Much as I loathe cops, I’m surprised this BS still passes muster. Y’all can believe a poorly written, self-reported study from decades ago. I guess if it fits the narrative, it must be true. Kinda like how conservative memes work.
Yes, everyone just likes using an old study. It’s certainly not because data on police misconduct is basically impossible to collate, or that cops are very rarely prosecuted for any crimes they commit and so there’s no public record of their misconduct.
Note how even this article ends with a law professor who was former police saying that law enforcement doesn’t work on cops, so we need “alternative means” of punishing them. The cops are a protection racket and a gang, and former cops still hold the blue line. One apparently can’t even write an article in America critical of the police without softballing the solution.
Police need to use something similar to the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) that the military abides by. This article eloquently explains this better than I can.
"If we are willing to provide military equipment and training to our local law enforcement, let us also share their higher standards of behavior with police. "
It’s upvoted now. But yeah, the mods around here (not this place, lemmy in general) are barely better than reddit mods. If the post challenges the narrative, out it goes.
Nah. It’s just as bad here. Try speaking out against Marxism/communism/Socialism. You’ll get downvoted to oblivion, reported, and possibly banned depending on where you post.
TLDR, during a 1983 survey of 728 officers and 479 police spouses, "Approximately, 40 percent [of the officers] said that in the last six months prior to the survey they had behaved violently towards their spouse or children." Also, "Ten percent of the spouses reported being physically abused by their mates at least once; the same percentage claim that their children were physically abused."
The interesting part is that nobody reacts to this. Just hours ago they were screaming fake and then, nothin. No rebuttal, no evidence to the contrary. I‘m not saying it must be true then but I am upset by the harshness of the first reactions and none to the sources.
This isn’t a rebuttal, I don’t have one, but some nuance I hope is appreciated.
I looked at the studies a while back and read some discussions on the validity of them. I’ll summarize what I recall. many people were misrepresenting them quite a bit. The people quoting this number often aim to shed cops in a bad light and will do so intentionally.
If I recall, 40% is the domestic violence coming from either member in the household. Not just the police officer.
Another thing was what the offers reported as violence. if I recall correctly “violence” could be defined as raising your voice to behaving violently. So I suppose that leaves room for some interpretation. But when the numbers are brought up, the claim is generally “40% of cops are wife beaters”.
Lastly, these were studies from the 90s and the researcherd generally did their studies on a single urban police departments. So old data and not representative sample.
I don’t trust the number at all with the data we have. The actual rate could be higher or lower, we need better data.
If I recall, 40% is the domestic violence coming from either member in the household. Not just the police officer.
You recall incorrectly. The 40% does in fact refer specifically to the officers. You are correct about the definition of violence being vague though, which is why I included the second quotation in my TLDR. The rate of physical violence was around 10% according to the spouses of the officers, with the other 30% apparently consisting of verbal abuse and threatening but non-physical behavior.
The actual document transcribing the hearing I quoted from is here: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED338997.pdf For convenience I will be referencing the page numbers in the pdf file and at the bottoms of pages, not the original numbers at the tops of pages (which are five behind). Dr. Leanor Boulin Johnson's part of the hearing begins near the end of page 37, and she addresses congress for two and half pages. Then in pages 41-53 her prepared statement is included.
In her oral statement, she said the following (page 39) :
We found that 10 percent of the spouses said they were physically abused by their mates at least once during the last six months prior to our survey. Another 10 percent said that their children were physically abused by their mate in the same last six months.
How these figures compare to the national average is unclear. However, regardless of national data, it is disturbing to note that 40 percent of the officers stated that in the last six months prior to the survey they had gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children.
The written report says the same thing, with a bit of elaboration (page 47):
Ten percent of the spouses reported being physically abused by their mates at least once; the same percentage claim that their children were physically abused. The officers were asked a less direct question, that is, if they had ever gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children in the last six months. We did not define the type of violence. Thus, violence could have been interpreted as verbal or physical threats or actual physical abuse.
Approximately, 40 percent said that in the last six months prior to the survey they had behaved violently towards their spouse or children. Given that 20-30 percent of the spouses claimed that their mate frequently became verbally abusive towards them or their children, I suspect that a significant number of police officers defined violent as both verbal and physical abuse. Further analyses showed that years on the force were not associated with violent spouse behavior. However, among male officers violence towards children jumped 12 percent after the first three years (i.e., 28 percent in the first three years and 40 percent in years four to seven); another nine percent leap occurred after eight years of service. Although the relationship between tenure and violence was not statistically significant for females, four to seven years showed the highest frequency of violence toward their spouses and children. However, unlike the males the frequency of reported violence subsided after the seventh year.
I agree fully that the numbers can very well be off.
In science, you need to prove a theory multiple times for it to become valid. Indicators like this dont mean a lot. But they do not mean nothing either.
So saying „40% of cops are wife beaters“ is as wrong as „thats bullshit“. Neither side knows really but one has at least some data which we should check.
Probably the part that bothers me is that there haven’t been any follow ups to the study; we have better tools and a better understanding of abuse and the effects.
We could do this same study way better now and at a much larger scale to ensure a better picture of the issue (smaller deviation from the norm, higher certainty in the figures). Yet, it hasn’t been done.
I’m wondering if everyone is afraid of being targeted by the police if such a study is done and potentially getting harassed for it, or if the police departments are actively refusing to participate in such a study, or if they think the number is lower, so the older study is more damning? So they don’t want to do a new one for fear that the number will go down?
I have no idea, those are just some thoughts off the top of my head.
I don’t know either way what a new version of the same study would say. Part of me wants to see it be higher to give better reasoning to restructure the police, part of me wants to believe it’s not that bad and the number is lower… But honestly, I don’t really have any horse in the race… I just want the numbers to be reflective of actual, and current facts.
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