Thread by @STEMthebleeding

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict Speaking as a combat veteran who was actively recruited to the police force but opted against it - I'm going to give my take on this:

Veterans get fasttracked from the military to law enforcement, but their training is military. Different threats, different responsibilities. /1

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict We're trained to presume every protestor , every rioter - is a potential suicide bomber trying to kill us. That's our experience in urban operations: street to street gunfights against human bombs.

It's ingrained into us, that we have to act decisively to survive /2

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict And no matter HOW MUCH you claim that you can leave that behind, you can't. I've been retired 5 years and I STILL have a moment where a piece of trash becomes an IED. I still change lanes under a bridge to avoid children dropping hand grenades into my vehicle that aren't there /3

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict All it takes is the right event. A smell, a phrase, a sound … anything, and you're not a police officer. You're a soldier, or a Marine again, and you're fighting for your life.

Yet because of that experience, these are the type of people who get actively recruited by PDs /4

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict They don't even get a real opportunity to decompress, or to unpack what they did. Oftentimes, they're turning in their military uniforms and picking up their police uniforms for the academy at the same time.

But they haven't healed. They're still wounded, emotionally. /5

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict Then they go from one authoritarian binary world which is simple to an authoritarian nonbinary world which is NOT simple.

But they're not fully out of the other world. And they're not able to realize it, or refuse to, because they think it makes them weak /6

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict And while veterans NEED jobs, and if you're in the infantry being a cop is a seemingly natural transition, academies need to realize that the transition needs to go beyond just teaching them procedure and equating their military education with formal education. /7

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict Academies like veterans because we know how boot camps work. We're "trainable" but they don't take into account that we spent YEARS on patrol in an environment where anyone from 8-80 years old, man or woman, might be the person who kills you , and "complacency kills". /8

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict They were trained that conflict resolution is achieved through superior firepower and tactics, and calling for backup means you're calling for an air strike.

Policing is not war. They are not in anyway related, but if we keep trying to fit warriors into the role of police /9

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict without first THOROUGHLY training them to understand that their community, their city, or their town is NOT a warzone, and I don't mean 3-4 months..I mean YEARS of training. Remember, that warrior mentality kept them alive "over there", and it's hard to let that go /10

@MGreczyn @SkinnerPm @MENA_Conflict when it's saved your life in the past, and we keep glossing over their military history and start looking it not only as a positive, or as a negative, but in its totality - these incidents will continue to occur , and the communities will continue to suffer.