When I was in the military I became aware of how 'group think/action' was influencing my actions. When your with 'the boys' stupid doesn't always look like stupid and how your perspective can get skewed.
I imagine this happening in the police culture and understand how easy its to get caught in it, however training should address that and cops held accountable when they fail in that regard or nothing is going to change. The cops targeting media should be disciplined no matter how much I understand why the might go after them.
I find this point interesting, because it affects all sides in the current environment - the police, the demonstrators, the "organically-violent" mob, heck even the journalists and onlookers, to certain degrees. An additional problem arrises when people don't recognize this dynamic, or only selectively acknowledge it.
Sure. The military paradigm is to follow orders, because the pointy end of the stick is not aware of all the info that went into making those orders. However; the earlier posts about the Nuremberg Trials are also pertinent. No soldier is allowed to follow orders they know to be illegal. One of the oldest rules is that no officer should give orders he knows will not be followed.
Well, some of the "you follow orders, and don't get to question them" is part legacy of the older military forces where your rank and file often could be the dregs of society.
In the modern military "you follow orders, and don't get to questions them(right now)" is part of the reality that in a combat situation,
you don't have time to debate over what the best options are, you have to trust that the people in charge know what they're doing(until they demonstrate otherwise).
But back to:
When I was in the military I became aware of how 'group think/action' was influencing my actions. When your with 'the boys' stupid doesn't always look like stupid and how your perspective can get skewed.
For the military in particular, part of this is a deliberate outcome of training. They
want unit cohesion, so in that respect group psychology has special relevance for a military unit that probably only really sees anything comparable in FireFights, SWAT teams, and paramedics by and large. Regular law enforcement trails behind the rest of them on list by a wide margin, especially those operating in situations where they're running solo most of the time.
It also is why a lot of the feedback from Iraq and Afghanistan vets about how they think a police officer should behave "based on their experience" turns into a "does not translate" scenario. Dealing with an Afghani with a squad and combat medic often backing you up that you've been working
side-by-side with
for months is a
very different situation from a lone officer confronting an unknown person by their lonesome self.
Sure they can wait for backup, then do it, and now you may have 2, 3, 4, or half-a-dozen guys there now, but
they're not a squad in anything resembling the context most Grunts would tend to understand it. Sure "ad-hoc" groups of Grunts often do happen in war-time, but operating as a squad is something they're trained for, it's
natural for them. For that solo cop? It's abnormal.
