this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Fun fact: The 40% figure is based on one single study that was a self-report study from the early 1990s, asking police whether a disagreement with their spouse had ever gotten “physical.” A follow-up study found a rate of 24%, also from the 1990s. It’s actually hard to find numbers since then (partly because it’s just inherently a hard topic to study), but assuming that every one of those self-reports was a wife beater, and that nothing has changed since 1992 (0% change in the culture of policing or the handling of domestic violence) seems unlikely.
TL;DR I don’t know what percent of police officers are wife beaters but it isn’t 40%, and claiming that it is is gleefully misrepresenting the truth; using the very outlandishness of it to claim that the cops are outlandishly and cartoonishly evil
More on this
I realize that this information will be unwelcome, and I eagerly anticipate your downvotes. Why are you booing me I’m right
it's an old study so we can't say it's 40%
https://www.nsvrc.org/blogs/saam/who-watches-watchers-domestic-violence-and-law-enforcement-leigh-goodmark
If only our police forces weren't so evil we could stop pointing out the terrible terrible thinga they keep doing
There's a lot there but I read the cited 2015 paper. From it:
And then:
Kinda sounds like literally every single example in this paper involves some sort of prosecution of the cops who were involved, i.e. not with impunity. No?
This is part of what I was saying -- I think back in 1992, the culture that if a cop beat up his wife or drove drunk, his co workers would look the other way was almost universal. I know it's definitely not universal now. Is it still common? I honestly don't know. But getting a honest answer to that question seems like a vital step in stopping it from happening in the places where it is still happening. Right? Or no?
There are actually much much worse and more systemic stories than these. I'm just saying that it's good to want to arrive at an actual measurement of how often it happens (because it's way different if it's 40% versus 10% versus 4%), and that it's bad to just pick the highest number you can and say that that's obviously what's going on because cops are terrible people. How do we know they're terrible people? Because 40% of them beat their wives, that's how.