FBI and NYPD Officers Sent On Museum Field Trip 70
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."
Meditation (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Make them live in a housing project for a week... (Score:3, Insightful)
Your rights online? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Make them live in a housing project for a week. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd go even cheaper: Make them read the constitution they swore an oath to defend.
"Your Rights Online"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because it involves cops...?
Absolutely (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Your Rights Online"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Make them live in a housing project for a week. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.