I share the disgust at scenes of police brutality and acts of murder (not too strong a word). But it isn't helpful to use "police officer" as a term of abuse in a way that suggests every police force is the same. It leads to a fatalistic approach and tribalism... (short thread)

In the U.S., much of the problem lies with a lack of officer education & professional standards. U.S. tax policy starves both police and the communities they serve of money. The case of Ferguson was an extreme case in point .... Training was barely above level of mall cops...

When I embedded briefly with a Toronto-area police force, I was shocked at how different things were. The cops I met had college education & were subject to stringent continuing ed requirements. They spent time on social media educating themselves about communities they served...

Here is a (brief) article I wrote about my experience in 2015. The idea that we should "defund" the police—a meme I periodically see on progressive cdn Twitter—is crazy. Read this piece and tell me who this woman is going to call if there are no police... https://thewalrus.ca/on-the-beat/ 

another @walrusmagazine piece I wrote, after sitting in on a session for police to understand mental illness. They brought in actors to simulate dangerous situations—the ones that end tragically in the US (& sometimes even canada)
But this takes funding https://thewalrus.ca/crash-course-in-dark-thoughts/

In regard to Regis Korchinski-Paquet #JusticeForRegis, a black woman who died this week after falling from a Toronto balcony, there are claims that police pushed her. I'd like to note that this exact scenario was modeled in the training I witnessed... https://twitter.com/SIUOntario/status/1265821375555612672?s=19

I mentioned it in the aforementioned article from 2016, describing training for @PeelPolice. As I noted, actors played the role of a person in crisis, about to jump, with police trying to deal with the situation. Each pair of officers did the simulation and then were critiqued...

The idea that officers trained in this way would instead literally push someone to their deaths is possible, in the way that anything is possible. And the SIU should investigate. But the idea that police should be presumed to be homicidal horror-movie villains isn't helpful