I know politics isn't the usual HN topic, but I think this goes beyond politics at this point. Until I saw this list, I had no idea how out of control this situation has gotten here.
I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.
One of the threads that was eye-opening for me was Greg Doucette's (a lawyer in North Carolina among other things) ongoing Twitter thread with Pics/Video of police brutality as it relates to peaceful protesters/bystanders.
Thanks for pointing that out! Obviously I should have read the spreadsheet/link beforehand, but I hope linking the Twitter thread here directly also helped some people as well.
Just be a bit cautious with lists like this: Last time lists like this were posted, most of the links were false accusations, or just someone claiming something, with no way to know the truth. (I spent some time trying to verify until I realized there were far more false accusations than true, and then I give it up as pointless.)
Of course even one instance of brutality is too much, but take numbers like this which a huge grain of salt.
Similarly, don't view every list as likely full of false accusations because one you checked was full of false accusations. This one seems meticulously crafted.
If you browse the list and feel that it is worth sounding an alarm for being fake, then feel free to do that. I don't think that's what you are doing though, and just sounding a Chicken Little alarm. The list is pretty chilling with video evidence. Really hard to fake this stuff.
I'm not arguing for or against the list being fake, but just because there's a video doesn't mean it's real or relevant.
For example, the other day there was a video being posted around of alleged police brutality, where an officer was using force to arrest some woman. The video was 1) from 2018 2) conveniently trimmed to exclude the first part where the woman was resisting arrest.
There are plenty of people trying to push a narrative right now, so just be very critical of the information presented to you.
OK, but let's contrast `greg_douchette thread` TGDs #1 and #2. #1 shows a woman wanding around holding a sign. A mounted policeman rides up behind her and just rides right over her. There's enough context to see that it's obviously completely unprovoked, and that either the officer did it on purpose, or there was criminal negligence in his training of how to handle a horse (and/or the training of the horse on how to avoid trampling people).
Now take for example `greg_douchette thread` TGD #2. That shows the instant that a man with a shirt that says "NYPD" on the back shoves a woman onto the ground. Obviously that was pretty violent.
EDIT: I more or less retract the analysis below; more information here:
Leaving my original post for posterity / discussion.
---
But I've seen that same scene from a different video (sorry don't have he link to hand), and it raises a lot of questions for me. The person wearing the shirt doesn't have any other equipment on -- no helmet, no belt or walkie-talkie or anything. He's not standing side-to-side with a bunch of police facing off against protesters. There's a long stream of people mixed together, meandering in the same direction. Is this actually a protest? Is the guy in question on duty, or is he just trying to get home like everyone else?
And from the other video you can see that just before the incident, the woman was walking backwards in front of the guy. My best guess is that the guy was off-duty (or trying to get off-duty), just walking somewhere, and that the woman came up to him and was verbally harassing him. Eventually he got fed up and shoved her out of his way; but because he's huge and she's tiny, he shoved her about 5x harder than necessary, causing her injury.
These to me are very different things. In the first we have a man who is clearly on duty, doing something clearly dangerous, to someone who is clearly doing something peaceful and constitutionally protected. In the second, we have a man who may not be on duty, having someone harassing him to his face, and responding in a way that isn't obviously going to cause her injury.
But you wouldn't be able to tell any of that that from the video linked in this spreadsheet. So that makes me question -- of the 700 videos listed, how many are like #1 and how many are like #2? Maybe a lot of people don't care, but I do.
I watched close to 100 of them last night from Greg's thread, I saw very few "minor" ones like your #2, most involve people being shot / struck by batons, cars, gang tackled and beaten by multiple people ...
I'd put the ratio at something like 85/15.
Most of them are individual or small group acts that are completely unacceptable, fire them immediately sort of things (indiscriminately pepper spraying non-protestors walking down a public street, firing a tear gas canister into a person just standing around's chest, an insane amount of gang tackling, pummeling, and neck kneeling given the context of the protests)
Some are insidious but not necessarily criminal, just groups being tear gassed, military style shows of force, etc.
A small but real minority of vidsos are what I'd call products of anti police bias, ambiguous context, or (at least imo) felt out of context.
But also "verbally harassment" of police is largely Constitutionally protected, but yes, tons of videos of people being arrested, often violently, simply for using words.
As a whole, Greg's thread is terrifying. Our police training here is piss poor.
There was a video, I think from LA, where some protesters on one side of the road yelled at rit police on the other side of the road. Usually, not a big deal. And then a couple of officers decided to pull out a guy from the group, who happened to be black, pull him to the ground, beat him with batons. Pepper spaying a woman next to him. All while being filmed. In June 2020.
Despite being disgusting, unwarranted, racist and unacceptable, the sheer amount of stupidity, ignorance and arrogance this shows is just mindboggling. And makes that totally inentional.
A list of three, one of which is a video of a cop slashing a tire, another is a photo of another car in the lot with slashed tires, and the third is a journalist who had to pass the National Guard to find his tires slashed.
The irony here being that since that post was made, we've learned that the slashed tire report isn't fake. The Minnesota police ended up confirming it themselves once reporters contacted them.
Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified.
I'm not saying the police doesn't do wrong, they absolutely do. We have examples of rapes, unjustified murders and beatings, entrapment. They are extremely rare. I think last year the police in the US killed 9 unarmed black men and 21 unarmed white men.
> Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified.
400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... just under 1000 police involved shootings each year. Can't find the source, but of these only about 47 were un-armed and most of those involved protecting someone else from a physical attack.
You're looking at a giant list of videos that people think are unjustified. You can go through and weed out videos that you think don't belong there. You can even submit pull requests to more organized compilations to remove unsubstantiated claims.
Your use of "unjustified" is entirely subjective. I don't know what your specific threshold is for justified violence against peaceful protestors, and it's a waste of time to try and guess what that threshold is. It's a waste of time for us to filter the data, only for you to then point out two videos you disagree with and ask everyone to repeat the same work over and over again.
All of the raw data is available to you in a list format. If you think there are errors, then fork the repo, file a pull request, or create an issue. Make your own list that demonstrates your point.
I don't know where to get last years data in such detail.
There are plenty of sites that count the number of killings, but this is one of the few that looks for unarmed ones. If you are aware of better or more recent stats (for example the source of this 47 number) I'd love a link.
> half of the cases sound like accidents, out of 104. The remaining is pretty close to 47.
I find it mind-boggling that killing 52 unarmed people by accident is somehow the best case scenario here.
> Officers arrested the man for violating a domestic violence no contact order and unlawful possession of a firearm
> the man went into cardiac arrest during processing.
> Correction officers began resuscitation immediately, police said, and the man was transported to the hospital while he still had a pulse. He later died at the hospital.
> Ms. Harris declined to comment through an Allegheny County Jail Health Justice project spokeswoman, but she has said that her son took an anti-seizure medication twice daily and called her from the jail to ask for help getting health care workers there to give him the medication
> He died of acute peritonitis due to colon perforation, and the death was ruled natural.
> Our records indicate that within ten minutes of Mr. Smart’s arrival at medical intake, our staff ordered the medications he said he needed, and he received those medications as prescribed. During an emergency event later that evening, our records show that our staff administered additional treatment to Mr. Smart and that he responded to the medical care provided.
This is an extremely misleading website and not a reliable source.
The answer to your questions is that those are not examples of police brutality, so long as the police respond with reasonable force.
Along with reading your other comments here, I viewed these 4 questions as a bad faith attempt at steering the conversation off topic. When people complain about police brutality, we are not talking about the times when police have to legitimately defend themselves or disarm someone. This thread is specifically about the hundreds of clearly documented examples of unprovoked violence by police in the US over the last few weeks, many of them against journalists, elderly people, kneeling protestors and so on. Please engage with that and don't try to change the subject again.
I just gave you a counterargument and an opportunity to turn this around and respond in good faith to the issue at hand. You didn't take it. That's why I'm saying you're arguing in bad faith. You refuse to accept fault or engage with the real issue here, instead resorting to logical phallacies to try and derail the conversation, as most people on the far right do these days. Try again. Can you respond to the issue at hand, ongoing police brutality in the BLM protests?
Every municipality has different rules for officer's conduct. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Part of the Federal US Department of Justice), there are 17,985 US police agencies, of which 15,400 departments govern the 39,044 distinct local governments and municipalities. These are further divided into autonomous administrative districts often referred to as precincts.
The rules for officer misconduct change in each municipality as reactions to prior conduct or complaints. The rules are based on edicts from the state, as well as interpretations of those edicts by the local police department which create internal policy. The level of compliance with creating and updating internal policies varies. No civilian is able to know or predict the various rationale an officer may use or is able to use to behave any particular way. Civilians learn after they have had a bad encounter with an officer, or are in jail or dead. Juries learn on the spot with prosecutor instructions, sometimes those instructions themselves are misleading or incorrect. The public does not necessarily ever learn what the standards were, and the media learns after the fact and only has a patchwork of "isolated incidents" that occurred in frankly different governing systems. When put together, this fuels discontent with police as an amorphous entity, an interpretation which fuels a growing divide of non-solutions.
So the term "justified" and "unjustified" means nothing because it is different and changing everywhere and is a term that only matches your pre-existing worldview, or your predilection to appeal to authority in counties and states you have never set foot in, let alone participate in.
The number of distinct police forces might already be a problem in itself.
Germany has 16 state level and one federal, plus customs (not legally a police force with a lot less jurisdiction)
France has two, Police national and Gendamerie.
Obviously a slight oversimplification when counting stuff like the BKA / LKA (maybe the German equivalent to the FBI?) as seperate bodies. But roughly across Europe you have two levels,local and federal. Both are reporting, one way or the other, to the respective Ministeries of the Interior. Quite adifference compared to the US, where the highest authority can be a mayor. or none, if I understood the thing with local Sherrifs correctly.
> 400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
And those videos have uncovered many instances the the police blatantly lying about their own misconduct in official reports, which is further evidence that the videos are only the tip of the iceberg.
> All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years.
These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks.
That is a startlingly high number, made worse once you actually start digging into the individual incidents, because you realize they're not just isolated. A lot of these videos aren't, "a single police officer does something shifty", they're, "an entire police unit starts firing tear gas at protestors who are kneeling on the ground." And then you start to read the responses from police unions, some of which outright lie about the incidents or contradict the videos. This isn't a problem with individual officers, it's a problem with high-level commanders and police union leaders -- it's a problem that spans entire units.
I personally went through about 200 incidents for a separate project I was working on, some more in-depth than others. I think people are looking at these lists and thinking, "oh sure, but if you zoom in and examine each incident, it gets better." It really doesn't. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to seeing people tear-gassed, those videos don't even make me blink now. But even with that, I was regularly shocked while I was combing through videos with incidents that I wasn't prepared for.
"Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas, holy heck that police officer just body slammed a protestor! Tear gas, tear gas, holy crap they just punched a reporter in the face!"
And again, 4 weeks. Not years. I would challenge anyone who's saying that these are extremely rare or over-dramatized to sit down and devote an evening to just watching the videos in series. It weighs on you. And it quickly becomes obvious that these are not individual rogue officers, these are police units operating in an environment where they know they will not face consequences for hurting protestors.
And not just in recent weeks, also with cameras trained on them and during a protest specifically trying to draw awareness in part to police brutality. My jaw dropped at so many of them.
> Also, are you suggesting that the riots are peaceful?
So apparently you haven't watched any of the videos, huh?
Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.
It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.
>So apparently you haven't watched any of the videos, huh?
Yes, I watched a few from this link, and that admittedly small sample didn't show a single peaceful protester being abused by cops. I suppose you watched more of them?
>Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.
Could there be a reason for some of that that is not linked to racism? Are only white policemen more on-edge around black people?
>It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.
> Yes, I watched a few from this link, and that admittedly small sample didn't show a single peaceful protester being abused by cops.
