From the streets of Fallujah to Savannah

April 30, 2018 4:28 PM

We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah. In time, he came to believe that the most meaningful application of his training and expertise—the only way to exemplify his beliefs about American security, at home and abroad—was to become a community police officer in Savannah, where he grew up.
posted by bitmage (15 comments total)

Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. ....Skinner spent a year in Afghanistan, often under fire from Taliban positions, and returned several times in the next decade. He kept a note pinned to his ballistic vest that read “Tell my wife it was pointless.”

wow
posted by thelonius at 5:01 PM on April 30, 2018 [13 favorites]

Yeah, I like that. That's how policing should work.
posted by ambrosen at 5:05 PM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

This guy sounds great + thoughtful but I don't love this framing about Fallujah -- as though military counter-insurgency policing is appropriate overseas, just not in the US of A.

I was glad to see him fill it in in the piece: “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah. It doesn't work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.”
posted by grobstein at 5:42 PM on April 30, 2018 [16 favorites]

The war always comes home.
posted by The Whelk at 5:50 PM on April 30, 2018 [10 favorites]

... I knew all the answers, because I had sat on airplanes for the past six months, doing nothing but reading newspapers and The Economist.”

Things 99% of cops don't do, part one of the dozens of examples in this article.

If the US hired cops like they hire CIA agents it would be a hell of a different place.
posted by GuyZero at 5:51 PM on April 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

If the US hired cops like they hire CIA agents it would be a hell of a different place.

I'm not so sure that would be the case. To me the biggest problems with the cops are that as a group, they are given almost total entitlement to visit unlimited violence and suffering upon the majority of people they see, that a significant number of them harbor extremely racist and misogynist views, and that the system as it exists only encourages them in all of the above. Those issues aren't the result of hiring cops who aren't educated or urbane enough, and I'd say there are pretty strong parallels in them to ways the CIA operates, with the only difference being that the utter ruination of lives overseas is even less visible to people in the US than the damage police have done here. It sounds like this guy is trying to do some good, but a lot of people with similar biographies have not particularly made the world a better place through their actions.
posted by Copronymus at 6:52 PM on April 30, 2018 [15 favorites]

Very interesting article.

I'm shocked after googling that the length of the police academy in Georgia is 11 weeks. In my native Norway it's a 3-year bachelor's degree.

However, I still think bad policing in the US is as much a symptom as a cause. I think more can be gained by trying to fix your ranking in the Gini index than giving the police more funding and training. So much despair, reading both between the lines and in the actual text of TFA. The elderly lady who couldn't afford her medication, for instance.
posted by Harald74 at 10:25 PM on April 30, 2018 [11 favorites]

The framing with Fallujah was definitely more neutral towards the "war on terror" than is justified, but it reads to me as saying that that the organising authorities are much more targeted on interacting with the community in Fallujah than in Savannah. Although of course the paragraph below points out how little the Fallujah community engagement is based on reality, at least there's an aim to engage.

“We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?”
posted by ambrosen at 10:46 PM on April 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

The army deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan was actually much less aggressive, and much more community oriented than many police here at home.

They also wore a lot less of that “tacticool” shit the cops here are so keen on. The derogatory term for a gear junkie in the army is a “pouch.” They’re considered jokes.

It’s like police departments only hire folks who are the person equivalent of those dogs who are so scared of people they bite all the time. We need more Labradors.
posted by leotrotsky at 6:54 AM on May 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

> The army deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan was actually much less aggressive, and much more community oriented than many police here at home.

Sick burn. The mortality rates (insofar as they cam be deduced from the US' covering them up) do not bear you out.

They do at least count the bodies in the US, right?
posted by AillilUpATree at 8:55 AM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

The plates cost him more than five hundred dollars—a week’s salary.

It'd be really nice if the New Yorker also didn't repeat an officer's lies about their salary. There's no way a police officer in a big city is making only $26,000/yr.

The typical defense of a police officer is "it's a dangerous job and they're underpaid." Which, no, they're not underpaid, they lie about how little they make. And it's dangerous because they make it dangerous for themselves.
posted by explosion at 10:01 AM on May 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

That could be his take home pay. Google tells me I make as much as a Savannah police officer and my take home pay is a little higher but not much. And I am single and tend to take the cheaper options for insurance etc.
posted by asteria at 12:23 PM on May 1, 2018

If the US hired cops like they hire CIA agents it would be a hell of a different place.

You did get to the point in the article where the subject quit the CIA because it had become a roving, extrajudicial assassination squad, right? And how he quit because he was tired of torturing false confessions out of people?

Lotta schools of social work out there... Maybe some of those graduates would like a fat pension and a union? Just sayin'.
posted by stet at 12:47 PM on May 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

they're not underpaid

the NYPD site says
Starting salary: $42,500
Salary after 5 ½ years: $85,292.
Including holiday pay, longevity pay, uniform allowance, night differential and overtime, police officers may potentially earn over $100,000 per year.
posted by fredludd at 2:59 PM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Or for this officer, it looks like $44,000 ish after completing Police Academy. Obviously I don't know what the rest of the pay package is.
posted by ambrosen at 3:08 PM on May 1, 2018