Good Cops v. Bad Cops
A good cop will tell you to freeze and actually give you time to do so.
A bad cop will tell you to freeze and shoot you dead if you flinch because of nervousness.
One of my favorite courses in college was Criminal Psychology. The psychological profiles of different criminals were examined. Profiles studied depicted the root of antisocial behaviors.
When I propose using psychological profiles over physiological profiles, I don't suggest replacing the mental conditioning that protects officers. Instead, this style of profiling will help them utilize those skills better, increasing their safety.
It will prevent civilians from being color coded, like the funny but subtly painful phrase, "driving while black".
Physiological profiling doesn't only refer to the way a person is dressed or their race, it may be based on their function, manners, or assumed disabled status.
In Forest Gump, one of my favorite actors plays an ingenious dufus that broke the "retard" stereotype. If you haven't seen the movie, watch it. It's a must see for young people and fosters an inclusive view of intellectual expression.
Forest Gump, played by Tom Hanks, has this ambivalent clarity about life. He is logical where the rest of the world is complex. His straightforward way of speaking recends mental weakness and reenforces the obvious. But an everyday person that coomunicates like the fictional character of Forest, also faces the discrimination that he did.
For an officer to be able to make sense out of what sounds or looks like nonsense is a trainable skill. Using psychological profiling will strengthen and expand that skill.
Another example:
A good cop asks Forest Gump what he saw the night of the crime. He recognizes Forest's strong sense of morals and intense focus on being honest. He uses the information he gathers to solve the crime.
A bad cop asks Forest Gump what he saw the night of the crime. He immediately discredits everything he says because he thinks the guy sounds "slow". Instead of listening, he dimisses Forest and starts questioning other witnesses. It takes years before a new officer reopens the cold case after meeting Forest Gump at a bus stop.
Officers are up against deceptive people who are well versed in misdirection, slight of hand and unthinkable cruel methods to get their way in life.
Some posts before this one, I referenced Ivanhoe, and elucidated on it's redefinition of thievery for the right reasons as opposed to selfish, antisocial reasons. According to logic, stealing for whatever reason, is antisocial. Whether an action is right or wrong, according to most governments, is dependent on the extent to which that action is antisocial.
A click of thieves usually possess an antsocial perspective that denies certain liberties to certain people. Thieves feel that a person being royal, intelligent, rich, attractive or from a different race are acceptable reasons to deny them respect for their possessions. They accept what they are doing as "robbing from the rich to give to the poor". But they are the poor in actuality, usually not making ends meet and envying the means by which the survivalists have come about their possessions. The survivalist thief - we can call this a thief that "made it" and is well off - does the exact opposite out of fear of becoming poor again. These survivalists steal from the poor to reman on top. Their main income isn't stealing, instead they buy information from large data storing companies and harvest ingenuity from others' hard work.
Either way, they are stealing for personally justified reasons, like grudges against an ethnic group because a member of that group committed horrific acts. Some thieves feel it is right to steal from Germans because Hiltler went off his rocker. Or for blacks to steal from whites because of slavery. Or blacks and whites to steal from white royals because of their perceived ease of life.
A good cop hears the key words and descriptions that pepetrators use to talk about people involved in the scenes of a crime.
A bad cop hears the action words that perpetrators use to talk about events taking place during the crime.
Here, I'll insert that orginality is easy. We all have amazing social influences that didn't steal their work. But we can also be certain that some have. Criminal Psychology dives into the mental decisions behind crimes like theft, and even white collar crimes like color of law abuse.
Copying and pasting this post into your next attempt at winning a writers contest seems like an obvious theft, plagiarism. Instead, you could get another blogger, let's say from Glamour, to weave ideas from this post into a "new one". Not exactly stealing. But opening an envelope addressed to a public official, criminal. Using that information in the new Glamour post, criminal.
There's a thick line at the edge of taking what doesn't belong to you, and before stealing from the government. But some may argue, didn't the US steal this land from the Native Americans? Didn't the US create instutional segregation and drive inequality into the American way of life?
Sadly, the manner of survivalist thieves did form and maintain many of the inequities we see in society today.
Physiological profiling is a baseboard, survivalist thief strategy to remain in a financially advantageous position in life. It's overflow use of social status provisions for select members of society. But we have made progress.
Some cities are demmanding more from representatives and taking charge of how officers are trained to interact with the public. We're seeing some changes on state levels, but we can make changes at the district level.
We must also market to the public that those changes are being made, so that people stigmatized by racially motivated shootings can begin to heal and trust the community members who wear badges and work odd hours to support their families.
Social equity can start today, we can offer new systems of doing things, new learning methods, and different ways to connect with our public safety teams. If you've ever needed help from a police officer, dialed 911, or needed emergency assistance, you can thank your tax dollars for supporting those response systems.