TGD #1 shows a woman standing with a sign being run over by a horse. That's absolutely peaceful.
TGD #2 shows a woman who was walking backwards in front of a police officer being shoved so hard she flies several meters back and hits her head on the curb. She was in the officer's face, but she certainly wasn't doing anything close to rioting.
I'll watch more later, but so far that's 2/2 at the top of the list showing peaceful protesters being abused.
> Could there be a reason for some of that that is not linked to racism? Are only white policemen more on-edge around black people?
Depends on what you mean by "racism". There was a series of studies a few years ago that put people in classic "shoot / no shoot" scenarios that police are trained on (i.e., you go through a scenario and have to shoot someone before they shoot you, but only if there's actually a gun). They randomly changed the color of the skin of the people involved. Civilians shot far more blacks than whites in "no-shoot" scenarios. Police shot about the same, but there was a longer delay: meaning, their impulse was to shoot blacks faster, but their training allowed a secondary impulse to come in and moderate the first one. (Sorry I can't find a link just now.)
>There was a series of studies a few years ago that put people in classic "shoot / no shoot" scenarios that police are trained on (i.e., you go through a scenario and have to shoot someone before they shoot you, but only if there's actually a gun). They randomly changed the color of the skin of the people involved. Civilians shot far more blacks than whites in "no-shoot" scenarios. Police shot about the same, but there was a longer delay: meaning, their impulse was to shoot blacks faster, but their training allowed a secondary impulse to come in and moderate the first one. (Sorry I can't find a link just now.)
That sounded interesting, so I tried to find some.
-- the conclusion seemed to be exactly counter to what the research you were talking about showed. "In addition, where errors were made, participants across experiments were more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects."
Just imagine you or a beloved one is the victim of police brutality in one of these cases. Take a second to think about it, and see if you're still on the same ground.
I believe strongly that George Floyds death and the reactions thereafter are to a majority of the nation, the same as the 16th Street Church Bombing was in 1963, its a turning point in making people aware of the real costs of our problems with policing.
The fact is, I'm a white dude in my mid-30's, I make a tech salary, and I'm afraid of the police, because an officer with a hair up somewhere could ruin my life for a period of time, if not for good.
Same here. When I see police, I just think, don't go near them or bother them at all. I actively avoid police if I can unless there are a bunch of other people around (concert, sporting event etc.).
The fear I think is more along the lines that police can detain you, arrest you and so on. So I just figure, why chance it? I optimize for lowest risk and I view police as an unnecessary risk.
Suggestions? It seems like anyone that is able to provide a service to host video would be just as likely to remove them for the same pressure. P2P torrent with enough people seeding them to make it impossible to remove them is the only thing that comes to mind.
Oh, also worth noting the HKPF/PLA just used the same knee-to-neck choke hold on an unarmed female protestor during the 1 year Anniversary protests on June 12th [1].
This seems like the perfect place to use InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) (https://ipfs.io/). You can store and distribute files (including videos) using IPFS without worrying that someone could remove them. The only thing missing is a "UTube" front-end, and I'm not completely certain that there isn't already such a thing.
Maybe this type of project would be the thing that gets IPFS off the ground and exposing it to a more mainstream audience.
Try building an app around it with glideapps.com for easier consumption by journalists, activists, etc., I tried to add it to my drive so I could build it but your settings will not allow me to do it
You can understand why a document like this would need to be pretty locked down I hope. While you might think an app is required, I'm pretty sure just about anyone on a computer can read a spreadsheet. Also, I'd rather not need an app to present the data in a spreadsheet in a manner the developer thinks is useful. Just present the data, let the viewer consume it as they see fit.
Most posts on this subject keep getting pushed off of the front page by mods. It's pretty sad to watch, especially with the number of posts about coronavirus. They're both major issues, but one is nerdier than the other so it gets to stay.
Although mods do perform many such actions, generally political posts are flagged quickly by normal users, indicating that they don't want to see them either
Got it, thanks. Since that's that's been a big trend recently, is there anything that can be done to make sure posts like these don't just immediately get flagged into oblivion? I can absolutely see campaigns against HN that flag these sorts of posts to get off the front page.
Not expecting the answer to be yes, but figured I'd ask.
Can imagine a lot of folks simply don’t want to see these here, which is understandable, but I’m personally curious what the HN crowd thinks. Maybe once in a while is okay.
I personally don't want to see this here, and I flag this kind of subjects when I see them.
One of the great things about HN is that is manages to be an interesting website that usually keeps out of flamewar american politics.
There are plenty of those pretty much everywhere on reddit/internet, and I appreciate that this kind of 'us vs them' posts usually don't stay up long on HN.
I'm a bit disappointed dang unflagged it this time.
It's mostly users flagging the post as spam/inappropriate for HN that kills the post. Flagging kills a post super quickly unless it's reached critical mass.
Don't get pushed over by police and your skull cracked open, the president will literally label you a domestic terrorist while you are in the hospital unable to defend yourself.
There's also a Github repo [1] which was posted a while ago containing various instances of police brutality as well as other sites using said data to better illustrate the problem.
One related issue, is that right now, in COVID times, unnecessary arrests, jailing, busing, etc. is in some abstract sense an application of potentially lethal force -- since enclosed spaces and close contact makes COVID transmission significantly more likely.
It seems important to understand how much that is happening and where. If that data, in combination with protest size/type data is available, it can help us better understand if protests or police are actually impacting COVID transmission (if either).
If we don't have that data available as case numbers come in, it makes the narrative of blaming protesters much more likely to stick, even if it turns out to be inaccurate later, and e.g. the primary cause is unnecessary police actions.
Is anyone doing this? (Does anyone want to start if not?)
This is something bail funds in Philly track, and I'm guessing bails funds in other cities do too! Many cities committed to some degree at the beginning of the pandemic to reduce arrests / setting bail for minor crimes. (how well they've done that is often a matter of debate).
The situation in local jails became a big issue at the beginning of the pandemic. I would reach out to a bail fund in your city (or read more on their web page) to see if there are useful ways to help their broader mission, which will include protestors :).
Basically a bunch of thugs attack random drivers. One of the thugs jumps into a random car, the car stops, police come, pull the thug out, he resists, they deal with him. I have zero sympathy for the thug.
If you want to create a list for this cause, at least make it good, make it solid. Don't fill it with random junk to inflate the numbers.
I had the same experience. It was a video of a riot line of police with shields walking down the street, and people shooting fireworks at them. I welcome any content that shows events that the media isn't providing. But if someone is going to curate a list like this, don't sell it as something it's not.
You're probably mistaking police flash bangs for fireworks. These devices are completely inappropriate for crowd control, but routinely deployed by US police in the protests.
Ah what is appropriate? Letting them take over entire city blocks as Seattle has done? Allowing mobs to burn down minority neighborhoods in Minneapolis?
I live basically in the CHAZ in Seattle, they haven't taken over anything. The police just abandoned the precinct building and left it unlocked and people are gathering peacefully to listen to other people speak. It's like a street festival or a farmer's market but with an explicit aim of stopping police from killing black people.
Ah what's the end game? They were forced by leadership to abandon the area. That wasn't their choice to abandon their post. What are your thoughts on the 300+ black people murdered in Chicago so far in the past year by gang violence? You think that a CHAZ in Chicago would help those lives? You think defunding the police would lead to less or more deaths there overall?
The police abandoned the city blocks first. The intent was to purposefully set up a situation where cops can point to rioting in an area they intentionally vacated so riots could happen. Protestors have responded by sitting and watching documentaries about police brutality in that area.
Maybe this can set an example for the rest of the nation, then.
There have been calls to abolish the police. If Seattle can do it, maybe Atlanta and Minneapolis too.
I think that's the right answer: this should be a local decision and each community should decide the level of policing it wants (including none at all).
I downvoted you because I live in a Seattle, and this question shows a ignorance of the facts: “Letting them take over entire city blocks as Seattle has done?”
A bare assertion followed by a bare refusal isn't much help. If you would instead provide some information, that would be a big help to all those of us who do not live in Seattle.
They've taken over blocks, blocking traffic, stopping the flow of people and businesses into that area, they've disregarded state and local laws, etc. It's completely factual. Whatever Fox News has been doing to drum up hits on their website is completely irrelevant.
Thanks, I appreciate it. Obviously it's hard for me to confirm things (an increasing problem) but at the very least it gives me an insight and a hook into events.
Not sure why people can't take their political hat off for HN and try to inform.
When other people have been downvoted, they complain that no reason was given.
I am doing the courtesy of telling you why I downvoted you.
If telling you why I downvoted you then also compels me to justify my position in an extended way, then I will not do it in the future. Instead I will just silently downvote when I feel it is warranted.
Very unlikely. Fireworks use against the police more common that you think. You’re just not going to see that many videos of them as it doesn’t help the narrative. A buddy of mine is a cop who had the unfortunate duty of being one of the riot police in my city and it’s not easy to keep your cool while having rocks, fireworks, and almost a Molotov cocktail tossed at you.
Don't dish out what you can't take. I've never seen an example of riots breaking out in a city before police instigate violence with rubber bullets and tear gas.
Also, if he can't keep his cool under those conditions, he has an obligation to change jobs because if he can't handle it he's just putting other people in danger.
I've only seen videos of police using flash bangs against crowds, which seems to be quite common in the these protests for some reason - completely inappropriate, just like shooting gas canisters or less lethal rounds at heads, not at ground level as they are designed to be used.
Haven't seen or heard of any fireworks, which you can be sure the police would not tone down in reports (probably describing them as explosive projectiles).
It certainly isn't easy to keep your cool if things are been thrown at you, but that's the job. It's not an excuse to violently attack protesters who are not throwing things or use inappropriate methods.
You're being massively disingenuous in the second example. A 'bunch of thugs' means one person who was being chased by a group of officers and beaten while he's trying to run. He's trying to get into a car to escape (admittedly a bad idea), then when they catch up to him they beat him up, throw him to the ground AND arrest the driver.
The fact that you chose to take the video so far out of context means you're not here to argue in good faith at all. Said list isn't for people such as yourself, where no level of evidence could convince you.
Ok, your correction is - one guy is doing it, not a bunch. I agree with your correction.
Other than that, the point remains.
They "arrest" the driver, because he is not following the police instructions to get out of the car, and is actively resisting the police. We don't know if he was actually arrested or just detained. I got handcuffed once and then let go, it wasn't an arrest.
Can you explain to me why the driver needed to be arrested, and why it was considered 'resisting arrest'? Try again, because you seem to still be spinning the story in a way as to try to favor the police. Even though I can agree the person running shouldn't have jumped into cars, why do you think the person driving deserve to be beaten too? If that was you in that situation, do you think you would deserve to be beaten up and arrested too?
And try not putting 'arrest' in fear quotes, because they literally yanked him out of his car, threw him against his vehicle and arrested him.
We don't know if he was arrested. And if he was, and he did nothing wrong, he gets to sue the state for a nice payout.
I would not sit in the car if the police ordered me out. So I wouldn't get beaten. I don't mess with the police.
> And try not putting 'arrest' in fear quotes, because they literally yanked him out of his car, threw him against his vehicle and arrested him.
As I told you. I got handcuffed and put in the back of a police car once. But it wasn't an arrest. They let me go. As a lawyer explained to me later, an arrest is a specific procedure, not just the fact of getting detained/handcuffed.
You are probably also taking it out of context. You have no idea what has happened in that neighborhood in the last year or decade. You have no idea what those perps and officers have experienced. Right?
Both totally irrelevant to whether or not it's appropriate to punch a handcuffed prisoner in the face while they're not resisting.
If a cop is suffering from PTSD or stress to the point where they can't keep themselves from assaulting a handcuffed prisoner, then I am genuinely very sorry for them, but they're still in the wrong job and they still need to be let go.
