Your college transcript would say Viores148
Fake solutions to an exaggerated problem
❚ The thing that prevents excessive use of force is training and experience in the application of force. A person who is well-trained is not going to lose their cool and jump to a higher level of force than necessary. Someone who has been in physical confrontations is going to be more comfortable, think more clearly, and make better decisions than someone whose only experience with violence came from an internet video or an unrealistic action movie.
Ithought California had reached peak suicidal insanity until I recently read State Assembly Bill 89, known as the Peace Officers Education and Age Conditions for Employment act, or PEACE act.
Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles, authored this bill, which was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 30, 2021, and is set to go into effect in June 2025. The bill has a stated goal of “minimizing peace officer use of deadly force,” and one of its requirements is for all new police officers to have a bachelor’s degree before attending a police academy.
The bill says “a college education reduces the likelihood of excessive force significantly.” The authors are implying that if someone more educated, someone like them, was in a quickly evolving dangerous situation they would be able to de-escalate and solve the problem.
The pomposity and smugness of the people who wrote this bill really shines through. Never mind the fact most of these people have never been in a fight and have no idea what it’s like to engage in a physical confrontation. They look at us street cops as uneducated brutes who only know how to use force to solve problems, but they have no understanding of what we do daily.
Lawmakers like Jones-Sawyer don’t take into account the countless high-risk encounters police officers have every day that are resolved either peacefully or with minimal force. When facing down a meth head with no pants who is wielding a hatchet and talking to aliens, your lesbian dance theory class is not going to help you solve the problem.
The thing that prevents excessive use of force is training and experience in the application of force. A person who is well-trained is not going to lose their cool and jump to a higher level of force than necessary. Someone who has been in physical confrontations is going to be more comfortable, think more clearly, and make better decisions than someone whose only experience with violence came from an internet video or an unrealistic action movie.
I was a cop for 12 years before I got a bachelor’s degree and while I was in college, I didn’t learn anything that made me a better police officer. However, 12 years of critical thinking, interacting with the public, working in a team environment, writing reports, providing expert courtroom testimony, teaching in the academy, and solving complicated public safety issues made college very easy for me. There was not a single topic I researched, group project I completed or paper I wrote that helped to prepare me to deal with a violent encounter.
If Jones-Sawyer were pushing for more force-on-force training or jiujitsu classes for officers and the funding, time and instructors to implement them, I would be on board. Building the skills and confidence of our officers makes them and the public safer and would certainly reduce the rare incidents of excessive force. Unfortunately, California is not interested in making its officers or the lives of its citizens better. These lawmakers are just virtue signaling their fake concern about an over-exaggerated problem while funneling more money to our ineffective education system.
Drive around Bakersfield, or any major city in California, and look at the conditions. Ask yourself if the people living in the projects are really impacted by police violence, or do they have many more and much bigger problems to worry about? Check out the business districts or talk to a small-business owner in the downtown area. Is it rogue cowboy cops that are vandalizing and burglarizing their shops? Did police brutality leave piles of human feces on their doorstep or scare off their customers? Of course not.
AB 89 will only make worse the already difficult task of hiring police officers. Only 20% of our applicants have a college degree, so police departments will be forced to either keep their current standards and fail to fill their academy seats, or they will have to loosen the background and character standards in order to fill the seats which will inevitably lead to more bad cops, not less. Maybe I’m wrong. I barely graduated from public school, so what do I know?