As a Briton with an American wife, who lived for a while in California before making a compromise and moving north of the border, my outsider take on the horrors of public order in your today rather abysmally dysfunctional society, is that your police forces need serious reform. There is too much space in them for those who have an institutionalised cult of violence instead of of service. There is still too much space in American society as a whole for the myth of force, not as a necessary tool but as a means to bring about justice. I feel that there is some place in which the American subconscious, on all matters, projects superhero comics -- where all issues are very simple and violence never causes true irreparable damage.
I still remember the comments of American viewers about a CBC documentary, some 10 years ago, on how British police was trained to respond to violent threat emergencies, which showed a video of policemen in riot armour surrounding a deranged man with a machete and disarming him over a length of time in which they talked to him constantly, resulting in nobody being injured. The comments of many American viewers were that it was insane to risk the safety of policemen that way, that a dangerous person with a weapon should be shot. And that is a mentality I have encountered constantly in the USA and never in Europe at large.
I think this attitude is what contributes to your problems with the police and policing. The racism discourse is a big distraction from the real problem, which is the problem of a society (whatever the race or ethnicity) that believes in the redeeming power of violence.
Mind, on all of this is grafted the old problem of the police being -- everywhere all over the world -- one of the executive branches of the "Establishment": which traditionally in the eyes of the Left (mostly the revolutionary Left, but some ideas are hard to die out even when one has become part of the establishment) is the Enemy. So, the henchmen of the Enemy.
Getting out of those ingrained attitudes, both left and right, is certainly not a small endeavour. But it is an urgent one to avoid the degradation of civic society.
I enjoyed your comments, with one caveat. The United States has more guns than people. This is a fact. The cops have to factor this in to their calculus when pulling over every single car or stopping someone on the street or investigating every report of domestic abuse. This condition, which I would argue is an existential complexity facing US cops, is not in play anywhere in Canada or Europe. I agree that police reform is critical; separate and apart from the ginned up racial focus it receives in the US. But your well-written observation seems to ignore the second amendment in the US. Even your example of cops surrounding a person with a machete - how does the situation change if the deranged person has a gun? As a US citizen, again, I completely agree that police reform needs to happen, absent the racial aspects. But when are the actions of citizens going to come under anything approaching the same scrutiny that is applied to the police in the US?
You make a valid point, which was in my intention to also make but clearly did not come through. I do think that the police killings problem is not a matter of police alone... it is also a matter of a general attitude of the population towards violence and towards the appropriate response to crime. I am aware of the Second Amendment and its controversial interpretation, which divides your country. Until that tangle is solved towards the establishment of a civil society in which the use of lethal force is exclusively the province of the legal policing bodies and of the military, the US will continue to have gun death rates appallingly above those of any other developed country.
And I believe that the problem of that tangle (aside from the interests of gun makers) resides in a corner of the American soul that mythologises the ability of the individual to defend his rights by violent action -- a "wild west" mythology that the film industry has displayed and continues to display well beyond the western genre, because the film industry always represents well the traits of a culture, even better than much literature.
An example of this was my discussion, a few years ago, with a colleague of my wife, who is American and Black, highly educated and liberal in everything except for being pro-gun: and his rationale for being pro gun was that owning guns allows him to defend his wife and children from the police (I tried to break it to him that, should it come to that, waving around a gun would very likely guarantee that he and his family would get shot by the police -- but it fell on a deaf ear: the mythology there superseded obvious reason). This otherwise brilliant man has since represented for me the exact thing that goes amok in the American psyche with respect to the ability of the individual to produce justice with the employment of individual force. It never happens, but the myth completely blots out reality.
The example I brought up about the UK police training was not so much about the specific situation (indeed, there are very few guns owned by private citizens in the UK, and there are very strict regulations on how to keep and transport them outside of the locations -- hunting grounds or shooting range -- where they are allowed to be used; if we had as many privately owned guns as the US we would certainly be in a different situation), but the example was about the reaction of those American watchers who commented: which was in my opinion emblematic, because it targeted the specific situation -- deranged man with machete, not man could have a gun -- and the comments claimed, very hotly, that it was unthinkable to spend so many resources and put officers at risk, because the man was a threat and he should have been shot.
"But when are the actions of citizens going to come under anything approaching the same scrutiny that is applied to the police in the US?" On this, I suffer with you. I do not think it is going to ever happen until the American people decides, on this issue, to finally join Western civilisation and restrict the meaning of the Second Amendment of your Constitution to the right to bear arms for "a well regulated Militia".
And one nit: many state constitutions also explicitly protect the right to keep and bear arms WITHOUT the problematic "well-regulated militia" language of the federal amendment. Such provisions would require attention in your 2nd Amendment reform scenario.
Florida's Article I Section 8, for example, states:
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves and of the lawful authority of the state shall not be infringed, except that the manner of bearing arms may be regulated by law."
Worry not, though, as you are not alone in our embattled Western world. The European Union has been as tangled in trying to create a federal system in which some basic rules of society are the same irrespective of country, just not about guns.
