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F is for Fascism (Ferguson MO)

Charlotte police academy is six months. You think we have a bunch of social workers who want to do that ?
 
BiffTannen said:
Charlotte police academy is six months. You think we have a bunch of social workers who want to do that ?
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i mean, if they got a degree already and also want to go to be a police officer i think additional training is probably expected
 
All you need to do is find a bunch of social workers who want to carry a gun and interrupt bank robberies and pull over drunk drivers. Cops are doing the social work, domestic violence, mental health aspect as part of their jobs already. Many of them already have good classroom training in such. It would not be that hard to offer additional perfunctory training to them.
 
BiffTannen said:
But that doesn't mean that social workers want to be trained to handle instances of extreme physical violence at risk to their own person more easily than police officers can be trained to handle domestic disputes.

Right now there are thousands of cops actively handling all of the stuff that we've been told social workers are better equipped to handle, without incident. In some cases they've actually been trained to do it through de-escalation tactics, or they figured it out on their own.
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Right now there are thousands of social workers actively handling all of the stuff that we've been told cops are better equipped to handle, without incident. In some cases they've actually been trained to do it through de-escalation tactics, or they figured it out on their own.

Could say the same about teachers as well.

 
We should not train cops to be social workers nor train social workers to be cops.
 
So there's interdisciplinary stuff, who knew. Like I said before, the police are already doing the social work stuff. Let's get teachers and social workers to do some policework involving guns.

Also, send those teachers with experience with chairs to the Kickin' Crab in Jackson, MS so the people can eat in peace.
 
I was not aware that there was a big constituency for the premise that cops are doing a great job at mental health care and social work, even and maybe especially among cops.
 
Deacon923 said:
I was not aware that there was a big constituency for the premise that cops are doing a great job at mental health care and social work, even and maybe especially among cops.
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I think Biff just doesn’t like social work as a field and profession.
 
BiffTannen said:
I just don't think social workers want to be cops.
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And social workers have an option to opt out of police work. Police do not have the choiice of opting out of constantly dealing with mentally ill and agitated people, many of whom are armed and/or violent.
 
BiffTannen said:
I just don't think social workers want to be cops.
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I am not sure what your angle/agenda is on this, but the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon is basically the model program for the social work model: https://www.gq.com/story/how-a-911-call-without-police-could-work#:~:text=CAHOOTS%20responders%20begin%20the%20program,cross%2Dtrained%20as%20crisis%20workers. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/05/us/cahoots-replace-police-mental-health-trnd/index.htmlThe social work/mental health people cooperate and coordinate with the police and it seems like there is not much trouble determining which calls get police vs. social work/mental health pros. I'm not aware of any CAHOOTS worker every being shot or killed on the job, although admittedly that is based on some quick googling. It's been going for 30 years and is pretty successful.

So what people are suggesting here is not crazy thing that's never been tried before, and it's not social workers being cops or cops being social workers. It's really more about mental health intervention than social work anyway, which are two quite different things that you seem to be conflating, and then disdaining because you have an anti-social worker agenda for whatever reason.

Feel free to critique the actual program that exists in the real world, as opposed to the imaginary strawman program that you are constructing in your head so you can tear it down.
 
The proposition was that it would be easeier to train social workers to be cops than vice versa. Read the thread. I don't think you'd have a lot of social workers signing up for actual police training. You apparently don't understand what a strawman is versus discussing the actual point.

I'm fine with sending social workers to social worker type calls.
 
There's a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call "the market" reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in pointless jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit ...

There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is. This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one's job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment? Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish fryers, to ensure that rage is
directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it ...

What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dockworkers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science-fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might improve markedly.) Yet apart from a handful of well touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well...

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralyzing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyze London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It's even clearer in the United States, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against schoolteachers and autoworkers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry executives who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It's as if they are being told "But you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that, you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?''

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how he or she could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorized stratum of the universally reviled unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)-and particularly its financial avatars-but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.
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from the links below I gather that STL has about 38 officers per 10,000 people and the national average is around 22 per 10k -- which rises to 26 per 10k for cities with a least 250,000 people; this ranks STL around #10 in the country in police per capita

if the police do indeed do so much for the murder rate, then explain why STL is #10 per capita in police but #1 per capita in murders -- wouldn't you suspect they would be 10th to last in murders per capita?

https://www.governing.com/archive/p...ta-rates-employment-for-city-departments.html

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-24/

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/06/24/cities-with-most-police-per-capita/10/
 
BiffTannen said:
Charlotte police academy is six months. You think we have a bunch of social workers who want to do that ?
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Six whole months of training?!?!


This is kind of bizarre. Social workers that want to do the job would apply those that don’t, won’t. I think your mental image of a social worker is stuck on a frail middle aged woman, but it’s a degree that all sorts of people get by going to school and taking classes so that they can get certified to help people in need.
 
BiffTannen said:
The proposition was that it would be easeier to train social workers to be cops than vice versa. Read the thread. I don't think you'd have a lot of social workers signing up for actual police training. You apparently don't understand what a strawman is versus discussing the actual point.

I'm fine with sending social workers to social worker type calls.
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Yeah, it takes 6 months to be a cop and 4 years to be a social worker. So it would seem easier to take some of those social workers, that would feel comfortable to be on the front lines of intervening on a domestic dispute, and train them up in some cop skills in case things go bad than it would be to take some cops and train them up on social work stuff.
 
To be clear, all St Louis actually did was keep 98 unfilled positions permanently unfilled and cut the 4 million from the budget that would have paid then.
 
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