this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
59 points (92.8% liked)
Asklemmy
55570 readers
494 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Police in the US originated from slave-catching militias and bounty hunters and developed from there as a means of oppressing, controlling, and re-enslaving (through convict leasing and prison labor) black people after slavery formally ended. At no point has preserving the lives, dignity, or well being of these people been a priority of police forces. All of this gets extended to anyone considered "other" or marginal from the majority.
Prison labor is big business in the US today and acts as a way of reducing the power of labor. This depends on a steady stream of new inmates, so capital pressures legislators and police departments to pass harsher laws and policies and ignore deescalation.
I know nothing about Norway, but I urge you to research how your police treat immigrants, indigenous peoples, and anyone else considered "other" in your society, compared to the majority. it won't be like American cops, but i wonder what you'll find.
There are many syllabuses available about the history of police and prisons in the US. if you want a real answer, try some of the materials here: https://www.aaihs.org/prison-abolition-syllabus-2-0/
One of the things that made our prison system make sense as a machine for me was the explicit carve out in the 13th Amendment:
Emphasis mine. If you're on the outside looking in, and you don't understand why the US prison/LE system is the way that it is, it's because we never actually abolished slavery. We just gave it justification and some window dressing.
And to be clear, I don't agree with any of it. But it is a thing that bears mentioning in the context of law and justice in the US.
This doesn't really answer the question of why US police training can be as short as four months.
Also European police forces (and London Metropolitan, which was the template to many police forces around the world) were primarily to prevent theft and beat organized labour. It's all tool of class war, and it's not uniquely American.
Without any facts to back this up: I would assume the barrier to entry is so low because, without it, no one with any amount of intelligence or empathy would apply.