Have you ever had to restrain a person who might want to kill you? While wearing a firearm? I have done some grappling in MA myself, but I imagine the stakes are in another dimension on a real situation.
I'm not totally certain there are any people who can be "good" at it in the sense that they'll never make mistakes or lose their cool. Then consider that there are over 10 million situations every year where something may go wrong. How could you make it never go wrong?
You're making this argument in a thread where police have been found brutally beating people who are already restrained and/or not resisting arrest. People without firearms. Or people that are protesting peacefully. Or a 75 year old man who was entirely harmless.
In the course of one thread, there's now a series of sequential arguments from several different commenters progressing from:
"A lot of these videos don't show anything wrong", to
"Well, here's at least two videos that show nothing wrong", to
"Okay, the video looks bad, but the full context probably justifies it", to
"Sure it was wrong, but keep in mind that in a stressful situation everybody makes mistakes".
I'm eager to see how these arguments continue to evolve once comments move away from isolated video clips and into the territory of police departments lying about video footage[0], or 57 other officers resigning in protest over basic disciplinary actions[1].
The union said the officers resigned in support of their peers. Two officers have said they actually resigned because the union refused any legal aid. Further the same officers said that many of those who resigned do not in fact support the suspended officers.
Most of the MA I have attended that had a serious focus on self defense, were focused on deescalation, safety and dealing with the stress of the moment. There is a place for the use of violence to educate someone that it's in their best interest to change their behavior, but prolonged choke holds or grappling aren't helping keep anyone safe in most on the street situations.
If the police officer is suffering from PTSD, a mental illness, and it originated at work, the police department as their employer should look into other options first before firing the unfit officer.
Treatment combined with appropriate work should be the first option. Treatment combined with sick leave should obviously be the second.
I'm willing to compromise on how treatment/employment is handled, especially if the problem originated at work, but I assume we're still in agreement that the officer shouldn't be on the street making arrests?
> Basically a bunch of thugs attack random drivers. One of the thugs jumps into a random car, the car stops, police come, pull the thug out, he resists, they deal with him. I have zero sympathy for the thug.
Even when one cop punches "the thug" in the face while he's being walked away while handcuffed?
You lose your qualified immunity as it is clearly established that you may not assault someone who is restrained/in custody. If you watch he attacks the man multiple times and is even told/gestured to move away and stop doing that. He is fucked.
This is covered in basic military and I guess also police training where I grew up. I only have brief military experience (draft) and yet I know very well that anyone in your custody are to be treated well or you get in trouble.
Besides, staying professional is the right thing to do and police of all should be extremely concerned with doing the right thing IMO.
At 0:16 a cop pushes Adam partially into the passenger window of an SUV, apparently hoping that he will fall out and be injured while the SUV is moving. When the SUV stops, Adam is mobbed by cops and beaten. The driver Bob (a victim of having a cop push someone into his window) is detained, his hands zip-tied. A bystander Charlie who doesn't seem to do anything is also zip-tied. At 1:43 a cop seems to spit in Adam's face and punch him while he's cuffed and being escorted by other cops.
Edited: In your first link:
If soldiers block enemy soldiers inside a 1-block length of street and use chemical weapons on them while preventing them from dispersing, it's a war crime. I don't really know why it should be fine for cops to do it to randoms.
> At 0:16 a cop pushes Adam partially into the passenger window of an SUV, apparently hoping that he will fall out and be injured while the SUV is moving.
This is the second time I've made a comment in defense of the police in a specific incident and if it's anything like last time I will be downvoted to oblivion.
Do you have any information to support your claim? (another video perhaps?) I think false claims only hurt those in support of police reform. I'm not suggesting that's your intent.
From the video in the parent post I don't understand how you reached your conclusion as I see something completely different. I see Adam attempting to enter one vehicle at 0:11 that drives off. Then he makes his second attempt with a different vehicle at 0:16 and clearly jumps into the window of an SUV. Stepping forward frame-by-frame it appears that the officer is pulling Adam's shirt[1] which would be the opposite of pushing him in. This is obviously just my opinion from that single video.
First one involves two groups of police sorrounding a group of protesters and tear gassing them.
I don't how that can be considered a valid dispersal method (They could not disperse there were police on both sides)
Also allegly firing Pepper balls above the waist which is incorrect usage. (There are marks on the walls well above head height)
If you made it practically impossable to disburse when using what are basically torture devices in that situation I don't see how it isn't brutality.
Here is what it looked, sounded, and felt like from the perspective of the protesters as the second police unit quickly appeared in front of them and detonated tear gas and a flashbang
From then on it goes into a lot of depth about the tactics the police used to trap the crowd, teargas them and shot them with pepperballs.
Re the second video, what I see is that at 0:33, the guy they're chasing starts to step out of the vehicle, and a police officer just whips out his baton and whacks him, unprovoked; and was about to whack him a second time when another officer intervenes. Furthermore, it looks like officer with the baton keeps looking for more opportunities to hit him as he's wrestled to the ground, and is only prevented by the fact that the guy is being mobbed by other officers.
EDIT Also, around 1:37 it looks like someone kicks him when he's lying on the ground, and at 1:45 someone punches him when his hands are cuffed behind his back.
That looks like an example of unnecessary force to me.
> If you want to create a list for this cause, at least make it good, make it solid. Don't fill it with random junk to inflate the numbers.
What I read is: If you want to create a list for this cause, at least make it perfect and unassailable in every possible way. Because I only need to point skeptically at one thing to dismiss the whole lot.
Is it not legitimate to want accurate sources of data? This does not mean slightly inaccurate data is unusable, simply that it is slightly inaccurate and this to some degree impugns its legitimacy (as it should).
> Is it not legitimate to want accurate sources of data?
Of course. I don't believe you honestly think that I am advocating for inaccurate sources of data.
However, finding and discussing sources of different quality among hundreds is one thing.
Saying that you only looked at two of them, expressing skepticism towards those two, and then stating that the whole thing is "filled" with "random junk to inflate the numbers" is another. That doesn't seem like the interpretation of someone who's honest about their intentions.
If I read two sentences from your thesis, find issue with them, and then claim that you have clearly filled it with random junk to inflate the word count... yould you characterize my position as believing that some parts of your thesis are "slightly inaccurate and this to some degree impugns its legitimacy"?
I didn't downvote you and I agree with many of your points.
However personally speaking I would (and do) in fact discount a reading where even two sentences are highly suspect; it makes it not worth spending the time to read the rest of it.
As another example, I work primarily in data analytics. If I produce a report where even a single number is wrong, it almost immediately calls into question all of the other reporting I produced (did they use the same unreliable source? what transformations did they apply? was any sanity checking performed?). And, as it should.
Accuracy is incredibly important to making things appear legitimate.
Appreciate it, and I agree with many of your points.
I guess my main point -- phrased a bit more aggressively than needed -- was that if you have a huge community-sourced pile of data from multiple people in multiple parts of the country, relating to complex and chaotic situations that are unfolding as we speak, and all you need to dismiss it out of hand is finding a couple of things that you find suspect... well then you're always going to dismiss it.
Identifying, discussing and removing data points that don't belong is absolutely useful and fair. Taking a glance at a mountain of data, pointing out a couple pieces that you don't like and implying that the entire pile is rubbish is neither useful nor fair to me.
And I'm sorry for calling you dishonest, or at least heavily implying it. That was stupid and rash of me.
It's worth noting hundreds of police officers lose their life a year in the line of duty: https://www.odmp.org/search/year and many more than that receive serious injuries, even permanent spinal damage:
The one-sided narrative against cops is getting out of hand. It's an extremely dangerous job and you cannot treat gangsters with kid gloves while they pack serious weaponry. It's a joke to talk of nerfing or defunding the police for the handful of bad incidents that occur meanwhile over 15K people a year are murdered in the country. It's completely disproportionate and not aligned with statistical reality: cops often have to make split second life or death decisions and they don't get a second shot.
According to the FBI, which publishes the data in the Uniform Crime Reports, from 1980–2018, an average of 85 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed per year.
This is correct. In fact, landscaping and groundskeeping workers (among many other categories) suffered more fatalities than police officers in 2018 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cftb0326.htm
Sure, I combined the two tables in the spreadsheet linked below, and there are many occupations that are more dangerous than police officer if we look at fatalities by per-capita occupation.
This sounds like one arguing that playing russian roulette isn't dangerous, because one can name more dangerous activities. The fact that deep sea fishing is ultra dangerous doesn't mean that being a cop isn't dangerous.
"It's a dangerous job" is given as a reason for why so much policy brutality occurs. Pointing out how dangerous it is relative to other professions is absolutely germane.
That's exactly my point, and no it isn't. Policing isn't less dangerous because deep sea fishing is really dangerous. If someone said "It's the most dangerous job", then it would be germane.
Here's the same logic applied elsewhere:
It's not dangerous to be a black man in America. What's really dangerous is to be a El Salvadoran living in El Salvador(the country with the highest murder rate in the world).
It's not the same logic though. A black man in America didn't choose to be a black man, and has no way to change it. Ditto for an El Salvadoran - most can't legally emigrate.
Police officers are volunteers, not conscripts. They're free at any time to choose a less dangerous profession if they so wish.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if policing was more dangerous than working in an asbestos-uranium mine on a fault line. There's no excuse for law enforcement to be breaking laws without consequence. People who can't tolerate the risks should go do something else.
I'd be interested to see a breakdown of deaths, injuries, and trauma(PTSD and such) per capita for police officers versus various US Armed Forces MOSes as well as common civilian trades/occupations.
I imagine in general it's safer in most regards than many trades and MOSes but until I see the data I wouldn't want to make an actual assertion.
I'd put this together myself if I felt competent enough to do this properly but by no means am I a data scientist or anyone actually qualified to do this.
That's only a function of how good they are at what they do. They have to engage in over 10 million incidents a year. Any one of those could be a routine traffic stop that suddenly turns into a gang bust and an attempt is made on their own life. They don't have the luxury of foresight of knowing if they're coming home today or not. They know they're a target. Contrast that with your average aeron chair programmer and I'd say their job is incredibly fucking dangerous.
Edit: It's number 15 and only because 2019 was a near record low year, following decades of decline and improved equipment and training. That's a function of how good they are. And if you make them worse or non-existent, crime will go up.
While the construction industry is accidentally dangerous, cops are victims of intentional violence and hatred. They have to deal with drugged out, abusive, angry people all the time. They have to console rape victims. They have to help assess suicides, murders, deadly car accidents and all kinds of unpleasant bullshit. They see death on the job every single day. It's not a walk in the park. It causes unbelievable stress (especially in high crime districts) and it pays 1/3 of what a junior JS dev makes and they don't get stock options or grants
It's 5x more deadly than average occupation and 6x more injurious. It also causes loads of psychological and emotional stress because they have to deal with people going through some of the worst episodes of their lives...all the time.
Pizza delivery drivers have to deliver over 10 million pizzas a year. Any one of those deliveries could be cut short by a drunk driver that causes a head-on collision at 60 miles per hour. They don't have the luxury of foresight of knowing if they're coming home today or not. They know they're at risk. Contrast that with your average cop issuing citations and filling out paperwork and I'd say their job is incredibly fucking dangerous.
Pizza delivery can be dangerous in certain neighborhoods, for sure. At least one or two were killed in my home town. However, let's not pretend that the emotional and mental weight and responsibility of being a pizza delivery driver is anywhere close to what a cop has to deal with on a daily basis:
This is bordering on the absurd. Almost all police officers go through their career without being in objective danger of dying. If they do run in to danger, they call for backup and are trained to handle it. You can find examples of death in any profession. Like it or not, policing is not one of the most dangerous jobs out there, it's just filled with scared people.
The police have never done anything for me, and I can't think of a time they've done anything for anyone I know. I don't really see how they are heros.
I can't even think of things they regularly do that can be called heroic? I know they do some good stuff, but nothing that comes close to the level of "hero" in my opinion.
