I think this is wrong. People don’t turn into monsters if you put them in a uniform. The Stanford Prison Experiment has been thoroughly debunked. See this recent paper, by the first researcher who went into the archives of the experiment: psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-45… [thread /1]
The police violence we see right now is, I think, the result of a much longer history of racism and terrible policing in the US. Take the ‘broken windows’ approach: the idea that you have to arrest people for the smallest of things to maintain the order. /2
Combine this with a crazy quota system, in which officers feel pressured to rack up as many citations as possible. Doesn’t take long before they start fabricating violations. Arresting kids for dancing in they subway, or people talking in the street etc. /3
We’ve got mountains of evidence that this kind of policing - so common in the US - only makes things worse. It’s institutionalised racism (most people who are picked up for small misdemeanours are people of color) and it destroys the relationship with communities. /4
What America needs, is community policing. Officers who consider their job a kind of social work. First thing you do: actually train your police officers, because this is hard work. In the US, average police training lasts just 19 weeks. In most European countries +2 years. /5
By the way, this is what community policing should like right now: /6
In the words of Newark mayor Ras Baraka: the goal is to have officers “who know people’s grandmothers (...) who look at people as human beings. (…) If you don’t look at the people you are policing as human, then you begin to treat them inhumanely.” pbs.org/wgbh/frontline… /7
I think a similar lesson applies to activism right now. Look at sociologist Erica Chenoweth’s research. She’s shown that peaceful protest movements are *twice* as effective as violent ones. Why? Because on average ELEVEN times as many people participate. /8
And see work of Omar Wasow. He studied the effects of protests in the wake of MLK’s assassination, and found that violent protests caused a 1.6-7.9% shift among whites towards Nixon (this helped tip the election, could happen again this year...)
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Is peaceful protest easy? No, it’s not. It’s very hard to maintain self-control when - as this headline summarizes so well - ‘Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide’.
slate.com/news-and-polit…
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slate.com/news-and-polit…
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And that’s exactly why it’s so, so impressive, encouraging and heart-warming to see the overwhelming majority of people protesting peacefully. Media have a big responsibility to put THEM in the spotlight.
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