The problem is, this behaviour and training fails the legal standard of a presumption of innocence which should guide such.

Devils advocate here but your argument is that they should change their safety policy because the job has great safety statistics? What if they change tactics and danger goes up?

I agree with all of this, but I'm not the biggest fan of the way it gets framed. There are reasons for this beyond the common Internet sentiment that police are just evil bullies who became police solely so they can bully people. There was a shootout broadcast on live television in 1997 in North Hollywood between heavily armed and armored bank robbers and police, nearly an entire precinct and a SWAT team, in which the two robbers held out for nearly an hour in a parking lot, mostly because they so severely outgunned the police. They fired over 2000 rounds in the span of scarcely 20 minutes. It became pretty famous for being so similar to what happend in the movie Heat. This was only five years after the LA Riots, in which 63 people were murdered and the National Guard had to occupy the City of Los Angeles because the police couldn't handle the mayhem. Combining all the various criminal escalation of the 80s and 90s, major city police kind of started vowing that they might fail for other reasons, but they weren't going to fail simply because they were being outgunned by the criminals. This wasn't just police doing it of their own accord, either. Thanks to all of these events being televised and terrifying people, plenty of ordinary citizens and talking heads demanded the police do something. This wasn't like the American of today, when protesters block a street or throw a brick through a window and crazies of the Internet start talking about running them over with trucks and accusing them of rioting. These were real riots, with completely innocent people being pulled out of their cars in broad daylight and getting beaten to death with bricks on live television.

Then 9/11 happens a few years later and we end up with 1) police being trained in counterinsurgency tactics and antiterrorism response by the FBI, and 2) an ongoing military surplus program where the Army dumps all of its used weapons, armor, and armored vehicles on the police every time they upgrade.

As far as I'm personally concerned, all of these things were mistakes, but I'm not going to sit here and act like they were completely unjustified responses to nothing. My own experiences having been in the Army during the Iraq and Afghanistan years is suck it up. You volunteered for a job knowing you'd get shot at every now and again, but you're not a hostile occupying force. Your job is ultimately to serve the people, which does mean protecting them from some extremely violent criminals out there, but the bar for action should be a lot higher than it is. The overwhelming majority of the time I served, the rules of engagement stated you can't shoot unless fired upon first. It is legal to open carry in the countries we were in, so it was never acceptable to shoot someone simply because they were carrying or because you felt your life was in danger. I never understood why the police couldn't be held to the same standard.

These things ebb and flow in a series of counterveiling overreactions, but the Internet of today does a poor job of remembering just how violent the 80s and 90s actually were.

> Police in the US are trained to respond to the hilt by default, and then lower their heavy-handed response later if they warrant it.

Citation needed.

> But being a police officer in the US isn't even in the top-10 most dangerous fields

You don't think that has something to do with the exact policies you are objecting to? They call them "high risk stops" for a reason.

Police in the US should respond to the hilt because the likelihood of the suspect being armed is significantly higher than any other country...

> I try to explain that in the USA, the ratio of guns to people is far above 1:1. Therefore, if I was a police officer approaching any car, I would assume that the driver had a gun.

Except that majority of households (58%) do not have a firearm:

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...

and when it comes to individuals, it is the majority (70%) that do not own one. The numbers are 'skewed' by a few individuals that own a lot of them. Statistically you'd be more correct to assume the person in the car does not have one (unless, perhaps, they're a white guy):

* https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...

Whether or not the people being investigated have guns or not, won't showing up with guns up escalate the situation rather than defuse?

I would be absolutely terrified if people with guns came up to me, whether they're cops or not, and if I had a gun with me, I'd be much more likely to go for it in that scenario compared to a normal human interaction. But IDK, maybe I'm an outlier?

"Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"

That sort of thing depends on what is "normal". Many states in the US could have around 10% of the population carrying a firearm. Armed interactions with the police are common and the vast majority are a non-issue. The typical police response to "I have a license to carry and a firearm in the vechicle" is typically "Where is it? Just don't touch it". Happens all the time.

Now, is there a statistical difference? Maybe. It's hard to say because you would need to apply the same policing culture, legal system, and population dynamics to a lesser armed country. I don't know of any good choices for that combination.

> "Do you really want every speeding pull-over to become a wild-west situation? Maybe your kids are in the car!"

Why would every speeding pull-over become a wild-west situation? If possessing a gun is a right, then mere possession is no reason to suspect criminality is afoot.

While I agree with need more and better gun control, American police officers are abhorrent for a very simple reason: lack of basic training, discipline, and practically zero screening/qualification process.

Anyone can become a cop in 6 months. Not everyone is temperamentally setup to be a great cop. That, there, lies the rub.

What if we just didn't have as many police interactions? They love pulling people over because it let's them run everyone for warrants.

If I were going to approach a vehicle whose driver was suspected of homicide, I would do so in a very obvious, slow, and non-threatening manner, probably without obviously being a cop. The last thing I would want to do if someone is potentially a hair trigger threat is give them a surprise and cause them to start shooting.

Police could solve a ton of these issues if they investigated before they tried to apprehend. If we're going to live in a surveillance state, use the damn surveillance for situational awareness. Right now, the cops just get a hit like "APB - Homicide" with no retrospective analysis or attempt to verify. It's essentially an unverified tip - they should use some expertise and tools to try to validate it before they commit.

But they don't, because there's no cost or penalty to them for overreacting, and there's a risk if they underreact. It's really an incentives problem. I don't know if the right spot to address it is with the individual officers or the department, but someone should have some huge liability for this mistake.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If police treat every situation as a potentially dangerous engagement, they're actually actually increasing the likelihood that dangerous engagements occur.

> How would you approach a car whose driver is suspected of homicide?

don't?

wait until they are out of the car and you can tell that they arent armed and also arent wieldign a deadly weapon -the car itself.

flock is adding a false urgency