Firefighters, EMTs, nurses, and doctors are all examples of actual heros, IMO.
Isn't being the stick that causes laws to have meaning a good thing? A law is only words unless there's someone who will inflict a penalty if you don't follow it.
You're right that a 'law is only words unless there's someone who will inflict a penalty'. The question we've seen over the past few weeks however is 'who watches the watchmen?'
The answer is, apparently, nobody. The police should not be above the law they're enforcing. The only thing that's changed is that with the mass adoption of smart phones we're able to see from multiple angles how deep the corruption goes.
The police make a mockery of the law because they get away with murder. Protesters want reasonable laws enforced for everyone regardless of race or profession.
Maybe I'm just naive and sheltered. I'm shocked by what I've seen these past weeks. There is a serious problem and it's going to be addressed.
A moment with a search engine will turn up story after story of people in uniform putting their lives on the line to help others.
Personally, I think they're heroes because they're people just like you and me who are willing to risk their lives to help other people. At least most of them are, I believe.
Police have been systematically killing people, inciting riots, executing pets as a matter of course, and using chemical weapons of war on civilians. Many police departments have more funding than any other portion of the budget combined and they still can’t stop themselves from executing civilians, stealing their property, and lying about it. A black man is more likely to be killed by a cop than a cop is to be killed at all in the line of duty.
Law enforcement is necessary(strictly, a crime investigation unit, a force capable of handling armed/bomb situations, etc.) but something has seriously gone wrong with the way it’s been implemented in many cities, counties, and states.
Firefighters have never done anything for me, and I can't think of a time they've done anything for anyone I know. I don't really see how they are heros.
I can't even think of things they regularly do that can be called heroic? I know they do some good stuff, but nothing that comes close to the level of "hero" in my opinion. They squirt water on hot stuff? Cool.
Firefighting is a job that actually has significant standards for licensing and criminal history.
They also don’t have a history of killing black people at 2.5x their usual rate of killing people. (They also by and large don’t kill people, in fact they’ve killed so few people there doesn’t exist case law that prevents liability of a firefighter for killing a person. Unlike cops.)
American police need to be disarmed and fired. The idea of a professional police force (especially an /armed/ police force) makes about as much sense as a professional jury service.
I think it's a case of several bad departments/cities/states. The response from the San Francisco PD (for example) was very different from Seattle. Policing is very different from state to state, and police cultures are very different across departments. Treating all police in the US as a single entity doesn't make much sense.
Those 50 some police did not resign from being police. They resigned from emergency response duties because they were shown that their dept will not support them.
There is also more to that “poor 75yo man” story. He is a professional agitator with a now-deleted social media history of hating the police, despite this hatred he showed up hours early before police did with a police motorcycle helmet he wanted to return because it was the right thing to do, this stated by a Buffalo/NPR reporter who he happened to be there with, while BLM activists knew/recognized him as an agitator and told him to go home, asking him why he was there and replied a few times “just for fun”, then in the full video you can see he is using he is using his phone to scan over police radios (supposedly to skim Bluetooth advertising addresses and RSSI correlation, to get someone information to listen in on private band police traffic), all of this while not wearing a mask up until the interaction with police when suddenly he has “two” masks, one which appears mouth guard of some sorts with a mask over that.
But whatever... it’s a lot easier to just say the police beat this guy (pushed him back from an advancing police line)
The post is a huge list of links of police brutality on innocent protestors, bystanders, and media well within their rights. This post has nothing to do with how the police treat "gangsters", unless you mean something different by that word.
Defunding police because of police brutality is swallowing a spider to catch the fly. You do NOT want to live in a place without police.
I think it would be much more productive and realistic to have a really deep study of how policing in America is different from other countries, and what can be done to normalise it. America is pretty gun crazy, and that doesn't make a cop's life any easier. The flip side of that is that some gun crazy people become cops, and shoot people on their knees with weapons engraved with "you're fucked": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver
> Defunding police because of police brutality is swallowing a spider to catch the fly. You do NOT want to live in a place without police.
This is a classic example of bad / misleading marketing on behalf of a reform movement. The "Defund the Police" movement has been poorly named. Yes, there are absolutely some folks on the extreme who truly want to disband the police and live in a place without police, but by and large, the major of people who are supporting this movement mean something else:
Defund == defund the CURRENT police organizational structure (militarized, etc.), reallocate funding for things like homeless support, domestic checks, etc. to other departments better suited to handle them, and KEEP a policing organization which is responsible for a much narrower scope of duty with a reformatted training program, etc.
It should be branded "Reboot the Police", not "Defund the Police"...
If that's really what it is, calling it "Defund" is like marketing Coke by calling it "Shitty Sugar Water" and then issuing a 10 page explainer that says "Shit not included".
It's not quite that, but it does sound like cutting all funding. How about "the police have too much money"? It's not an imperative statement though. "Cut police budgets" has the same problem as "defund the police." Any better slogans? Something snappy like "we send the EU £350 million a week. let's fund our NHS instead."
> Defunding police because of police brutality is swallowing a spider to catch the fly. You do NOT want to live in a place without police.
False dichotomy.
You can defund the police, by not sending armed, militarized police to do the bullshit parts of their jobs, while still responding to violent incidents.
For 99% of police calls, you don't need an armed gunman to show up. Of the 1% that you currently do, more often than not, that armed officer won't even show up in time.
At least where I live in the UK half the police have guns, they're just locked in their car 99.999% of the time. A lot more UK police have guns than most people think. Any car with a 5 point star (orange in my area) is an armed response vehicle.
Maybe US cops need to just leave their guns in their cars more often?
The demand to defund the police the claim that policing is too much of the budget. The demand to disarm the police us the claim that not all cops need to carry a gun. Neither of these is a demand to get rid of police.
> It's worth noting hundreds of police officers lose their life a year in the line of duty
From your own link it shows less than 200 deaths of police per year from the last five years. Hundreds as you've used it imho is misleading. Furthermore those stats include accidents which makes them even more misleading. Do you honestly think deaths from cancer related to 9/11 should "count" in the context of this debate? And yet they closely trail and sometimes even eclipse the death of cops by gunfire in the past 5 years.
I do agree that it's a dangerous job but I don't agree that they're "required" to be heavy handed because of "gangsters" with "serious weaponry". The weaponry issue is a gun control one, not a "gangsters" one. There's absolutely NO NEED for so many ARs over there. NONE WHAT-SO-EVER. And I say this as a reformed red-stater expat who had a AK under my bed as a teenager and a 40 smith in the night stand.
From my perspective I think the narrative for cops is disproportionate and out of hand. The ample, arguably overwhelming, footage of cops beating, maiming, shooting, and killing people in the past month alone is ridiculous and should be evidence enough that the police have lost their way. Instead you're in here defending them in spite of overwhelming video evidence to the contrary.
In Australia and NZ the police are legally bound to these key principles.
• Police should only use force that is reasonable, necessary, proportionate and appropriate to the circumstances.
• Police should use no more force than is reasonably necessary for the safe and effective performance of their duties.
• Individual police are accountable and responsible for their use of force and must be able to justify their actions at law
I disagree. The protests and the narrative around them are about highlighting injustice.
In those examples, I’m fairly confident the perpetrators will be arrested and likely justice will be served. In the first two, arrests have already been made and they’ve been charged. Meanwhile, those that murdered Breonna Taylor are still free despite the fact that the police know exactly who the perpetrators were.
The fact that people instantly go to both-sidesing this is absolutely infuriating. This isn't some kind of red-team/blue-team dynamic bullshit sports thing. Police officers are the designated empowered representatives of the state and they absolutely must follow the law. There is no rule of law if they can beat your ass and kill you and then hide behind a wall of denial, a police union, unaccountable processes, and phalanx of defenders like this.
Police officers die in the line of duty. Yep. It's a dangerous job. You know who else dies in the line of duty? Truck drivers. Truck drivers die at 2x the rate of police officers in America. Do they get a free pass for beating the shit out of people and killing them? Hell no.
It’s about 100 officers a year in the U.S. About half are homicides and the other half are car accidents on the job. It doesn’t rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs (per capita) in the U.S. according to the BLS. The number of deaths will be much higher this year, at least double, due to COVID19 deaths. The job pays well and comes with a pension. It’s nearly impossible to get fired and if you do get fired, most officers get rehired elsewhere.
honestly the whole "being a police officer is not even a dangerous job" is really non-intuitive, which probably means it's wrong. Being a police officer is a dangerous job, but through thorough training and institutional experience, they've managed to lean how to keep themselves safe in actively dangerous situations.
Landscapers and truck drivers never have to wrestle a large, non-compliant man into handcuffs or talk down domestic dispute that turned into a potential murder suicide.
Software engineers who sit on their computers all day and try to backseat drive on these issues should probably be dragged into the streets and set on fire.
If the police are so well trained how do we have 700 videos of police brutality within the span of maybe 3 weeks? Why do so many rapes go uninvestigated much less brought to trial?
Why is it legal for police to coerce people they’ve detained into sex in many states? Why does civil forfeiture exist? Why are police not legally obligated to 1) know the law, 2) protect people?
Wouldn't landscapers and truck drivers also be trained to handle the most common dangerous situations in their respective occupations? Are they just more careless?
>Software engineers who sit on their computers all day and try to backseat drive on these issues should probably be dragged into the streets and set on fire.
Congratulations, I think you're qualified to be a cop.
Being a cop is less dangerous than being a pizza delivery driver, and pizza delivery guys don't get guaranteed pensions and a union to protect them when they purposefully beat the living crap out of someone because they had a bad day.
Pizza delivery driving is a dangerous profession because pizza delivery drivers are frequently racing to improve their tips and delivery numbers and drive dangerously, meaning they frequently cause their own deaths[0]:
> Of course, when a pizza delivery driver is injured in a car accident, it is not usually an isolated event; other drivers and passengers are also involved. All too often, the accident is caused by the delivery worker’s negligence. They are racing for tips, trying to uphold the company’s reputation for service, aiming for positive feedback at work, or they are simply checked out and bored because they spend so much time in the car.
Yes, cops frequently kill themselves in traffic accidents as well, but the difference is that they are usually not rushing to a place to put a few dollars in their pocket - but rushing to a place to protect or help someone who called upon them.
It's not clear to me why "Policing is dangerous" means things like strangling handcuffed prisoners, raping detainees, attacking journalists and peaceful protestors, and stealing cash and other valuables (i.e. civil forfeiture) and so on have to be tolerated. None of these are "split second life or death decisions".
Just as crimes against police are more serious than crimes against civilians (rightly, IMO), crimes by police should also be more serious.
Over the last week I have been starting to realize that what you said is true in general, and not just of protests. It seems that police inflame and instigate most of the violent situations they are involved in. We are literally paying to be abused. We shouldn't be trying to get that money back; we shouldn't even be paying it in the first place.
One example is civil asset forfeiture. Police can and do stop people at random, see if they have “suspicious” valuables or a little too much money, and seize it. It’s virtually impossible to fight the case and it’s literally free money with zero consequence to the police. If you try to deny them their free money, they just arrest you. It’s legally condoned robbery.
I’ve had friends who’ve been pulled over while passing through Illinois and asked to hand over their wallets just so the cops can count their money. They only had a few bucks and were let go, but I’m sure if it was a little too much, the cops would’ve claimed it was drug money and taken it. The cops didn’t mention speeding or any sort of crime, so their reason for pulling them over was pretty clear. They probably target non-local people because nobody is going to come back just for a hundred bucks or so, and if they need to make up a ticket on the spot, few people will bother to fight it.
> It’s virtually impossible to fight the case and it’s literally free money with zero consequence to the police.
This is a problem that could be easily greatly improved with legislation (and without requiring the more radical and controversial step of abolishing civil forfeiture entirely) - each state could legislate that civil forfeiture proceeds are to be paid into the general state budget not kept by the local police forces. This would remove much of the incentive for overuse of civil forfeiture.
