PEORIA, IL POLICE DEPARTMENT IS USING CALL OF DUTY IN A RECRUITMENT AD? WCGW?
I’ve played a few first person shooter games, though not any recently. So I know what they are. I know that they can be fun. And, I know that I don’t know much else, except that they’re probably not great for kids without moderation and that means we have a lot of nascent adults with their brains wired for casual violence in the abstract. So given my understandings of this dynamic, I have to ask; WCGW with a police department using Call of Duty to recruit cops? For the most part, the question answers itself. Yet the Peoria, IL PD is doing just that.
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CALL OF DUTY TAKES POLICE MILITARIZATION TO FANTASIZED POLICE MILITARIZATION
Many folks, this writer included, have had some major concerns about the very advanced trend of the militarization of police in the United States. Some of this has to do with metropolitan cities having to work hand-in-hand with Homeland Security every day to some degree. Some of it has to do with that relationship translating into weapons and other hardware made for war in police hands. And even more has to do with police culture. So it’s no small concern that a first person shooter game like Call of Duty has anything to do with enticing young people to become a cop.
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VIOLENCE, WANTON DEATH AS A FANTASY PRACTICE IS NO WAY TO PREPARE TO SERVE AND PROTECT
To Serve and Protect shouldn’t have anything to do with the activated fantasization of a video game that simulates brutal violence, military style raids, shooting people (lots of people), chronic vulgarity with the violence, and the addiction to all of those in combination. Just re-read the last sentence and consider how that mindset developed over hundreds of hours of playing Call of Duty might not translate all that well to policing the streets. You know, with real, live, variegated and complicated human beings. Regular folks; kids, the elderly, the disabled, people with mental health problems.
So again it begs the question about using an extremely violent video game like Call of Duty to recruit new cops: WCGW?!?
