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Hroswitha's avatar

I'm afraid that I have to look skeptically at the idea that improving police training would be effective in reducing police misconduct.

My suspicion is that the form that "improved training" would take would be "more hours of training", but that the content of those hours would be entirely untested for effectiveness, and would consist of whatever was being offered by self-styled experts and promoted by this or that community goup. We'd see lots of implicit-bias sessions and Robin DiAngelo, but nothing to test whether trainees were capable of controlling their tempers in the face of provocation, or of resisting peer pressure from more senior officers who'd learned to thrive in a toxic police culture.

The analogy that occurs to me is my TA training in my early days as a grad student. There'd been complaints about the quality of teaching by TAs—largely, I suspect, from students who wanted to explain those D's and F's to their parents without getting into the details of how they spent their weekends—and, in response, the administration had mandated X hours of training. But the purported training was entirely useless, provided chiefly by anyone who wanted to harrangue a captive audience and could come up with some kind of rationalization for doing so. We had a two-hour session of "Diversity Exploration", consisting of sitting in small groups exchanging platitudes about how bad racism, sexism, thisism, and thatism were; but part of our "training" also involved half an hour from the Director of Campus Recreation, talking up the benefits of the newly-opened Student Recreation Center. I'm quite confident that no one emerged from the purported training with any improvement in their ability to teach algebra, French, or American history.

No. I suspect that any sort of "improved training" for prospective police officers would be similarly useless. The hours of training would chiefly serve as a fig leaf for officials, as proof that they took police abuse seriously and were Doing Something about it. But I doubt very much that it would test whether the officers had the temperament and character to manage daily interactions with some of the worst elements of society without yielding to the temptation to misuse their powers.

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Faze's avatar

Lorenzo Warby is correct that feminism is a paranoid theory of history, and Arnold is correct for pointing out how Warby can improve his otherwise good argument.

Looking at history, it seems that feminism was a notion that regularly escaped from elite coteries that included especially bright women. These ideas never found fertile ground in society at large, until the 19th century, when feminists piggy-backed their notions of freedom and oppression on the powerful arguments for Abolition. Women's sufferage (and prohibition) were the culmination of that long episode.

Total victory didn't come until the 1960s, when high-status, high-intelligence women hijacked the de-legitimation of hierarchies that came with the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, to advance their own claims -- enjoying the highest possible status while permanently establishing themselves as victims of historic oppression.

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