Very clever, but given the benefit of history I disagree with the first line. Weakness invites trouble, but strength is not the solution to every problem.
I have this idealised vision of a police force that are more like monks. Their main training is mental, meditation, mindfulness, situational awareness, sensitivity training, de-escalation training. They are also extremely well trained in combat and self defence but almost never use it. When they do they can quickly disarm and subdue violent perps without struggle. They exist just to keep the peace between people. People could grow to trust and respect them in a way that they can't for cops.
It would have to be a lifelong pursuit like a real monk, without much financial incentive. The problem is without trust and respect it wouldn't work since no one would enlist. I'm not sure how you would bootstrap something like that.
If this would be the case, the rest would report the violent ones, would testify against them and violent ones would be removed. This would happen in cases where is no video and no public outcry.
That it does not seem to be happening unless there is video and public outcry suggest the issue is cultural and institutional, not just individual. The good cop is not reporting bad cop and is not testifying against him. Maybe the good cop would be retaliated against, maybe nothing would be done, and all of those are reasons why bad cops are empowered.
Would you tell on your loved one, good friend, and/or favorite cousin if they attacked someone? What if you could rationalize what they did? What if you told on them and that meant turning your back on the rest of your family and them all shunning you, or hurting and harassing you?
I think we need some massive overhauling of how accountability works in police situations and I think that will have to start with shit rolling uphill.
Oh no, I fully agree with you - in a normal organisation that respects operating according to the burden of responsibility placed on it, reporting these things would be a duty. As things stand, it is seen as betrayal of the 'brotherhood' which is why it needs to be brought down.
We agree. I was pointing out how it is different than if you saw it at the office. The brotherhood term is very relevant. Not sure why I was downvoted.
This is the problem. The family should reject the violent individual and turn in the person as a collective.
If the police were genuinely "good", they would act as a unit and reject the bad ones. In fact, the opposite happens, and they keep silent when bad cops commit crimes, and they reject the good ones who try to actually try to be good.
This is the culture that needs to be destroyed and rebuilt.
1. A programmer, his work involves programming (obvious), going to meetings, printing some reports/codes etc.
The biggest problem he can do is introduce bugs in code by mistake (yes, lives can be lost that way), would you expect his peers to tell on him that he was the guy that introduced a bug that killed 300 people in a plane crash?
2. A cop, his job involves preventing crimes, event violent ones, so he sometimes need to use his gun to prevent some of it, and sometimes he has to shoot a criminal.
His mistakes might be killing innocent person. Same thing can happen to his colleagues, so they protect him (just like any sane community would, like your family) - at least unless he turns out to be some sick sociopath.
Do you see relevance now? If you play with code you can just break code, if you play with guns you can break lives.
A side from that I don't get it why there are so many people that trash cops, but don't say a bad word about looters.
Cops protect us from crimes, small and big. They provide order, there are always black sheep, but there are less of those than you think - good guys also make mistakes.
Without a force that provides protection from crimes we would turn into vendetta like justice - have you been to countries that just went out of war? e.g. after the fall of Yugoslavia, there was no police there only tribe and vendetta justice.
Each utopia turns into dystopia sooner or later (CHAZ).
If I thought my coworker had deliberately introduced a bug that killed 300 people, I would absolutely turn them in. There is absolutely no question in my mind that I would do that.
But cops do not turn in their own when they deliberately abuse their power. They in fact resign in protest when their own are investigated (Buffalo, NY), and turn out in support when their own are arraigned for abuses of power (Philadelphia, PA).
Intent is not obvious, unless you have evidence and that is to court to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt.
Intent to kill is something a sociopath does, do you think police force has more of them than the rest of society?
There was a time when vigilant justice didn't need court, but I don't think we want that to return (witch hunts in middle ages or lynching in 19th and early 20th century USA).
> Intent to kill is something a sociopath does, do you think police force has more of them than the rest of society?
Actually, yes, they are filled with sociopaths. It's well known that lower-intelligence people become police. The police actively reject candidates with higher intelligence because the theory is that they become bored.
Also, it's well known that the occupation attracts bullies, who love the idea of bullying people and having power over regular citizens.
What you end up having is a group of low-IQ bullies, and they control the entire police force, because the "good" cops don't want to rock the boat. The stupid, boisterous bullies are the ones that create the culture of silence and complicity, and ultimately violence. I believe that cops love the idea that they are at war against the common citizen, which is why they draw their guns and escalate situations even before anything has happened.
> It's well known that lower-intelligence people become police.
Any data?
> Also, it's well known that the occupation attracts bullies, who love the idea of bullying people and having power over regular citizens.
Again, data?
Isn't it easier to become crook? More pay, less control, more freedom.
I know they are not PhDs but come on.
What you are doing is exactly the same what others do to different races/genders/nationalities, just replace "police" in your sentences with "black", "yellow", "women", "jewish" etc.
Hate against whole occupation, thousands of people.
People start poisoning them (have you seen what happened in NY?), their children are bullied at schools.
> Would you report your fellow in company that e.g. goes late to work? Or uses corporate assets (printer, laptop) for personal things?
If I reported that someone is using corporate assets (printer, laptop) for personal things, my manager would consider me crazy. If I reported someone being bit late, it would be the same.
That is exactly the culture thing. The corporate printer or laptop being used is not being seen as an issue by me, you or anybody else, regardless of what official rules say.
This is difficult when police literally have a union. If the union were acting in good faith they would be eager to learn & fire. Instead we get the “blue wall of silence” & turn otherwise “good” cops into ones indistinguishable from “bad” cops.
I mean there’s even a “good cop/bad cop” trope that’s got to be the best example of this kind of behavior—I can’t count how many times police are complicit with straight up torture and abuse of rights on Law & Order.
Watch the videos and pay attention to what the other police do when their colleagues misbehave. They can commit these crimes because no one will stop them.
"The 81st Precinct covers Bedford-Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant Heights. The NYPD Tapes were secret recordings made by whistleblower officer Adrian Schoolcraft in 2008-2009 proving widespread corruption and abuse in the precinct. After voicing his complaints internally, he faced harrassment by fellow officers. High-ranking NYPD officials eventually ordered an illegal SWAT raid on his apartment, physically abducting him and involuntarily committing him to a psychiatric facility for six days. The license plate “54-EDP” references a “10-54 EDP” call, in which a so-called “emotionally disturbed person” is taken to a hospital via ambulance. The quote is the Deputy Chief ’s recorded order to remove “rat” Schoolcraft to the hospital."
NYPD have made it very clear that if you're a "good" cop, the rest of the cops will destroy you.
I would turn in a colleague if they did a hit and run, which is much closer to what we’re talking about. That appears to be something cops are incapable of doing.
That is neither fair, feasible nor practical to be honest. You want to judge them as a group while basically complaining against their practices of profiling.
The comment accused the police as a whole for inciting protest. In this case a police officer probably failed his duties and the police gets accused as a whole. You should accuse government, it would be more believable.
Expect the push for more funding of the police to be the eventual narrative. This is to allow for more training and putting more officers where they are needed.
Simply put, the defund the police slogans are damaging to the DNC outlooks in November and three major unions basically read the riot act to the DNC and members in Congress that no talk that can come back to collective bargaining being a reason police get away with so much abuse is allowed. Instead it must be that they lack training, the security of their pension system raises anxiety among the forces, and lack of officers incurs overtime furthering anxiety. So the only solution is more money for training, propping up their pension systems, and more money for community policing.
just put it this way, when that was dropped on me from a relative as their new marching orders I thought they were joking.
tl;dr the whole defund the police calling is poison in November and the big influences in politics has called their party to the carpet to change the direction of the debate
> Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.
No, they should come out of taxpayer funds. The principal is responsible for the actions of their agents.
If the public authority doesn't properly screen, train, supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights, it is their responsibility and the responsibility of the public who chooses that authority.
Absolving the public authority and the public of responsibility just means that there is reduced incentives to address systemic problems.
Not really. It doesn't create negative consequences for the individual wrongdoers, or even the police collectively except perhaps extremely indirectly. It is symbolic collective punishment, but substantively it's just a way for the public authority to defer its own consequences so they are distant from the problem, since a pension fund is literally just the fund out of which the public authority pays it's pension obligations to retiring police before having to resort to using other funds. Depleting the fund for unrelated purposes doesn't reduce the public authority’s contractual obligations to each retiring officer.
You may be mistakenly assuming that exhausting the pension fund directly cuts pensions for those covered, which would still be remote just in targeted individuals and time, but there is no necessary relationship there. It just makes it more likely that the public authority would be forced to declare bankruptcy because it can't meet it's pension obligations, at which point it might be able to shed pension obligations for employees (not just those covered by the fund, if the police have a distinct fund!) as part of the bankruptcy, but that could happen as a result of direct settlement payments, as well.
In the fairly common case where the police don't even have even have their own pension fund but contribute to a common fund with other employees, perhaps not even from the same local jurisdiction (e.g., California local governments where often both police and other employees are covered by CalPERS), taking it out of the fund would even lack the symbolic sense that it has in the more simple case.
If you want direct liability for the people doing the immediate wrong, you want an end to, or limitations on, qualified immunity, not redirecting public authoriry liability to pension funds. That, of course, would make the public authority not responsible, but to would mean that individual cops would also be responsible on civil suits.
When driving through other jurisdictions with speed traps etc, I certainly do want to blame those taxpayers for enabling their local gang to be attacking me. But if I take a look at the jurisdictions I am party to, I am powerless. Blaming voters is a fallacy of late-stage Democracy.
The deep seated issue is the principle agent problem around elected officials. The police threaten the politicians, who don't want to rock the boat, to get a lopsided contract that makes them virtually immune to any oversight. This is why we're literally at "defund the police" - citizens are finally crying uncle and demanding that their city's entire contract be thrown away and redesigned.
You've made a common mistake, and that's confusing people on social media for the majority.
Most people don't want to defund their police. Per the latest Monmouth poll, about 60% favor the police (compared to ~11% for congress) and most people see the police as their protectors.
Police don't get a lopsided contract by threatening politicians and that's a grossly inflammatory claim. Contracts are negotiated like any other, and given that most people don't want to spend their time being spit on and attacked, it turns out you get to ask for a fair bit of protection in that contract.
> Blaming voters is a fallacy of late-stage Democracy
Blaming anyone else is a fundamental misunderstanding of Democracy. Everyone pretends to like Democracy until they realize not everyone shares their opinion, and then all of a sudden pull out the insults and attacks on fellow voters.
Police generally have contracts where they have weaseled out of criminal, civil, and even administrative sanctions, allowing them to break the law with impunity. If you don't see this as extreme corruption, then you don't actually believe in the rule of law.
> Per the latest Monmouth poll, about 60% favor the police (compared to ~11% for congress) and most people see the police as their protectors
Unfortunately this instance of corruption is a tough nut to crack. The sheer majority of people will never be victims of the police, just as most people will never be victims of any violent criminal. Hence the focus on video evidence and actually discussing the issue now that it has the spotlight, getting more people to care about these unaccountable criminal gangs calling themselves police. It's called solidarity and the rule of law - caring about what is right even when it does not affect you personally.
>> Blaming voters is a fallacy of late-stage Democracy
> Everyone pretends to like Democracy until they realize not everyone shares their opinion
You just seem to be going on a tangential rant here. I was referring specifically to this tendency to ascribe a democratically-chosen action as the responsibility of everyone who was given a chance to vote. I personally do not hold up Democracy as some sort of ideal, but rather Liberty.
> Police generally have contracts where they have weaseled out of criminal, civil, and even administrative sanctions
That's false. Qualified immunity is a result of a supreme court decision and not part of police contracts. The only thing in most contracts is that police officers who are fired get a chance at mediation for firing disputes.
