Differences in USA and The UK Police Force|| Americans in England

hey guys my name is Matthew and today we're gonna be talking about the differences between the police in the u.s. and the police in the UK so Before we jump into actual differences here I do just want to say that in this video we're gonna try our best to just present facts but there is one particular difficulty that makes that hard which is the United States is so varied in its police force the other thing that will make that difficult is we always talk about our experiences and so the other thing we'll talk about a little bit is our experience with police officers in both places and those are of course facts because there are like what we've actually experienced but they may be different than your experiences that's okay we'll also talk about why the United States is a little bit harder to you know to tag down and say this is the way it is when we get to localities we'll get into all those things but first we're gonna start with training now training is an interesting one because when you just look at the amount of training each each set of forces has it seems like they're pretty similar in the United States for instance this comes from a Snopes article I'll link it below the reason that come from Snopes articles because there's no there's not a lot of compiled data on these things but it says that in the United States the average amount of training that comes for police officers is 21 weeks of in classroom work and then 13 weeks of in the fieldwork this total is about nine months altogether and it it actually is quite a bit of time that's assuming that they get no breaks for any time off or whatever so most the time this training actually takes more like a year for most of the time in the United States and and that's pretty typical there's some obviously with averages some police forces have less time than this and some have more but the variance isn't actually that much training is is relatively normalized across to all these forces you don't have a lot of people who you don't have like a month of training and then suddenly they're police officers or something like that in the UK like I said before the training is a little bit more standardized but there's actually still variance in training as well I've posted some Essex police officer of training courses in in the description below and basically there's about 21 weeks is is somewhat average but can go anywhere from 12 and 21 weeks of in classroom training before you're allowed to be a police officer and then you have about 28 weeks which is more than twice as much in the field training as the United States too to be able to be a police officer and and then you're put on something called like police officer probation which lasts for two full years you're always coupled with someone else for those two full years and at the end of those two years then you're a fully a police officer what I find interesting about this is not so much just that these trainings are actually comparable they're obviously more the UK has more training for their police officers there's this probation period they get put on the in the United States something similar is done it's like it's not like after the nine months and they're done with their police officer training suddenly they're just full-fledged cops and there's going off on their own they're also coupled with someone else they also have this this kind of probationary period although it doesn't have a name in the United States but what I like about this difference is it looks very similar until you recognize that there's a huge difference in what the u.s. police officer is able to do and what a UK police officer is able to do with a comparable amount of training so after a u.s. police officer has received this amount of training and after the UK police officers receive this amount of training they're given their equipment let's go and talk to this equipment and then we'll talk about why this amount of training doesn't seem like it's actually comfortable anymore after you talk about the equipment and for the equipment I've scoured this all over the place just to fact-check it but this video is a really cool YouTube video that literally goes through each item in each piece of equipment on a us officers belt and vest and all that and then does the same thing for UK police officer I'm really really cool one thing the video doesn't talk about is the vehicle which I think is really important as well so in the United States a police officer will have a firearm a baton gloves a tourniquet a Leatherman handcuffs one important difference between the u.s. handcuffs and the UK handcuffs is UK uses rigid handcuffs and the u.s. uses like handcuffs with like kind of chain-link in between I'm not exactly sure the differences or if there's an important difference there if you do know let me know in the comments mo it come with the Taser a radio and a first aid kit and so it ends up being quite a bit of equipment it's quite heavy but one really important piece of equipment there is a firearm they all have a sight or not on them it's it's quite quite common that you'd see a police officer with just a handgun on their belt that's that's the most normal way actually it would be odd to see one without you would assume you're looking at like a mall cop or something maybe if you didn't have a firearm and the reason that's really interesting is because for the same amount of training they also are required to learn all about how to use their firearm and be in the shooting range and spend all the time required to pass all those tests that they need to pass for all that and so the training suddenly goes oh wow they use the same amount or actually less training than a UK police officer but they also have to fit in training for a firearm the other thing that's really interesting about a u.s. police officer that a UK police officer typically doesn't start off with is