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FBI and NYPD Officers Sent On Museum Field Trip
In an attempt to "refresh their sense of inquiry" FBI agents, and NYPD officers are being sent to a course at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Art of Perception hopes to improve an officers' ability to accurately describe what they see during an investigation by studying art. From the article: "Amy Herman, the course leader, said: 'We're getting them off the streets and out of the precincts, and it refreshes their sense of inquiry. They're thinking, "Oh, how am I doing my job," and it forces them to think about how they communicate, and how they see the world around them.' Ms Herman, an art historian, originally developed the course for medical students, but successfully pitched it as a training course to the New York Police Academy."
The New York Police Department calls the trip a "resounding success." Though several paintings and sculptures were shot multiple times during the trip, an internal NYPD investigation has confirmed that the pieces of art were apparently reaching for weapons when they were fired upon. "Yeah, sounds like a clean kill to me," said Officer Leo Sekonsky, in reference to an incident that left Vincent van Gogh's "Self-Portrait with Straw Hat" in tatters. "That Van Gogh was definitely reaching for a knife or some shit. Ain't no one gonna say different."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Did they catch any art thieves?
Officers plan on bringing The Art of Perception to a strip club or donut shop next month.
P.S. Ms Herman is a genius.
I may implement this with my students and colleagues.
It sounds like an attempt at filling the gap left by the lack of meditation our society experiences. Nobody plays Go (or Chess; but Go is a superior game), nobody quietly contemplates, nobody does listening meditations or anything. The most basic are breath awareness exercises-- sit quietly, close your eyes, observe the sound of the air passing through your nose and into your lungs, how your chest and belly expand, how your body shifts... then focus as well on your heart beat, and then add the focus of your attention on your muscles adjusting to hold your posture against gravity, shifting your balance constantly. All of these things at once, just for a minute or two, or an hour if you wish; time is a personal decision.
We do none of this stuff, and then we sit around wondering why people are bad at observing things. People want answers to shit; we still want to understand what's happening around us. But we've trained ourselves to be intolerant of the task of observation. We want to look, see, and understand; but our minds are looking for an ANSWER, not simply looking. So we don't understand what we're seeing, and we can't form a viable answer of what's going on around us.
It's like when you put a can of soup to the right of a jar of mayonaise in the cabinet. Then you open the cabinet and somebody moved the mayo a foot to the left next to a bottle of oil, and you spend 10 minutes trying to find it. You NEED it to be there, because you don't know HOW to observe and understand.
Here we have an attempt to make people stop, relax, stare and contemplate the art, the sculptures. Talk about what they see. A hollow attempt to regain these abilities that we no longer have.
The sad part is this is all completely whacked out and ridiculous ... and that I'm right.
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It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
...that will refresh the sense of inquiry much, much better.
end up with thought-police?
The program will be canceled about 12 seconds after the first officer on the witness stand describes a rape victim as "Rubenesque".
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Why is it labeled your rights online?
I'd go even cheaper: Make them read the constitution they swore an oath to defend.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Looks like the NYPD is taking a page out of NASA's preparation for the moon landing. Where Apollo astronauts worked with geologists to better be able to describe what they saw while they were on (or flying above) the moon's surface. Instead of calling something a gray rock, they could give it a more scientific and accurate description.
I think this will lead to a rise in the arrest of moonwalking gorillas.
Why is this filed under "Your Rights Online"?
Because it involves cops...?
My stupid web site
The game is thought to originated somewhere in the border country of India and Afghanistan around 600 A.D. It came to Europe via Arabic traders a few hundred years later.
The setup sells itself!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Yet another scene from the Simpsons, accurately predicting where this all will go:
Agent Johnson: [on speaker] This is Agent Johnson from the FBI. Be on the lookout for a 1936 Maroon Stutz Bearcat!
[A 1936 Maroon Stutz Bearcat whizzes past.]
Chief Wiggum: [lazy] Ahh, that really was more of a burgundy.
From The Trouble with Trillions
You're essentially trying to retrain an already adapted mind, against the same environment. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'd like to think we have the proper educational instructors at these types of places that could better implement the necessary policy and training changes before the fact, rather than after.
Or perhaps, it is not an important enough improvement to the personnel in the field as they think it is. Who am I kidding, right? This is the FBI and CIA we're talking about here.
Because it involves cops...?
As a member of a city police department for over 15 years, I can tell you that in many cities there exists a real problem with relations between law enforcement and the public, and that problem is that in any urban or suburban department of any real size, the officers are all ultimately gravitating towards a world in which there exists only cops and criminals. If you're not a cop then you're a criminal and a citizen is just a criminal who hasn't got caught yet. This nation is on a downward spiral to becoming a police state and this trend must be reversed.
Programs like this one sound like they may be of some benefit towards that reversal. I even personally believe that full time career LEOs should have to periodically take an extended sabbatical away from the law enforcement environment in order to qualify for remaining in the field. Something like you get to work as a cop for four or five years in a row, then you must take two years away from any kind of LEO position during which time you're a complete civilian with none of the privileges or protections offered to LEOs, then when your two years are up, you can carry a badge and a gun again for another four or five year stint. This would help drive home the fact that the citizens are really your boss.
