Surely there's a segment of the population with similar personality traits predominant to police officers that don't become police officers. One would think they'd also have similar incident of domestic violence if this were a personality trait?

Personally, I would have no interest in dealing with the horrible things people do to one another, on a regular basis, as part of my job. No thanks. Reading the news is bad enough, I wouldn't want to live it.

Not as a counterpoint to the domestic violence issue but to broaden the picture of symptoms of widespread mental illness, the suicide rate is also higher than the general population.

> “The Ruderman Family Foundation, a philanthropic institution, also found that first responders die by suicide at a higher rate than people in the general population, according to an April 2018 report.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/for-third-straight-year-polic...

honestly, is this really surprising? people become police officers not just to "help others" but to do it through the use of force, weapons and authority.

if you group people by profession and gender, you can probably find 1000 things that are specific to that group. it's like saying that programmers/engineers have a higher probability of being good at math or being introverted vs the general population.

If you follow the footnotes, you'll see that the only references for this claim are almost 30 years old. One of the two is just a Congressional hearing.

Which is itself part of Injustice Watch: https://www.injusticewatch.org

"a non-partisan, not-for-profit, multimedia journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality"

I don't think its a hard distinction to make that the bar is higher when you are issued weapons and authority by the state.

Leftist asshole talking about "old white men" online = bad

Cop who has the power to use force against you or arrest you talking about how "thugs deserve slugs" = worse

This isn't hard.

I’d say the opposite. Intolerance should not be tolerated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Classic whatabouttism. Does it really make you feel better to imagine two sides, one of which is "left", the other "right", and placing them on a balance? The two sides here are the police and civilians, not police and "leftists on the internet".

... because one comment on social media becomes a just characterization of all members of a class?

That was covered in the headline...

"Police Post Racist and Violent Messages on Facebook, a Review Shows"

Sure, there were non-racist comments that were troublesome... but also a lot of racist ones. What is your point?

It shows really poor grammar though.

Did you scroll down?

Lots of things are 'obvious' but we do the research to both confirm them and to exclude our biases.

When you have enough evidence one way or the other then you can begin addressing the problem properly.

Evidence lead policies are the most rational way to addresses things.

Or being in violent environment will often make you numb to violence.

Are you suggesting we ignore the problem?

From the article:

  Of the pages of officers whom the Plain View researchers could positively identify, about 1 in 5 of the current officers, and 2 in 5 of the retired officers, made public posts or comments that met that threshold — typically by displaying bias, applauding violence, scoffing at due process, or using dehumanizing language. The officers mocked Mexicans, women, and black people, celebrated the Confederate flag, and showed a man wearing a kaffiyeh scarf in the crosshairs of a gun.

"no worse than the general population" would be a damning indictment on its own. The police have, notionally, a monopoly on state violence, and you want to set the bar so low?

The pattern with "the racist+fascist assholes" typically is that the craving for power (and sometimes for brutal violence) comes first, and then ideas are sought in a bid to normalize it. A position of authority, or purposely fanning widespread hate towards some socially marginalized or despised group that few people will bother to counter, are two things that are very often used to get away with all sorts of brutality and inhumane behavior. It's essentially a smaller-scale version of what the Nazis did, and the sort of thing that should actually be decried as such, in the strongest possible terms.

> It's a selection problem, which I'm sure those responsible are very aware of and have no intention to change

Do you have evidence for this?

When you don't ever face consequences, why hide? It's just extra work. And then no consequences or even positive reinforcement from your Facebook friends validates them and makes folks even bolder.

> This would be both extremely interesting and very difficult to study

You’d have to get a department to consent to the random sampling of its officers’ social media histories. (Can’t just use public data due to the selection bias it entails.)

The data are there, being dutifully logged by everyone’s cell phones and flung off to servers across the world. Ethically accessing them is the political problem.

I highly recommend David Simon’s talks on policing (he is the creator of The Wire).

He talks at length about how the skill sets necessary to investigative work and community policing have largely been lost as a result of the focus on meeting drug war quotas.

> I wouldn't be surprised if you could find similar relative numbers in Canada and the UK

I don’t have the source on hand. But the elevated rates of domestic violence (like 4x baseline) in policing households is unusually prominent in the United States.