Nice essay. Impressive teenager. The essay doesn't fully explain how the author's experience in the 100-hour program informed her opinion of what's needed in police recruiting and training. But she offers more ideas for improving policing than candidates for city council.

Jeannette Wang, your article carries both the weight of experience and eloquence in its words. It will have a profound reach. Please keep changing society through the power of your words. Thank you for writing this.

Thanks for this intelligent and well written article that addresses core issues of police over use of force and gives good ideas about addressing it in our community. I hope you continue to peruse your interest in a law enforcement career.

Law enforcement is a challenging job. I worked in prison system for a while as primary care physician and came to understand how difficult the job is. But that doesn’t excuse abuse of power, which I did see from the deputies in the prison system towards inmates. We the People insist on a higher standard of policing than is the current norm.

As is common for some of our local kids these days, the author seems to be parroting talking points from the BLM playbook. The problem is that the facts don’t support the suggestions:

1. “ police departments must work toward reaching a critical mass of Black and minority officers to reduce fatal encounters with Black people.”
Statistics show that more blacks are killed by black officers than white officers so preferentially hiring POC would theoretically do nothing to reduce black deaths.

“ To combat difficulty hiring minorities, departments can expand community outreach programs, like the explorer program, and offer subsidized higher education as an incentive to join the force.”
Wouldn’t it be racist to preferentially subsidize education for POC without offering the same programs to whites?

“The officers who killed Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks chose “them.””
The officers were defending themselves in both cases. Is she suggesting they should have chosen to die rather than defend themselves?

I’m unclear on the relevancy of the explorer training (starting at the ungodly hour of 0730, workout for one hour, class work etc) as experience that would qualify her for suggested changes. Until she’s faced a real gun pointed at her head she can’t really opine on how an officer should respond in those circumstances.

@Hmmm, that's why I'm no longer willing to even be 'a voter registered Republican'! I absolutely heard too much of that from Republican officials / for a socially progressive guy to take.
- Affirmative action, even as practiced in democracies such as India, under their Constitution, allow REPARATIONS as a form of damage control, for the horrible practices of the past. That includes past Police Force actions. Across the county, for example the Zoot Suit police abetted riots in WWII Los Angeles.
- So bring on the affirmative policies as this young, involved police services trainee suggests. This is a Public Policy that a Majority of the MV City Council could direct/vote for the City Police Department to implement. (though I guess it would be legally challenging to word)

So whites today should be discriminated against because some white guys did some bad things 70 years ago? Ridiculous. How is that different than condemning all blacks for the disproportionate amount of crime that blacks commit? If you want a color blind society it goes both ways. All people should be judged on the quality of their character and the competency they exhibit. Lowering the bar for POC teaches them that they’re less than and incapable of fairly competing which ultimately leads to keeping them down rather than lifting them up.

@Hmmm,

Congratulations! You have two old Steve(s) used to arguing in public to actually agree. Equal Opportunity is not equal if it is "separate but equal". There are many reasons I do not support reparations, but the fact that they would be unfair to white folks is not one of them. Last year marked the 400th year since slavery came to America. The Dredd Scott decision set us all back almost 100 years. Brown v Board of Education was almost 70 years ago. We have made progress, but we are NOT yet a colorblind society. Oscar Grant was prone on a BART platform, Philando Castille was a passenger in a car with his child. George Floyd may have passed a bad Twenty. None of them should be DEAD. Crime and Poverty are intertwined but not perhaps in the ways you expect. Trying to be tough on Crime has not solved poverty. Could we try working on Poverty to see if we can improve Crime around our country??

Old Steve - spoken like a true 'fix it' engineer. Hmmm I know my eyesight is poor, but your cultural eyesight does not seem much better (IMO). It is not "some white guy" "70 years ago". It unfortunately continues to be many white guys (and some go along white women and others) to this very year.
Wake up. "Ultimately" is part of the fallacy of your thinking, and that of the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education II. "With all deliberate speed" left kids in Western Virgina going to color-line segregated schools into the early 1970s. Those were not schools with equal resources. QED