Police officers do get legal protections, the same way you and I get them. You can't release private records of a police officer, you can't sacrifice them publically to appease an angry group, etc etc.
Qualified Immunity just sets the default and is mostly a red herring (not that it shouldn't be addressed). A city could easily declare that an officer acted outside their explicit government duties when committing a crime. Furthermore, this could be straightforwardly clarified in their contract.
In general you're repeating talking points about fragments of what I said, while ignoring my substantive points. For instance, explaining QI doesn't address how the police have also been able to weasel out of criminal and administrative penalties - eg why haven't Breonna Taylor's killers been charged and put in jail, or at the very least quickly fired? There are obviously mundane procedural answers for these, but added up it's a very lopsided contract allowing the police to play Rambo with impunity.
>Qualified Immunity just sets the default and is mostly a red herring (not that it shouldn't be addressed). A city could easily declare that an officer acted outside their explicit government duties when committing a crime
QI is irrelevant to crimes, it applies to torts. And when carrying out their explicit duties, police are performing ministerial tasks for which government employees, including police, have absolute immunity; it is only outside that space where they enjoy qualified immunity, and whether the requisite nexus to their official duties for QI exists is a legal question for the courts, not a matter which the city can declare dispositively after the fact.
> For instance, explaining QI doesn't address how the police have also been able to weasel out of criminal and administrative penalties
That's not contract, especially for criminal penalties, it's prosecutorial discretion which is entirely a matter of what the public looks for in choosing the (almost invariably locally elected) head public prosecutor who sets prosecutorial policy.
When the most important fact voters weigh in electing a DA is police union endorsements, they literally have no one else to blame but themselves for police impunity before criminal law.
> why haven't Breonna Taylor's killers been charged and put in jail, or at the very least quickly fired?
Because they are "innocent until proven guilty". It's not as if they've been going on calls and continuing to kick in doors - the investigation was handed to the FBI (a federal body) and the officers were put on leave until that investigation is finished.
If they are fired and it turns out they were acting lawfully, then the people who fired them will get sued and lose.
> In general you're repeating talking points about fragments of what I said
I'm addressing specific cases and claims you make. We can argue loudly about whether or not the police play Rambo but that's not a productive thing we can debate. I can make specific claims about what is in police contracts versus what it is not and falls under QI or other federal law which supersedes local authority.
The issue is that you feel you are correct, and to that end you're making broad unspecific claims that aren't factual - literally not a matter of true or false but fundamentally so vague so as to not have meaning.
> There are obviously mundane procedural answers for these, but added up it's a very lopsided contract allowing the police to play Rambo with impunity.
That's a great example of exactly what I'm talking about. We have to care about mundane procedural answers. We can't just sacrifice someone to appease the angry mob.
> The issue is that you feel you are correct, and to that end you're making broad unspecific claims that aren't factual
No, I made general claims about a larger pattern. If you don't agree that police have managed to weasel out of most accountability, then there's really no discussion to be had. Yet you jumped in anyway to push some police-justifying nonsense ("Contracts are negotiated like any other") that grossly contradicts the events under discussion.
>> why haven't Breonna Taylor's killers been charged and put in jail, or at the very least quickly fired?
>Because they are "innocent until proven guilty".
The first step is charging someone, which has not been done. Everyone in jail is innocent - guilty people go to prison. Once again, procedural details that sound sensible while adding up into a constructively corrupt system. The case has been turned over to the FBI precisely due to the local corruption.
As you are implying some alternative justice path for cops, I'll be explicit: To evaluate how well the rule of law is working, you only have to ask yourself what would happen to a non-cop who performed the exact same actions. Specifically, what would have happened to a group of non-cops that committed a home invasion resulting in murder?
> Police generally have contracts where they have weaseled out of criminal, civil, and even administrative sanctions
No, they don't. You can't contract out of criminal sanction, for one thing. You could be indemnified from civil sanction, but QI makes that mostly moot anyway.
And, to the extent they do, those contracts are negotiated with and approved by local elected officials. Work—and, yes, this takes convincing others—to change those officials minds or change the officials, and you change what contracts get negotiated, or even of the police department continues to exist. Cf. Minneapolis (especially, but not exclusivelt) right now, Camden in 2012, etc.
The idea that citizens don't have control of local police through local government is wrong. Normally, local citizens are between actively approving and tacitly tolerating the behavior of police rather than actively seeking change, but they absolutely do have the power should they choose to exert it.
You're just nitpicking the word "contract". The arrangement with the cities generally result in public prosecutors do not bring charges against the police. That's part of the de-facto contract, even if it is not written down.
> The idea that citizens don't have control of local police through local government is wrong. Normally, local citizens are between actively approving and tacitly tolerating the behavior of police rather than actively seeking change, but they absolutely do have the power should they choose to exert it.
I've been caring about unaccountable police for well over a decade, so forgive me if I don't see myself as having much power to change anything. The vast majority of people will never be victims of the police, so as long as police keep up the illusion of providing safety, they will continue to be supported by the masses.
For what I was referencing specifically, look at Minneapolis city council members' descriptions of what happened to their districts when they previously tried to reign in the police. Yes, those same council members are now at a breaking point where enough is enough, and do actually have the power to act in concert and change things. This doesn't invalidate my description of where the vast majority of cities are with respect to the police unions. And the police unions know this, which is why their instinct is to start riots when citizens protest.
> You're just nitpicking the word "contract". The arrangement with the cities generally result in public prosecutors do not bring charges against the police. That's part of the de-facto contract, even if it is not written down.
It's not part of a contract, which is binding and enforceable, and which once and while in place, citizens have very restricted ability to change via the political process. It's part of the policy of the existing elected officials, which is very much amenable to public pressure and elections. Given the context of the discussion is whether or not citizens have the power to effect these things through the political process, pointing out this difference is not “nitpicking”, as the difference is on the exact question being discussed.
I was responding to the obtuse claim that "contracts are negotiated like any other", which opens up a wider scope that the contract itself. I probably should have used the word "arrangement" for the general situation.
Examining the problem constructively, then each aspect does have different details to pay attention to. But they also have similar shapes with momentum and indirection. Civil and administrative penalties need to be fixed through the explicit contract, which takes a contract cycle and can be derailed behind the scenes by corrupt officials. Criminal penalties need DAs willing to uphold the law, which takes an election cycle and can be derailed behind the scenes by corrupt officials. Analogously to what you said - once a DA is in place, "citizens have very restricted ability to change via the political process".
The biggest issue is that a small chance of a twenty million dollar payout in case of an egregious murder isn't worrisome to a municipality, and specifically to its politicians who's liability is limited to possibly losing their job. Meanwhile if they do advocate for reigning in the police, the union will most certainly make them lose their job at the next election. So while we can talk about municipalities being responsible for the paramilitary forces they're creating in the abstract, this is clearly not an effective mechanism for reigning them in.
I think "just don't pay them for the time" is not reasonable or realistic, and thinking you can get consensus on what caused a riot is naive under the best of circumstances.
On the flip side I'd like to point out that this increased OT often has downstream effects as well, most notably in pensions which are typically based on your last n months of pay. Some contracts include OT in this and some do not. So soon-to-be-retired officers could literally be increasing their pay for the rest of their lives based on increased pay due to working a riot.
Based on this comment it's not clear how much experience you have with public sector unions generally or LEO contract negotiations specifically, or how public sector pensions typically work. Barring conviction of a crime (and sometimes even in spite of conviction, depending on the offense), your pension is generally set based on your hire date, and is a percentage of your salary based on the average over some period of time (last 3 years is pretty common). About half the time these pensions are exempt from municipal bankruptcies. It would take legislation to dismantle these pension systems that would almost certainly be litigated and spend years in court, during which time they would still have to be paid out.
They're not putting their financial future at risk.
Free will is questionably a thing. If you are trapped, hungry, thirsty, threatened, and you see your neighbors beaten for minor infractions, then some kind of "mayhem" is not an unreasonable choice. Or would you rather they quietly took the abuse and had their next-of-kin file a complaint that will be summarily ignored?
BTW these are all things that protesters experience, as the police as trained in "crowd control" techniques which involve kettling and provoking masses of people so they can exert force to teach them a lesson.
Mayhem is always an unreasonable choice. And it certainly won't feed you if you're hungry.
And judging by the pictures, very few of the protesters were desperate, tired, hungry, downtrodden, etc. For most, it's an opportunity to virtue signal for a day or two, and then go back to their relatively affluent lives and forget about all of this.
Hardly a one would be caught dead tutoring some inner city kid with their algebra. Far more fun to taunt cops in an impossible position.
The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ food poising by a chain in a month. The also imagine you believe there's no problem.
This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
To be fair there's way more people filming the police right now than any of those professions so I wouldn't expect the number of mishaps on video to be comparable.
I agree we can be almost certain that there are violations that aren't being captured on video and therefore the true number of violations is actually higher (assuming all the instances presented are violations). What matters is how the true number compares to the total number of interactions and if that ratio is acceptable to society. The absolute number of violations caught on video and the comparison of that number to similar numbers in other professions doesn't really say anything.
> What matters is how the true number compares to the total number of interactions and if that ratio is acceptable to society.
I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the communities directly impacted by this behavior find the abuse unacceptable no matter how muddied the “but maybe there isn’t enough abuse yet.” crowd wants to dilute the issue.
And honestly, I live a fairly cushy life, and I find the officers in my city to be stand-offish and aggressive, I can only imagine how utterly horrified Id be if they behaved the way we’re seeing. There is no way anyone in my community would have been as patient if we were subjected to the same level of treatment.
And also, it’s probably important to point out, it isn’t only the physical abuse, the day to day attitude of an overbearing police force can drastically impact your own day to day quality of life.
To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is no excuse whatsoever for the multitude of outraging problems in the system, but the comparison isn't straightforward.
This is exactly how I think about the police issue in the US. If someone has more power, as in, they are allowed to carry guns and arrest people if they need to, then those people also cannot expect it to be a "normal" job where they matter more than who they are working with (the public).
The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.
I was there. This is why I left the rotten country. They were using it as some free for all practice complete with tear gas grenades and a water cannon truck. They even brought a tank to show off.
All humans, not just jobs, should have higher standards of conduct, don't you think?
Where are you going to get the humans who are able, wanting and willing to live up those higher standards is my question for you.
Last I checked, anyone can decide at any moment to be completely broke, a drug addict, a criminal, an alcoholic, a piece of shit, have an unlimited number of children and everyone else has to support them for some reason.
What kind of standard of conduct is that?
You won't ever get people to conduct themselves properly if ignore evolution and pretend you can magically educate people into not being animals. Americans don't even bother with trying to live up to the education myth, given how much they pay school teachers. They think they can just import people with higher standards of conduct when they have to and outsource the rest. It's more profitable this way you see, to ignore reality, fund bogus economics, manufacture consent and have this planet go to shit. It's more profitable this quarter you see.
If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever.
Similar logic would apply to a position for a crane operator or a pilot. If an airline had a pattern of pilot errors, and their excuse was “if we required all our pilots to have adequate pilot training and meet stringent skill requirements, it would be very difficult to hire pilots,” would you accept that?
I've thought of a shorter way to answer your question.
> If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever.
Let's say we decide to pay police officers 1 million/year and really raise their standards. Great! We did it!
Why don't we just do that across the board? The answer is - we have a limited number of highly capable people.
I see the shortage of highly capable people as a problem. My previous post was a way of highlighting that. One would have to think big picture to understand the point I was making.
Regarding leaving positions unfilled - I'm not sure you've thought this through. Imagine we have a shortage of doctors and your appendix burst. Would you rather a medical student try and save your life at say, an estimated 50% success rate, or simply die?
I generally disagree with the impression alexashka is conveying that we can’t have higher standards ‘because humans‘. There is plenty we can do.
