMT's are working for private companies and not the city (my SO wore a green uniform and drove before being promoted to a coordinator position) and they do not like crews sitting around doing nothing, waiting for a call that requires that specific mix of disciplines in the area they are posted to. Maybe the division of the Fire Department which has the city-paid EMTs could handle that, but that greatly reduces the numerical advantages. I expect the FD proper to have similar problems. Long story short it may be that with the great number of complex factors already involved, it ultimately may not (probably won't) make sense to do it that way unless you're in one of the biggest metro areas in the world. NYC could probably benefit even with the extra overhead.
Oh, and ambulances only have so much room - 1 medic in the back, 1 driver who can provide medic support in case of complications or call ahead to reserve a bed in the appropriate part of the hospital, and a patient. Sometimes there's not even room for family members to ride along. Times you need a cop are mostly limited to violent psychiatric patients, which are generally few and far between.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 01 2015, @05:47PM
Yeah yeah I know why it is the way it is now, but WRT
and they do not like crews sitting around doing nothing
That was exactly the mental health benefit I was hoping for.
Also I bet on calls having labor they can trust is almost universally going to be useful even if on paper its unnecessary. Not to mention surprises!