Reminds me of the study that showed that you got very different types of people signing up to be police officers if your town's police recruiting brochure had pictures of a SWAT team versus pictures of a police officer doing community outreach at a school and shaking hands.

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m463 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I knew a guy who wanted to be a police officer in the LA area.

They gave him a psychological exam.

one of the questions was something along the lines of "you pull over a drunk driver, and it turns out to be your mother. what do you do?"

I asked him what he said.

He said he would call another officer and have him take her home.

I was thinking, wow.

He said if someone answers that they would arrest her, they wouldn't hire that person.

Took me a while to work through it and wrap my mind around all of it.

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mothballed 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I would assume that the thinking is that someone that says they would arrest (or have arrested) their own mother, is a liar.

	▲	fatbird 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is very charitable assumption.

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jMyles 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

...without apparently controlling for the extent to which people _become_ "very different types of people" in agencies who advertise one way or the other.

Either way, it's beyond obvious in 2026 that SWAT teams are no longer necessary and are far, far more trouble than they're worth. Abolish them today.

	▲	mothballed 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's probably indisputable at this point that inviting the citizen gravy seals to deal with real threats will probably result in fewer innocent victims than a professional SWAT force that professionally sometimes rescues hostages while also mostly being used to throw flashbangs at babies and terrorize people at 2am no-knocks over petty crimes.
	▲	pstuart 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And it's almost always done for some drug related crime. End the War on Drugs now!