However, it is worth pointing out that there are around 750,000 police officers in the US. It is hard to deny that finding and or training 750,000 highly capable people is a very difficult problem.
You disagree with a straw-man version of my argument while agreeing with my actual argument :)
There has to be a limit to 'higher standards' humans can live up to, I hope we can agree on that. If you agree, you can't deny that we can't have higher standards indefinitely.
We can have higher standards a little bit and we can fake achieving higher standards a lot by moving highly capable people from one set of jobs to another (from jobs X, Y, Z to police officer by paying them 1 million/year) and doing a marketing campaign that convinces the ignorant masses that real progress has been made.
My previous posts were pointing out that wanting higher standards and not having any standards for the people who create and raise new humans, are incompatible and have to be reconciled if you want to actually have higher standards, not fake higher standards via re-distribution of highly capable people.
Unfortunately, criminals aren't going to have higher standards of conduct, even if they "should". That's why we call them criminals. And the police have to deal with these people all day long--there's no easy comparison to other jobs.
Peaceful protestors are by definition not criminals.
People whose rights are violated by the police? Often not criminals as well!
In fact, you cant really call someone a criminal until they've been convicted of a crime - cue the video of the cops being called by the black store owner, punching him in the face and breaking his jaw while the white thief leaves.
Right but when you start throwing rocks and glass bottles, when you start blocking ambulances and firetrucks on highways, well then you aren't a peaceful protestor anymore.
It is extremely hard to react with anything but EXTREME vitriol to comments like yours - police are using excessive force deliberately, and then arresting people with no cause who post videos of their crimes.
Yeah, that sucks. Your description makes it sound like their face was impacted by a metal canister, but looking at the picture, they seem to have simply been maced.
Without more context, I'm guessing their parents took them to a protest and acted illegally. If so, I think that's rather poor parenting.
There doesn't seem to be a link to the full video (or any video), so take that with a grain of salt.
> you cant really call someone a criminal until they've been convicted of a crime
This is a technical nicety not available to a policeman in a real situation. If someone points a gun at them, that someone is a criminal, even if they are "technically" not.
And this document uses a very liberal definition of police brutality to say the least. In this document, a lot of references to "police arrests someone", "police pushes back a crowd or clears a street", etc...
I live in EU (where, generally, the police is trained to minimize-harm, rather than take-control-by-all-means), and I feel a bit the same about this list; a sizeable share of those videos show regular-ish riot control techniques IMO (pushing the crowd down the street etc.). Then, many show police overreaction or outright brutality.
But, then, why mix all of those in one big list and call them simply 'brutality'?
As much I sympathise with protestors and the cause, there's this not-very-wise tendency among this side of the conflict to portray themselves as 100% peaceful victims, and police as almost universally working for the forces of darkness.
So, I see it as a sad (yet, probably, temporary) tendency, that even the side which I'm sympathising with is feeling that treating me like a gullible person is OK - "The first casualty of War is Truth".
I also live in the EU and sometimes I get annoyed by how soft our police are.
I've seen multiple officers unable to take down one violent criminal. Why is there not hand to hand training and strength training? With proper training surely they could do it cleanly without injuring the perp.
I've seen (videos of) cops just walking away from armed criminals, letting them rob a store then tracking them down 6 months later after they do the same thing twice more.
When I look at the US I see the opposite problem. Police shooting a man in the back multiple times. Police using excessive force when arresting people for non violent crime. Police just generally power tripping.
From that perspective I can see why you would want to defund the police but I really would hesitate to do that. The EU is fine with a softer police force because we mostly have no guns and when there are real terrorists we can still bring in armed police. That is not the case in the US plus you are talking about fully defunding the police. Seems like a dangerous experiment to me. Why not reform instead?
I think for the same reason you see high-speed chasedowns in the US, and you don't really see that in Europe. The risks involved in catching that perp are significantly higher than simply arresting them later. (Both risk economically, as well as risk to human lives).
I think they should focus on demilitarising the police in the US, with that you also reduce the funding of the police. As a lot of the money goes into buying military-grade equipment. I really don't know why the police needs a tank (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police)
Sure, with brute force you can take a suspect, usually the decision whther or not a person is a criminal is up to the courts. The reason why European police aren't doing that, is exactly that brutality. They simply try to not hurt or seriously injure a person.
I know a couple of police officers, funny enough from martial arts training (kickboxing, BJJ and so on). These guys can take a person down all by themselves, sure. But at the risk of serious injuriy. This kind of brutality is exactly what peple are demonstrating against.
Als, IMHO, this whole "everyone is carrying a gun" narrative is a little bit lazy. Sure, the US has a gun issue. But just throwing it out there, is just a means to justify police brutality and use of deadly force. If there is such a problem with guns, there are couple of ways to deal with it:
- stricter laws (seems to be dificult)
- specific and adequat police training to deal with it. That explicitly means to not shoot first
I live in Berlin.
Police gets indicted for drawing a gun, let alone use it.
And that’s the way it should be.
Not all incidents are the same, but so is the feeling of being above any law that Us police officers enjoy and enforce
With use of force it doesn't matter if the techniques were ones we're used to it matters whether they are warranted by the situation. One isn't usually obliged to push crowds down the street. Using correct technique in the wrong situation is just as bad as using excessive force when using force is warranted.
There's a dead comment in reply to this. I disagree with it as strongly as anything I've seen on HN. I think it racist. I don't think it should be hidden. It highlights a mentality that needs to be known about and considered including any possible sensible response to it.
Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country"
To what extent do these, not uncommon - even here, sets of beliefs contribute to the problems of violence in policing? Not something that seems to me like a good idea to pretend does not exist or is minor or fringe.
> Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country"
Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Haiti, and Malaysia or Mexico, Madagascar, El Salvador, and Rwanda, depending on whether you take the CIA's numbers or the World Bank's. If you look at the list, you'll see that the European countries are closer together and in a different area of the list, the US isn't in their group.
Wouldn't that be a better indicator for "similar countries" than average internet speed or NATO membership status?
The rationale for Brazil was explicitly the same one in the dead comment.
But yeah, that's pretty radical what you're saying too. Maybe it's fair that you should only compare the richest nation on earth with much poorer developing nations with a short track record of democracy. Not sure I'd agree.
Why? Income inequality is correlated with crime rate, why wouldn't you use that to find comparable countries? Seems useful to me, similarly to comparing diabetes rates in countries with similar levels of obesity, not based on average hair color or amount of trees per square mile.
> the richest nation on earth
You'll need to define what "richest" means, I guess. The highest GDP? Largest military spending? Does that mean a lot to somebody that is poor in the US? Would that person possibly be better off in a European country with public health insurance, a vast social safety net, high welfare etc, even though it's not "the richest country on earth" by your standards?
The USA can /afford/ to be better. Comparison with other wealthy nations seems to me to be the right benchmark.
I mean the richest nation on earth bar none. The amount of wealth in the nation. Literally that. The USA cannot plead poverty as an excuse for why anything is worse there than any other nation. Do you see it now?
Put like that, I agree. If the US fundamentally changed their culture towards being less individualist and more collectivist, a lot of things would change with it.
I don't think US-citizens by and large want that change bad enough to accept restrictions upon their freedoms and an end to low taxes, European-level wealth redistribution does not seem to be popular in the US. I suppose they'd like the result without doing it. Unfortunately that's like wanting to be great at tennis without wanting to put in the training: understandable, but not happening.
I'm not suggesting there is one and only one solution to any given problem at all. That's the scoreboard. How does the USA do compared to other rich countries with long established democracies. My read on it is most americans want to be first on that scoreboard. Badly want it. Most americans can't and don't believe how badly they're going in certain benchmarks. These are the benchmarks. This is the story. Americans can fix it, of this I have no doubt. I'm sure that it can be fixed without embracing socialism in /any/ way if that's how americans choose to go. All they need to do is say "Here is the scoreboard - let's get fixed. Let's try something and if that doesn't work let's try something else and not rest until we get it done in a way that works with our views as Americans and preserves all the stuff we hold dear."
I have no doubt that American can-do and talent will get it done.
None.
Just decide what it is, what the scoreboard looks like and get it done as Americans the American way.
Nations also interact, muddying the “compare” waters further.
Where I live, we drive cars, but we don’t fight the overseas oil wars. We’ve outsourced all that brutality to the US. That lets us smugly reap the benefits and point fingers at Americans for the violent, backwards, gun-toting culture.
I don't know that the US would need to have a violent society to be a military super power. China is on its way, and so far at least they seem to have managed to avoid that, so maybe those things are not related.
The point is that the study participants interact; it’s misleading to compare nations by the stat. The extent to which China is a military superpower interplays with other participants.
> The point is that the study participants interact; it’s misleading to compare nations by the stat.
So what though? Do European countries like the UK (that are usually with the US when it's time to bomb somebody in the Middle East) outsource their domestic violence?
Really, you need to provide some evidence for "we have less crime, less murders, less police violence because the US has more". "The US has more income inequality because it has to fight wars for the European countries" doesn't follow either, so please don't.
Yes, my belief is that 1) nations outsource violence to the superpower 2) the superpower’s military prowess comes at the cost of a warlike culture at home.
Your belief is (?) that the US aggregate violence/whatever is in no meaningful way confounded with the levels you measure in (say) EU nations: any confounding is small enough to make no difference?
We have a population of 200 (nations) of very diverse size and age, all related by historic and present competition and cooperation. Is there any fair shot at comparing apples to apples?
What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
> Yes, my belief is that 1) nations outsource violence to the superpower 2) the superpower’s military prowess comes at the cost of a warlike culture at home.
But that only works for super powers? Why is there no trend visible for countries like Switzerland who are traditionally neutral and never fight wars with neighboring countries like France who or Germany who have a larger active military, do engage in NATO wars etc? Why aren't the Chinese shooting each other on a similar scale? Why weren't the Germans during the early 20th century when they were very militaristic? Why were the US already at similar levels in the first half of the 20th century, before becoming a global super power that others may have "outsourced" their wars to?
> What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
Minimum requirements: has some sort of rule that allows predictions that can be falsified other than "it's only true in this super specific narrow case of the USA in last 5 decades of human history, but not in any other place or during any other time".
It feels like looking for super complicated reasons that require American Exceptionalism (as in "does not apply to any other country") to explain something that is explained by well-studied phenomena that do not require US citizens to function fundamentally different than other humans in other places or other times.
My overarching point here is that it’s pointless to debate Switzerland v Germany as if they exist in some sort of vacuum without interaction. Without Germany, there is no Switzerland. Without Switzerland, there is not Germany.
A theory where every nation is a data point can’t get you anywhere. All the nations interact meaning we should reason about the system as a whole.
I say something about a nation, you expect me to back it up with other nations. But there are very few data points, and they are interconnected, and the problem has a huge number of dimensions.
It’s like I claim opposable thumbs are good for tool making and you ask me to show five other body parts where that applies.
> I say something about a nation, you expect me to back it up with other nations. But there are very few data points, and they are interconnected, and the problem has a huge number of dimensions.
Sure, but there's little/nothing that suggests the effect you speculate about, it seems to have no parallel in history although empires have existed before, there are counter examples ... so it seems not too likely that that is the cause. Of course, no two days are the same, no two countries are the same and no two countries are even the same with regard to their not-same-ness on two different days, but countries and cultures move slow enough, and countries and humans are similar enough that we'd see such obvious and large patterns, I believe.
On the other hand, we have other explanations that have supporting evidence, apply to multiple situations etc, so they seem more likely. When you present a new theory, claim that it cannot be falsified because no two countries are exactly the same (and therefore no relationships between countries can be the same), I think you should offer some evidence to support that theory instead of asking others to just accept it.
I’m not asking you to accept anything: I don’t evangelize. In particular I have no theory that generalizes over nations. It seems very limiting. Like ignoring a mechanism I see work in my apartment because it doesn’t hold true for buildings writ large.
