Tim Dees, a retired police officer and criminal justice professor in Reno Nevada, recently shared some insights on Quora regarding current trends and patterns in police departments across the country:
I don’t know that there are any official statistics on this. The following is my sense of current trends.
- Recruiting is harder than before. The pool of viable applicants has been shrinking for many years, in part due to an obesity epidemic, fewer people serving in the military, and more people moving from adolescence into adulthood while still dependent on psychotropic drugs like Ritalin and Adderall. The problem is now aggravated by a decline in the public image of the police, and increased defiance of police authority. People who would be well-suited to be good cops look at the level of abuse cops have to put up with on a daily basis, and say, “No, thanks.” The openings will still be there, and many departments will (or already have) elect to lower hiring standards to fill the slots. Historically, this has led to high levels of misconduct and increased corruption among street-level cops.
- Working cops are increasingly reluctant to be proactive. Cops who perform exactly as they have been trained in the face of a threat to their life or safety are demonized and condemned. They are often forced out of police work for political reasons, and are unable to find work anywhere else. The cop who sees suspicious activity worthy of further investigation often thinks, “That may be nothing at all, but even if it turns out to be a crime, I can wind up a YouTube star for doing my job. If I sit here and do nothing, my career is intact for another day.”
- Increasing numbers of people believe they have a right, or even a duty, to challenge or outright oppose any action by a police officer. They somehow have the idea that their resistance is going to make the cops give up and leave them alone, even though that almost never happens. Police-citizen encounters that used to be insignificant events become donnybrooks, and the cops are always blamed for instigating the fight.
Edit: I came across this video a couple of hours after finishing this post. The one who does the most talking is Scott Fair, a self-appointed Sandra Bland activist. He decided to park his car in the lot of the Waller County (TX) Sheriff’s Office for unknown reasons (my guess: to try and provoke a cop into doing something he shouldn’t). While he was there, sheriff’s office employees brought water to him and his dog, and gave him some previously unreleased video of Bland while she was in custody. When a Texas DPS trooper came along, this is what transpired. How long do you think you could contend with this cupcake before you lost it?
The video was made on August 1, 2015. On August 5, 2015, Fair was arrested after going to the McLennan County Jail, where he argued with employees and threatened to kill them. When a sheriff’s dept. captain tried to apprehend him (it’s illegal to make death threats to a public employee), Fair dragged the captain with his car some distance before fleeing. After a 40-mile pursuit, Fair was arrested. He’s now in the same jail where he started the encounter, held on bond of $245,000. Man In Custody After Overnight Chase That Injured Deputy
Most posts I see on this topic center on how the police need to change to better serve the public. I think the public should change a lot about the way they treat the police. If the police were confronted with less contempt, resistance, and outright hatred, I bet there would be far fewer violent confrontations.