6 months training for a police officer is appallingly low. German police officers undergo 3 years of training, including extensive training in de-escalation.
That’s 6 months in the academy, they are then made probationary officers for about 2 years.
In Germany it depends on the path, the police academy includes not only police training but general education (hence why they are called police universities and offer degree programs too) to at least college levels in the US and you may also elect to get your bachelors degree as part of the training.
If you already have a degree your training would be substantially shorter.
While I don’t disagree that the police officer training might need to be reviewed the 4-6 months for the most part is a clickbait that if you look at how most other countries train their police force it’s not that different.
Please note that many police forces in the US require a 2 year college degree / enough credits for one or higher to join the academy in the first place and you have to be 21, countries with much longer “academic” studies for police forces tend to allow people to join the academy at 16-18 and get their 2 years of secondary education as part of their training.
I think the big difference is that most police forces in the US exempt you from this requirement if you have served 2 years or more of active military duty and were honorably discharged.
I've heard claims that a large part of the problem is this probation period, during which the candidates are made to unlearn all the teaching from the academy and taught the real ways of the street: that is to say the actual practice at the station that has been handed down since time immemorial.
Could be, but they are still tested on the book throughout their probationary period the question is really how well the training officers are vetted.
However again it’s not that terribly different than many other countries where you either get an academic degree and then practical training or if you already have a degree you are essentially given a crash course and sent into practical training as an apprentice/trainee officer for about the same time frame as the probationary period in the US.
In the UK you have 3 main paths, apprenticeship which takes about 3 years, a degree program which takes about 3 years and a degree to policing program which takes about 2 years.
The first and the last pretty much put you on the street right away the middle is a combination of academic learning and on duty training.
Yeah, one would also hope that the police officers handling military equipment would get even more training than those who carry only one small handgun.
I presume this is to cut costs. But the logical conclusion of that - giving people a companion app and only 1 month of training - appears very inhumane to me. And it wouldn't be surprising to me if less training with other humans leads to less care for other humans in the field.
What utopia of a country do you live in where people didn't care about race up until people started protesting about police brutality against black people?
Can you indicate the African-americans from that page?
I’m not questioning diversity or pointing out that YC enforces any kind of anti-diversity policy.
Quite the contrary: despite being a diverse organization, the amount of people of African-american descent in that page are basically statistically irrelevant, if there’s any. Either this tells you something about the state of things in tech and Silicon Valley, or you’re just as unaware of the problem as many other Americans seem to be.
I’m mostly happy not to have too much politics on hn. Discussions on politics are usually uninteresting and many times too heated; a net negative most of the time.
I like a space free of politics too. However, being able to ignore politics is a privilege. There are folks out there who can't ignore politics because their lives are made worse by those very politics.
It sucks a bit for us but it sucks a lot more for them.
> It sucks a bit for us but it sucks a lot more for them.
This, I think, is the crux of any minority disenfranchisement. Their bubbles of reality are just different, and it's almost impossible to see from within someone else's bubble.
Also, ignoring politics is tacit approval of the status quo, which is a choice as much as any other.
We’re very sorry that the world outside is burning due to injustice and systemic inequality, and this might disrupt your nice little privileged bubble.
I would separate the board issue with the disconnection from reality. But yes, as some tech leaders are expressing themselves on twitter, each time I log into HN I have the feeling I can hear "Whitey on the moon".
What are you arguing for? Equality of outcome or equality of opportunity? The first can be dismissed as another form of racism outright, so let's talk about the second. Do you think that black people have not had equal opportunity?
Equality of outcome might not be a good target if you assume that there are underlying factors that we don't want to control for that would cause unequal outcomes - which I think we can probably agree on, since (the relevant) minorities are under-represented in the pool of potential candidates and let's just say that's probably beyond the scope of what YCombinator can reasonably be aiming to achieve.
However, let's say I build a function that selects a random item from a list of length 100. I run it 50 times and it only ever returns an item from the first 5 elements of that list. That's a pretty good reason for me to take another look at the function. It's probably broken.