As a Briton with an American wife, who lived for a while in California before making a compromise and moving north of the border, my outsider take on the horrors of public order in your today rather abysmally dysfunctional society, is that your police forces need serious reform. There is too much space in them for those who have an institutionalised cult of violence instead of of service. There is still too much space in American society as a whole for the myth of force, not as a necessary tool but as a means to bring about justice. I feel that there is some place in which the American subconscious, on all matters, projects superhero comics -- where all issues are very simple and violence never causes true irreparable damage.
I still remember the comments of American viewers about a CBC documentary, some 10 years ago, on how British police was trained to respond to violent threat emergencies, which showed a video of policemen in riot armour surrounding a deranged man with a machete and disarming him over a length of time in which they talked to him constantly, resulting in nobody being injured. The comments of many American viewers were that it was insane to risk the safety of policemen that way, that a dangerous person with a weapon should be shot. And that is a mentality I have encountered constantly in the USA and never in Europe at large.
I think this attitude is what contributes to your problems with the police and policing. The racism discourse is a big distraction from the real problem, which is the problem of a society (whatever the race or ethnicity) that believes in the redeeming power of violence.
Mind, on all of this is grafted the old problem of the police being -- everywhere all over the world -- one of the executive branches of the "Establishment": which traditionally in the eyes of the Left (mostly the revolutionary Left, but some ideas are hard to die out even when one has become part of the establishment) is the Enemy. So, the henchmen of the Enemy.
Getting out of those ingrained attitudes, both left and right, is certainly not a small endeavour. But it is an urgent one to avoid the degradation of civic society.
I enjoyed your comments, with one caveat. The United States has more guns than people. This is a fact. The cops have to factor this in to their calculus when pulling over every single car or stopping someone on the street or investigating every report of domestic abuse. This condition, which I would argue is an existential complexity facing US cops, is not in play anywhere in Canada or Europe. I agree that police reform is critical; separate and apart from the ginned up racial focus it receives in the US. But your well-written observation seems to ignore the second amendment in the US. Even your example of cops surrounding a person with a machete - how does the situation change if the deranged person has a gun? As a US citizen, again, I completely agree that police reform needs to happen, absent the racial aspects. But when are the actions of citizens going to come under anything approaching the same scrutiny that is applied to the police in the US?
You make a valid point, which was in my intention to also make but clearly did not come through. I do think that the police killings problem is not a matter of police alone... it is also a matter of a general attitude of the population towards violence and towards the appropriate response to crime. I am aware of the Second Amendment and its controversial interpretation, which divides your country. Until that tangle is solved towards the establishment of a civil society in which the use of lethal force is exclusively the province of the legal policing bodies and of the military, the US will continue to have gun death rates appallingly above those of any other developed country.
And I believe that the problem of that tangle (aside from the interests of gun makers) resides in a corner of the American soul that mythologises the ability of the individual to defend his rights by violent action -- a "wild west" mythology that the film industry has displayed and continues to display well beyond the western genre, because the film industry always represents well the traits of a culture, even better than much literature.
An example of this was my discussion, a few years ago, with a colleague of my wife, who is American and Black, highly educated and liberal in everything except for being pro-gun: and his rationale for being pro gun was that owning guns allows him to defend his wife and children from the police (I tried to break it to him that, should it come to that, waving around a gun would very likely guarantee that he and his family would get shot by the police -- but it fell on a deaf ear: the mythology there superseded obvious reason). This otherwise brilliant man has since represented for me the exact thing that goes amok in the American psyche with respect to the ability of the individual to produce justice with the employment of individual force. It never happens, but the myth completely blots out reality.
The example I brought up about the UK police training was not so much about the specific situation (indeed, there are very few guns owned by private citizens in the UK, and there are very strict regulations on how to keep and transport them outside of the locations -- hunting grounds or shooting range -- where they are allowed to be used; if we had as many privately owned guns as the US we would certainly be in a different situation), but the example was about the reaction of those American watchers who commented: which was in my opinion emblematic, because it targeted the specific situation -- deranged man with machete, not man could have a gun -- and the comments claimed, very hotly, that it was unthinkable to spend so many resources and put officers at risk, because the man was a threat and he should have been shot.
"But when are the actions of citizens going to come under anything approaching the same scrutiny that is applied to the police in the US?" On this, I suffer with you. I do not think it is going to ever happen until the American people decides, on this issue, to finally join Western civilisation and restrict the meaning of the Second Amendment of your Constitution to the right to bear arms for "a well regulated Militia".
And one nit: many state constitutions also explicitly protect the right to keep and bear arms WITHOUT the problematic "well-regulated militia" language of the federal amendment. Such provisions would require attention in your 2nd Amendment reform scenario.
Florida's Article I Section 8, for example, states:
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves and of the lawful authority of the state shall not be infringed, except that the manner of bearing arms may be regulated by law."
I get it. It is a terrible tangle.
Worry not, though, as you are not alone in our embattled Western world. The European Union has been as tangled in trying to create a federal system in which some basic rules of society are the same irrespective of country, just not about guns.
May humanity one day attain a modicum of reason.