THREAD: US policing does not have to be this way.

At the risk of me overdoing the Korea-philia, besides doing a great job on covid this spring (my thoughts here: https://nationalinterest.org/profile/robert-e-kelly), South Korea is also WAY better on policing. The cops are nice and approachable here, /1

quite friendly actually. The macho, warrior-cop ethos - the kind of domineering arrogance that turned Sandra Bland's minor pull-over into a terrifying physical confrontation - is almost nonexistent here.

Similarly, the US police brutality we've all seen for the last 2 weeks - /2

https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1266751520055459847 - is almost unheard of here.

The cops, even the riot police, are not kitted up like militarized US cops (barring genuinely extreme circumstances). SK cops also almost never carry firearms, even the riot squads.

The riot police pursue a de-escalation /3

strategy colloquially known as the 'lipstick line': https://books.google.co.kr/books?id=EjFZBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64&lpg=PA64&dq=lipstick+line+korea&source=bl&ots=YExoQUDRyM&sig=ACfU3U37NfNYpJTTAvtxnyW1GHSezqHDaQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkzbGxrfbpAhUEVpQKHeDyBI0Q6AEwEnoECBEQAQ#v=onepage&q=lipstick%20line%20korea&f=false. So when hundreds of thousands of Ks protested for months against their corrupt president a few years back, nothing remotely like what is happening in the US now happened here.

It also obviously helps /4

that gun control here is very strict. The cops here don't need engage in an arms race against these own citizens and kit up like they're occupying Fallujah, because no one here insists on access to long guns or forming creepy militias.

And SK's crime rate is very low; it is /5

exceptionally safe here.

All these things go together: strict restraints on gun ownership mean the police don't need to kit up like Darth Vader. Disarmed police who can pursue less aggressive tactics - bc they're less nervous about gun violence - then signals to protestors /6

that the cops are not a repressive opposition force in a street clash, but facilitators of the protestors' constitutional right to assemble. The protestors then behave better too, and any troublemakers, looters, and so on are much easier to identify. The cycle of police over- /7

response->even larger protests we've seen in the US recently is avoided, as are all these terrible videos of police harshness.

How to get there is tough. Breaking down police praetorianism and restoring civilian - ie, mayoral - control strikes me as the first step. But the /8

larger point is that modern policing does NOT have to look like US police departments today - military gear, aggressive tactics, rogue behavior, choke-holds, and so on. These are US policy choices which can be changed, and there are other models out there. /9