In the same way, whilst you're not aiming for a specific outcome, if the outcome is a long away from your priors - if you seem to be excluding a specific group of people from your company, you probably need to take another look at why that's happening and I don't think "Let's just assume we're doing a great job and that there are just no under-represented people to hire" is a reasonable explanation.
Yes, I might have rushed my comment, but that’s what I meant.
If even a diverse organization like YC can’t have enough African-Americans in their ranks, it has to mean something about the access these people get compared to white folks and people of other heritage.
To further elaborate: Reddit hiring a black person to fill a board seat vacated By a white man on the premise of giving it to an African-american is a patch that’s worse than the hole.
With risk to sound controversial but since when is not having a single black person in a team considered a indicator of a negative view towards black people? Would you rather they have a token black person to avoid this?
This kind of claim is ridiculous and hurts your cause. If you are going to hire people based on the color of their skin you are actively being racist, even if it is in order to promote diversity.
EDIT:
I would add, if you think that I'm wrong I encourage you to reply to me to let me understand why. If you just angrily push the downvote button I'll not understand your point of view.
Because once racism is systemic, actively avoiding racism will continue to perpetuate the current situation. Great if you're part of the privileged group, not so much much if you're hoping for a change.
I'm not trying to tell anyone what the correct solution is (I've experienced societies with wildly different approaches to this), but doing it at the leaf (as you express it) is a solution. It's not the only solution, but it is one. Furthermore, this solution does work to some degree, and it has quite quick results, compared to education which takes generations to impose any real change.
You just refuted your own argument. Blacks in Africa do better than blacks in America. What changed? Did their DNA change? Did they get smaller brains?
They now live in an environment not conducive to their success.
To clarify, let’s take color out of the picture. Let’s say we’re talking about some poor, southern white town.
What do you often get? Generational poverty. If you were to talk to some, you might be turned off. These aren’t polished people. Poor decision making, often backed up with “what different will it make”.
Look at the history of Flint, Michigan. There are many others. It doesn’t take a lot to destabilize a community.
I do agree with that victimhood isn’t helpful. There is a tendency towards that recently, so let’s put the media aside.
Go talk to a few black people who are analytical like you. Talk to a few of different ages, from different parts of the country, etc. It might be informative, it might not. It’s a better place to start than the news.
> The problems of the African-American community are mostly their own, and mostly cultural.
Wow.
> If there was significant systemic bias, then African migrants to the USA would not outperform African-Americans so significantly
Maybe people who successfully migrate to the US are not your average kind of person? There are a lot of hurdles to overcome (financially, too), so it's probably somewhat skewed.
Oh, I guess you didn't see any of the "unarmed" deGrasse used in his text (It was only six times, once more than the word "die"). You should know the text is about police killings of unarmed people, nobody is really arguing about the shoot outs at the moment.
I think any practical suggestions would be welcome. If this isn't simply rhetoric, then why hold back?
> but presenting an endless narrative of victimhood is not it.
There are a number of ways you can slice the data to support either narrative of victimhood or oppression, but referring back to the OP - it's worth a read - Neil's anecdotal experience and that of his contemporaries are sobering. Where I live I've not once been pulled over randomly, not even with such tenuous justifications.
> 49% of Black children live in single-mother households
Step 1. Systematically lock up african american men through unequal enforcement of laws, invention of bullshit pretexts (see "crack" vs "cocaine"[1]), and racist policing.
Step 2. Use the lack of male role models in the household as an explanation for why african americans are culturally inferior.
On that point I will definitely agree. We need to end the drug war. Legalise and regulate marijuana, and decriminalise all other drugs. If there is single policy which marginalises and unfairly impacts the working class and particularly African-Americans, it is current drug policies.
But who, in the midst of all this, is putting the pressure on to reverse drug policy?
I think the point is that you are defining systemic racism wrongly if it excludes the drug war.
I always thought systemic racism means the policies that lead up to this. I never interpreted it to mean that if we look at the data for a particular institution, we will discover evidence that individuals within that institution are conspiring against black people.
Like, the drug war and mass incarceration ARE the systemic racism...
Sounds as if the US has a problem with unfettered access to firearms, which has flow on effects that justify questionable police behaviour alongside making policing itself much more life threatening than it would otherwise be.