this highway speed like a lot of times like a Dodge Charger or just as just this vehicle that's that's required for things like police chases and the training to use those as well also comes in from the US side a UK police officer carries a much smaller load they carry a radio a Taser some pepper spray the baton the rigid handcuffs which I already asked about below let me know if you know in the comments and then some straps for like finding people's legs together and that seems to be pretty common for your standard-issue UK police officer I'm sitting here editing this video and I'm realizing I've forgot to mention something that's pretty important a UK officer is actually allowed to eventually after many years on the force receive a firearm and I've done lots of research on what that takes it's really really interesting you should go scour the internet if you're interested at all but it's like years of training a lot of times you know 16 people are selected for a particular class and I saw one one like report that said only three people got out and then after those three people like finished that particular class they still have like a couple more years of training to go before they're ready it's like lots and lots of late nights and de-escalation training and all the stuff and it takes years to get a firearm in the UK whereas in the u.s. you could receive one potentially after nine months I think that's a huge difference and I think that's an important difference in the training for a firearm and how important the UK views that training versus the importance that the u.s. puts on that training so forgot to mention that in the video so I wanted to throw that in as well so this next one is about location and this is something that I've noticed in my experience but also have done a lot of research on and it seems to be pretty true in the United States I've interacted with police officers on I don't know 20 or 25 different occasions I really haven't had to interact with police officers very often at all normally it's because I'm getting pulled over I've received a lot of warnings in my days because I'm going a couple miles of the speed limit or you know kind of breathe through a stop sign a little bit too quick or something like that so I've received quite a number of those kinds of interactions and I've been pulled over a bit normally that is where you interact with the police officer in the United States in my experience is in their vehicle they pull you over and then they get out of their vehicle and come talk to you if I've seen police officers on the street it's been rare maybe when I'm in a really big city you'll see a police officer but for the most part if a police officer is out of their vehicle it's because they've got some business to attend to it's because they're attending to some serious business you don't find a police officer that far from their vehicle very often because most of the things they do is from their fully their vehicle UK police officers you almost never see in their vehicles of course I see them in their vehicles occasionally and they're driving around especially recently with things going on I've seen them more often but like the number of people I've seen pulled over and the entire time I've been in the UK has been like three like three total that I've seen my adrenaline spend as much time driving in the UK and that you know there are a lot of factors going on here but I've literally seen three people pulled over the entire time I've been in the UK it just seems a rarity but I've seen lots of police officers walking around in a city centre or even on their bicycles that's quite common as well and then one piece of experience that I've had is that I've actually had a police officer walk over to me and talk to me and I first like I found went into like a little bit of like okay panic mode you didn't do anything wrong Matthew but okay yeah yes sir what's going on and there's like oh nothing I was in London and he said you just looked a little bit lost I wanted to see if you needed help anywhere and I think that's a very different experience than I would expect being in the United States I'm not saying that no one would know police officers wouldn't be helpful or they wouldn't see someone looking at loss and help them but it's something I've never experienced before and just seeing someone outside of their vehicle and approaching me and their police officer automatically put me in oh he's in business mode so he must mean he must think I've done something wrong and of course that wasn't the case here so I think it's really interesting that you find UK police officers are often side oftentimes not in their vehicle they're walking around they're patrolling they're doing whatever but they're not in their vehicles our all necessarily and in the United States you'll find of course that they are a huge part of this actually is just because of the infrastructure in the United States though the United States is very much so built around a lot of the United States most of it is built around this idea that you need to get into your car to go and do something that's true for me personally but it's also true for a police officer as well okay now we're going to talk about what everyone's talking about right now in the United States us police officers shoot 1000 people every year they shot a thousand people in 2019 and then 2018 it's not an exact figure it's actually hard to get the exact figure because no one's publishing the exact results but it seems to be right around 1,000 people every year whether there are unarmed or armed or civilians or criminals whatever whatever the reason is they shoot 1000 people every year it's a staggering number it's a lot in the UK to give it a little bit of context last year in 2019 if three people were shot and that's a kind of a typical number for the UK those numbers aren't in the same playing field you can talk about population and obviously