Can We Break the Circle of Fear?

I hate to jump on bandwagons and for sure, everyone who writes on blogs will be writing about all this, either trying to make sense out of madness, or adding to it.

I don't want to add to it or to look for blame or offer an interpretation that no one wants to read -- but I do have questions.  Why do arresting officers work themselves into an incoherent lather, screaming hysterically so that anyone they're addressing is more likely to panic than to comply?  Anyone who has handled firearms for long enough will realize that when you have your finger on the trigger, guns go off when you least expect it. In fact that fact is used to improve accuracy in target shooting.   If you're howling like a wild animal backed into a corner, the gun will go off in your finger is on the trigger. It most certainly will and you'll be as surprised as anyone else when it does.

Are police trained to do this?  Why?   Why when someone is pinned to the ground and someone yells "gun" and you don't know why, do you start pumping one round after another into the man on the ground, shrieking like scalded cats? Is the technique of descending into group panic designed to turn good men into dangerous cowards?

I'm very tired of the folk psychology about hidden prejudice lurking behind every white face. It makes as little sense as shooting Dallas cops for something that happened in Minnesota, because if we're training police to be trigger happy and paranoid, anyone could be a target, including other policemen.  The key word, I think is training, teaching cops to handle people as well as they handle weapons would be a start. As it is, some cops are training the public to fear them  and mistrust them to the point of panic and especially minorities.  I'd call it a vicious circle if it weren't a cliche'.

Prejudice is a natural part of learning in humans and animals. We make judgments based on past experience -- we prejudge from our training as well. Our reflexes, our conditioned responses are the result of learning from many sources and to say it's hopeless and a property of our race is no less than racism, and although the idiot Trump can say we have to fight fire with fire, we don't. We don't fight racism with racism and we don't have to murder people because they make us nervous and we don't have to make the public terrified by yelling at them as though we were insane.  If we're that untrained and unstable we shouldn't be cops in the first place.