Originally Posted by kane

Aside from there just being a few bad apples in the police department one of the major problems is that most cops are terribly under-trained and overtaxed.

A friend of mine who was a cop in big city said his commanding officer would tell them to arrive at a call and take no more than 3-5 minutes to decide if a crime has been committed. If so, arrest that person. If not leave and move on. He would go from one call to the next to the next all day long. By the end of the day he was so stressed and exhausted he was ready to collapse. He ended up quitting after about a year and a half.

So, you take someone (and I don't know if this guy is in this situation or not) who doesn't have adequate training, put them under massive non-stop stress all day and eventually they make shitty decisions like what happened here. It's sad.