that plays a little bit of a fact here but the u.s. shoots and kills more of their own civilians every year than any than any rich country in the world like any civilized a first world country we do the worst it's staggering how badly we do really really impressive we also imprison more people that's a factor that goes into this as well but it's really interesting I'm gonna talk about two things how why and and using the UK as a comparison point I think will help one thing it has a lot to do with the culture that we're talking about here in the u.s. actually for instance in the UK how many police officers were shot in 2019 so how many or were killed at all in the line of duty not including like accidents when accident would be like someone accidentally got trapped into their own car or something like that in the UK zero police officers were killed in 2019 there were no what the US would deem as a felonious crime against a police officer felonious death against a police officer none of those happened in the United States forty-four police officers were shot and killed or killed in some purposeful criminal activity 44 again 44 and zero aren't on the same playing field so the u.s. police officers are are afraid in the u.s. of being shot because guns are prevalent and they exist and that's not something you're gonna be able to change in the United States so that's you know not really on the on the docket right now but it's a really really interesting number that puts the 1000 into perspective a little bit is when you're talking about one thousand and three and you go forty four and zero those numbers they start to make a little bit more sense because we're talking about really really really different cultures the other thing that we need to talk about a little bit when it comes to why this number this death number which I feel like is something we need to fix it's something that I think everyone thinks we need to fix I don't think there's anyone out there saying like no our police force is perfect the way it is right now but another big issue that's coming up is this idea of localities in the UK things are pretty centralized for their police force there's a little bit of segregation when it comes different countries and a little bit as well with different counties but in the u.s. it's quite common not quite common but it's definitely possible that someone could be fired from their job in one city and within the same state go a different city go to a different police force and be rehired from a different police force because they're totally different organizations they're not you know there's a little bit of an interdepartmental working together stuff but they're different organizations altogether and so each city has their own police force each County has their own Sheriff's Office their own Sheriff's Department there's also obviously the federal government and they've got all sorts different you know policies and governments and police forces within those as well and so there's literally thousands and thousands of options for them if someone got fired from one police force for violence or whatever they could go apply to literally thousands of other police forces and potentially get picked up somewhere else in the UK that's not likely in fact it's nearly impossible if you're due to be removed from the police force for some reason you're not getting in and some other you know in some other part of that country these are interesting differences about the United States in the UK and one thing that I think would be really tempting to do would be to take the UK police system and say well it's doing so well in comparison we can talk about other systems of course but the UK system is doing so well in comparison why don't we just move it over to the United States and implement that across the board and the reason that just can't work is because the culture and the environment and localities they're so different right we're talking about a completely different place with different for instance the road itself like you can't take an officer and give them a normal vehicle in the United States with no capability of going highway speeds and things like that like that's not that just wouldn't fly it doesn't make sense similarly you couldn't take an officer over and just take away the gun and put them in the same situations that you're putting officers in right now something else major would need to make some shifts I think it's really easy to put together this idea that oh we should take a police force that's doing well and just put all those ideas in the United States and that idea is really nice but it just doesn't work in practice because they're so different I think there are lots of good ideas about what could happen to the police force right now in the United States there are lots of great things talk about reform and even defunding attention depending on what your definition of that is there are lots of great ideas going on about how to fix it but I think that most people can look at these differences most people can see the differences and recognize actually as something needs to be done something maybe needs to change in the United States police force do let me know in the comments below what you thought about this if you have any other differences that you even noticed experiences that you've had and do also like and subscribe if you enjoyed this content or if you found it useful we put out new content every single week and we'll see you guys next time

Channel: Schaefer Family Adventure

Views: 156,409

Rating: 4.8175898 out of 5

Keywords: police, usa, uk, difference, United States, Cops, differences, us vs uk, americans in england, american, united kingdom, uk police, british police, american police, police brutality, george floyd, rt america, united kingdom (country), police academy, police car

Id: ws6A9ygibSE

Length: 16min 4sec (964 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020