Observation is a learned skill, and anything that makes police better observers is great in my book.
I train my fellow officers in some simple observation exercises. My favorite takes place during meal breaks.
When sitting down at a restaurant, I instruct them to maintain eye contact with me, but describe every article of clothing the person at the table next to us is wearing. By forcing them to use their peripheral vision to gather details, they slowly learn to better use their unfocused vision and not get easily distracted. It's also a lot of fun.
For the less-than-willing male officers, I tell them it means they can check out women without actually looking at them...
Would be teaching them to DRAW.
Which is also about learning to see.
you had me at #!
Let's give a round applause for two groups of people thinking creatively in order to get better at doing what they do: the law enforcement folks for considering new approaches and the art folks for doing more to make their profession relevant to society.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
As much as I love this idea, it'll never happen for the same reason my other favorite plan won't.
Every time we hear the police complain that "Civilians don't understand what it's like, it's a lonely dangerous job, you could never do it, you could never understand" I offer the following plan. Fine. Take every able-bodied, responsible, solid-citizen who's willing, and train and deputize them.
I'm talking serious people with gravitas. Former military officers and chiefs, ER docs, SAR team leads, Red Cross disaster coordinators, CAP fliers, VFD officers, airline pilots and the like. Put them through the Academy on a night shift. They'll sign whatever waivers you require.
In any major city, we could triple the number of boots and guns on the ground, and give the professional police force the breathing room they require. Any full-time uniform outranks and directs the volunteers just like we do for fire-fighting.
This plan is always immediately rejected, no matter what level of training is offered for the volunteers. I once offered to get a squad of triathalon-running judo-black-belt attorneys who could pass the shooting requirements for SWAT together. No dice.
There is a reason our police are chosen from young, poor people with a legally-tested IQ cap. They don't want our cops to know any other life. They don't want our cops to have any other experience than taking orders. That's why they love hiring ex-marines, young people of limited experience who will follow orders without thinking. The city fathers never want to hear a uniform tell them, "I'm sorry sir, but that's an illegal order and it is my duty to decline."
Making cops take a couple of years off of the force would give them the experience and perspective to grow a backbone. The people who hire them would never tolerate that.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Reading the constitution isn't nearly enough to understand even the hundredth part of it, much less to understand why it matters that we defend it.
One simple example: we tell kids it takes a simple majority of Congress to pass a bill into law, then a 2/3rds majority to overrule the president's veto, and we give them the constitution to read. But technically, Congress can pass laws any way it wants for the initial passage--it can deem them passed, or require sixty votes to end a philibuster, or require a unanimous vote. Just reading the constitution without thought isn't enough, and even with thought isn't enough, unless you're actually studying it.
Another example: Miranda rights are NOT in the constitution. The Supreme Court made them up a few years ago as a way to protect constitutional rights and has been slowly taking them away since.
Another example: There is a debate over changing the language of the Fourteenth Amendment to not grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. The sentence they're thinking about changing is the one we insisted on writing in because of the civil war--it's what we fought the civil war over: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." To the casual reader, it just seems to make people born here citizens of the US--but in reality, it granted black northerners *federal* citizenship, as opposed to merely state citizenship, meaning the federal government now had a legal avenue to fight discriminatory state action.
It would take a year of a *good* school for most of us to begin to understand the constitution.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
is considered bullshit: scientific method, studying the substance ( mind, one's system-of-knowing, one's tools ) with-which you study Universe, is beyond you, utterly?
I pity you:
I consider understanding one's tools-of-knowing to be required,
for mental competence & integrity...
and you consider it to be bullshit to be opposed, automatically...
Too difficult/offensive to do the experiment?
-Antryg
That's reminiscent of a Mexican mayor who required his officers to regularly read books (and write short reports) in order to be eligible for promotion. I've been curious for some time how well that worked out. The LA Times story is archived here (behind a paywall but there's an abstract).
cops are civilians.
Civilian:
2a : one not on active duty in the armed services or not on a police or firefighting force
But I get your point in that they aren't military. The problem is that the police have forgotten that in the "War on Drugs/Terror/Liberals."
Head over to the forums on "Officer.com" to hear some truly hair-raising smack talked by people we trust with guns and badges. We've tolerated a police culture that thinks of everyone out of uniform as -- officers' own words, mind you -- "sheeple," "peasants" and "children" for far too long.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Reading the constitution isn't nearly enough to understand even the hundredth part of it, much less to understand why it matters that we defend it.
I mostly agree there and with the rest of your post too. But I still think someone who swears an oath to the constitution ought to *at least* read it.
As it stands, current trend seems to instruct law enforcement that people who mention the constitution too often might be domestic terrorists. See the MIAC report among several other examples of that.
Mind the frickin' laser...
The Art of Perception hopes to improve an officers' ability to accurately describe what they see during an investigation by studying art.
Er, wasn't the whole point of studying to be a police officer so that they could, among other things, accurately describe what they see during an investigation? If they're no good at that, they shouldn't have been hired in the first place; and if they were hired, they should be fired after the fact.
They would probably feel as though the constitution was falsifying a police report.
It took a year for this story to get to UK and back? Sad.