What to do about America's police

[Mark Crispin Miller]

Scroll down to see a jaw-dropping comparison of the rules governing police 

recruitment in Norway, Finland, Germany and the USA. It's self-explanatory, 

and a tacit call for radical reform throughout US police departments.

Excuse me for repeating myself (as I sent something out about this some

weeks back), but raising the recruitment standards for police is only one 

of several necessary changes that have also not been mentioned much, 

or at all, in what passes for the current "debate" on how best to improve 

US police departments nationwide. We also need to:

> purge police departments of the white supremacists—Klansmen, neo-

Nazis—who've been infiltrating them for years, as the FBI internally reported

in 2006 (in a study declassified in 2010, with minimal press coverage);

> crack down on the abuse of anabolic steroids that has long been epidemic

among cops (and US troops), and that's turned all too many policemen into

rock-hard killing machines (who also often beat their wives); 

> make martial arts instruction mandatory, so that cops will know how to

disarm assailants without using their guns, billy clubs or tasers;

> have communities policed by officers who live in them, or come from them,

or from ethnically similar communities;

> place strict limits on the US government's provision of military hardware

to police departments, especially in smaller towns and cities, thereby 

halting a quasi-fascistic policy that accelerated after 9/11, ostensibly to

help cops fight the "war on terror," but which only hardens cops' belligerent

self-image as occupying forces; and

> end the international police exchange programs, wherein US cops are

trained by the Israeli Defense Forces and the Israel Police—personnel

enforcing an apartheid system, and therefore grossly inappropriate 

instructors for American police, especially those working in communities 

of color.

These are practical reforms that are more likely to make some real difference

in how cops treat citizens than sensitivity-training courses, stricter rules

against the use of force, and other largely verbal measures that, by themselves,

will not improve the culture of today's US police departments.

MCM

Let's do something about this!