When I was younger (which would be any time except now), I sometimes did poorly in school. I'll spare you the theories for my unwillingess to perform and my consequential hatred for the schooling process. But as a result I was subjected to multiple IQ tests to rule out plain stupidity. There is/was a portion of the test where you're shown a number of pictures, and you have to determine what's wrong. Some are very obvious like "the door is upside down," some are trickier like "one house has no shadow," some require multi-step thinking like "the clock reads 12 PM so there's no way the shadow of the house should be that long with the sun at the trajectory it would have at that time."
Here is a link to a terribly sad story in which Magdiel Sanchez was shot and killed in a confrontation with police. The man was reportedly deaf and mute and unable to understand or communicate in a confrontation with police. He was then simultaneously shot and tazed because he was holding a pipe (which neighbors said he used to shoo away stray dogs) that the police feared as a weapon.
Now of course there is the obvious:
"Why are you killing a man that you've had no interaction with whose only threat is holding a pipe fifteen feet away?" But there's a more damning piece of evidence that paints the police as incompetent or at least poorly trained:
Why is one shooting him and one tazing him? Isn't there any kind of procedure here? For example:
If suspect does A, the procedure is to fire shots. If the suspect does less than A, the procedure is to taze only or not resort to violence.
Proponents of police will advocate for police citing the stress of the environment during an encounter with a suspect. But isn't this exactly why we need firm procedures that can be executed fundamentally in these stressful situations? Then we can also more effectively prosecute and hold police accountable when a glaring procedural error is made.
Of course I appreciate the effort of well-intentioned police, but the stakes are too high with lives at stake for us not to do better! And again I'll repeat: RACISM IS TOO EASY OF AN ACCUSATION TO DENY WHEN INEFFECTIVENESS CAN BE THE REAL PROBLEM. We have to hold the police (one of the most important jobs to protect our rights in a free society) to a higher and more objective standard.