One thing I find mighty annoying about police here are the monthly quotas when it comes to revenue collecting, or knows as distributing tickets. Its just not moral. Often, the easy way to collect revenue and meet quotas police will focus on poor communities where they are more likely to find stupid crap like broken taillights or other minor stuff. I mean, Im not against pulling people over and issuing tickets, but the whole concept of police being the armed sect and responsibility of collecting money for the town/city depending on that to make budgets is just wrong.
Where I live, if you get a speeding ticket you just plead not guilty and they will give you a broken speedometer ticket with no points on the license. Why? Because speeding ticket revenue goes to state and broken speedometer tickets goes to the local town/city so courts are corrupt and the whole system works in that favor. I mean, Im not complaining but its just screwed up. Then the cash register table being right next to the judges stand, its just nauseating.
NZ police used to be the same some time ago, so they abolished quotas as they realised they were damaging the trust and confidence people had in police. We still issue tickets, but the dollar value has dropped and instead the points on your licence were increased to compensate.
We don't have it perfect either, but it's a good start.
Going back to the use of force thing - what people often fail to realise is that marginalized communities and people spend a fair amount of time being harassed by different agencies, whether it be police, dog control, councils, debt collection, power companies, internet providers etc. This creates resentment toward these agencies, and their natural defence is to have their guard up and start pushing back.
There's more than a few videos of police approaching someone accusingly, which causes that person to 'push back' (often verbally or start to defy instructions) which leads to police escalating their use of force (become physically rough or draw a weapon). My issue with this is that it is some people's natural reaction to 'push back', especially if they are the ones who have these agencies constantly knocking on their doors. It wears you down. The problem is, the police are more likely to shoot them due to this resistance.
If you've never been harassed numerous times per day or week from police or other agencies, then it's so easy to just say "if they had just complied they wouldnt have been shot". What they fail to see is the 3 other encounters with police that week, or the previous 100 encounters over the past year. If you got targeted that much, wouldn't you start to get annoyed and start to push back? I know I would.
It's easy being me and having a decent income because I'm never harassed by agencies due to missing bill payments, and I'm not harassed by police on a weekly basis. If I were to be stopped today, I'd be compliant. If I were to be stopped numerous times per week over the next few years, my patience would start wearing out.
My issue is that police justify pulling out their guns at the slightest resistance, without realizing they are the ones who created that resistance.
www.police.govt.nz