Edit: Probably shouldn’t have written “the superpower” posts ago because that makes it sound like a general claim.
I agree, but the more I hear about the defund the police narrative the more an agree. Some of these interaction have 0 reason to be adversarial.
For example the Rayshard brooks shooting. Why was a gun needed to wake a man sleeping in a car. Why are guns needed to hand out speeding tickets.
I get that guns are needed if a bank is being robbed. But this is glorified customer service work. Imagine your car breaks down and the AAA guy who came to fix it had a gun. Like y tho?
Hmm, let me see. Why might the police need guns to hand out speeding tickets?
Perhaps it's because at least some of the people they stop, for speeding or other possible offences, won't take kindly to being stopped and in many parts of the USA, those in the vehicle may be permitted to carry guns of their own...
But we actually have data on this. Traffic stops are not particularly dangerous for police in the United States. There are laws in place about how legal gun owners must notify law enforcement during traffic stops. In fact, there is no shortage of video of law-abiding citizens in the US notifying law enforcement that they have a legal firearm in the vehicle and receiving a disproportionate response. But you don’t even need to look that closely. There are also video clips of police stops where police tell someone to get their ID, and then immediately murder the person for reaching for their ID.
> There are laws in place about how legal gun owners must notify law enforcement during traffic stops.
Isn't the issue with laws that those breaking them don't usually care about laws? I'm sure you have laws in place against murder, and murder still happens. "But there's a law against burglary, why would you want additional protection and have a strong door" isn't a good argument.
There are good arguments (and the whole issue is a good gun control argument in general), but that really isn't one.
The comment before mine mentions that people being stopped by police are permitted to have guns. That’s what I was addressing.
Sure, there are also some people who violate gun laws. But those people could be a threat to everyone, not just cops, yet surely we wouldn’t justify everyone to preemptively have their guns drawn in all human interactions.
> Sure, there are also some people who violate gun laws. But those people could be a threat to everyone, not just cops, yet surely we wouldn’t justify everyone to preemptively have their guns drawn in all human interactions.
Not necessarily drawn, but isn't that pretty much the reason you have public carry laws in the first place? Surely even the worst of cars does provide sufficient protection against roaming coyotes and mountain lions. The only predator left to fear is another human.
>This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
A reference I never expected to see on HN.
It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
Neither you or the parent poster explained what "Ba Sing Se" is. I quickly discovered that it is a reference to a city in "The last Airbender" [0].
I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean.
Not really very obscure. It's an incredibly popular show and I would be willing to bed that at minimum 50% of coworkers would understand the reference.
I don't think it's very difficult to use context to understand what's being said by the commenter.
While I get your point, there are a myriad of things I don’t understand that get posted and commented on here. Usually if I don’t know something, then it’s a good chance to look it up and learn something new.
I think it’d be counter-productive if everyone who didn’t understand a reference or technical concept on here wrote a comment asking for a shortcut explanation rather than maybe five minutes Googling and maybe watching a quick YouTube video (in this case).
“There is no war in ba sing se” is the equivalent of the older phrase “we were never at war with Eurasia”. Which is now more obscure but likely better understood on HN.
OP is saying you’d need to be incredibly delusional to deny police are brutal and there’s a problem.
With all due respect, 1984 has a much higher cultural impact and awareness than ATLA. The show isn't that well known outside of current 20-30 year olds.
Frankly... among my generation of roughly 30 year olds, I'd expect Avatar the Last Airbender to have higher cultural impact than 1984 (which was written in 1949).
Most of us were forced to read 1984 and didn't really enjoy it. ATLA however, is something that we organically grew up with through high-school / college and actually paid attention to.
My group of friends would be aware of 1984 concepts... such as "Big Brother is Watching" (phrases / concepts which have escaped the book and become a thing of their own). But I don't think we'd recognize the phrase "At War with Eurasia".
Honestly, the only reason why I remember "At War with Eurasia" is because I was a quiz-bowl player and was forced to memorize key phrases from many books I barely read. Even if I did read 1984 in my high school classes, it never actually stuck with me.
Fun fact: as a kid in 8th grade or so, we were supposed to read and summarise a book for English class Most picked easy books, I picked 1984, probably out of a desire to be edgy. Little did I know that my level of English at the time was not enough for that book. The result is that, since I never went back and re-read the book, I kind of only half-read it because half of it I didn't really understand. :D I think I got the general idea of it though.
Either way, I'm able to connect with the root comment here about Ba Sing Se more readily than "We're at war with Eurasia".
The original two posters in this thread were also intimately familiar with Ba Sing Se / Avatar the Last Airbender. So multiple people here are fully aware of the reference and are in good communication.
I probably wouldn't reach for a reference to ATLA myself. But, apparently its popular enough that plenty of different posters in this very discussion are aware of it and able to explain to other people here the concept.
Either you're generalizing a bit too much or I'm weird as I'm mid 30's now, and I have definitely read 1984 but have never seen Avatar. In fact when I read "Avatar" I think of blue space aliens before I think of the anime.
If you're in your mid 30s now you'd be in your early 20s when Avatar the Last Airbender originally aired. Since it's a children's show (Nickelodeon), you wouldn't have been in the target demographic, so I don't think that's unusual.
I'm your age and I never even heard of Avatar the Last Airbender. I'm sure my younger cousins know about it.
The claim was that "Frankly... among my generation of roughly 30 year olds, I'd expect Avatar the Last Airbender to have higher cultural impact than 1984 (which was written in 1949)." - if you and I would have been early 20's, that would have made that cohort late teens, so I still find the demographics weird.
The phrase is "we've always been at war with Eastasia", and it is known because it resumes the core theme of the book. 1984 was written in 1948. There's a reason why it is in the school curricula, but sadly to be forced to read a book obviously creates a bad predisposition.
Good books that philosophically shed light on human nature are timeless.
Me too as my anecdotal evidence is completely opposite of you, neither myself or anyone I know would get a reference to ATLA, I vaguely know about it because of the anime being broadcasted in some channel.
These are all late 20s, early 30s people, Brazilians, Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch and so on, 1984 would immediately be known by most, quite a few have read it, none (even if they know about ATLA, what many don't) would get the reference.
Interesting I can cite a conversation I had not long ago with them to act as anecdotal data, I'm really interested to see what is the split here.
"Anime" as a word isn't even a genre. Its... incredibly ill-defined.
Actual genres would be "Shonen" (Dragonball Z, Full Metal Alchemist, My Hero Academia), "RomCom" (Ah My Goddess, SNAFU), "Magical Girl" (Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure), Mecha (Gundam), "Sci Fi" (Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in a Shell), "Mindfuck" (Evangeleon, Paprika, Paranoia Agent), or "Isekai" (Overlord, Sword Art, Slime)
And a few shows are blend between genres. Both Inuyasha and Kenshin are Shonen + RomCom blends for example. There are a few shows I can't pin down exactly (Little Witch Academia doesn't seem to follow any genre rules... too many action scenes / stress to be Iyashi. Not enough transformation scenes to be magical girls. Not cute enough to be a moe. Too much supernatural to be slice of life)
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Each genre of anime has its own art style, expectations, and writing style. Avatar would probably be a Shonen if I were to pin it to a specific genre (Child protagonist, action scenes aimed primarily at young male audiences... a "Shonen" or young male demographic). Avatar's artstyle is reminiscent of Shonen as well.
Both Paprika and "Night is short..." are anime and considered anime by the whole community. But stylistically, they are no where close to Avatar, DBZ, Full Metal Alchemist.
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The most consistent definition of anime is Japanese origin, or at least "Eastern" cartoons. "Anime-style" describes Avatar, Teen Titans, and RWBY. But its not really acceptable in the community to call those shows "anime". But I guess if we want to get technical about genres and definitions, "Anime" is a word that's too ill-defined to really be useful in these kinds of discussions.
I don't think you speak for the entire community. In the anime communities I frequent, it is perfectly acceptable to call ATLA an anime and nobody will bat an eye.
Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest series ever made which also has the benefit that it can be understood by kids, so it's worth investing 3 seasons in anyway.
I guess I'm in favor of obscure references, I think even if I hadn't understood I would think that must mean something really delusional.
I will second this. Even at 27, it's one if my favorite shows, I've watched it all the way through multiple times. It has everything you could want, with the side benefit of being incredibly wholesome and having a wonderful message.
In fairness, that happened for many quickly over the past month or two as it hit Netflix. A good deal of people still don't know much/anything about ATLA.
That's fine but considering NCIS is the most watched TV show of 2019 I'm sure it holds as a reference for "mainstream".
Edit: I know downvote edits are frowned up but... I need to ask: why are people downvoting this? Do you not think NCIS is good example of a mainstream show?
Due to the glut of content available today, viewership is fractured. It doesn't take much to be the "most watched TV show" any more, just like it doesn't actually take many sales to top the music charts. Something can hold a record for viewership while still being something that most of the population (or most of a subculture like us here) remain oblivious to.
Also, HN is a global community, and even though many television shows are watched internationally, their impact on pop culture overall can be drastically different. So, you can't assume a major show in your country will be readily recognized by your fellow nerds in another country.
Even if that is true wouldn't you agree that NCIS is mainstream? If it's not mainstream I don't know what is. Feel free to give a better example.
Let me remind you that the whole discussion started by me highlighting the popularity of The Last Airbender (due to Netflix, as someone pointed out) by comparing it to a mainstream show. I could have taken any popular show but thought taking the one topping the charts would be enough to illustrate it. Apparently not, and in the future I must carefully review the viewing habits of the whole HN community in order to make a point and not offend anyone.
So let me revise the comment: The Last Airbender is as mainstream as any other popular show today.
What do you mean? Is there a legal definition of "mainstream"? The Last Airbender is topping the charts on Netflix. That surely must be enough for me to be allowed to call it mainstream and that a reference to it is not obscure.
If you read the sibling comments they are trying to say NCIS is not mainstream at all since TV ratings mean nothing, making the opposite point of yours. You guys are impossible.
So the absolute truth is on Twitter? How significant is the portion of uninformed Americans? If an American watches TV news and reads Twitter are they half informed? WTF is your point: blame others, hate others, downvoting to remove a disparaging opinion. Do you feel powerful? You might be the cop.
>refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
Twitter as another resource was an example. But yes, you can look on Twitter and find many different perspectives about a topic. I would think someone who knows how to spend some time understanding multiple perspectives of an issue knows how to look in many different places for them.
As far as the rest of your comment, I think you're going way off-base here. Sorry.
Twitter is probably the worst medium for developing a balanced, well-educated view of anything. Americans don't need more fast-paced social media, they need quality education and journalism that covers all sides of these issues.
But of course that's not going to happen. For modern people with attention span of a goldfish it's too much of an effort to read long texts - thus they'll just keep watching the news, or reading short, one-sided tweets full of hate.
What is the value in going on Twitter and actively looking for information that confirms your bias? This is what most people, of all political inclinations, are doing.
It seems like you're suggesting mainstream news sources are somehow different? Personally I prefer the explicit bias of individuals on Twitter, than the implicit bias of mainstream news sources.
Mainstream media's bias is no more implicit than that of many individuals on Twitter (e.g. celebrities) and at least my time is better spent reading about a subject on selected media that span a wide political spectrum. But there is a risk: you might get the impression that mainstream media reporting is disturbingly inaccurate, on all sides.
There are ~10 million arrests per year in the US. That google doc includes non-US cases as well (but is also limited by what’s caught on camera). Still, 0.0007% of arrests leading to a case like this doesn’t seem as horrible as the raw total in isolation.
There is one UK example which is actually a counter example where the police allowed a statue to be destroyed instead of intervening and creating a potentially dangerous altercation.
That's right. Depending on the law and the context, if the police don't enforce it then there are fewer problems. That's pretty much what Superintendent Andy Bennett said in the video.
The police did that in Portsmouth, VA ie. stood back and allowed a mob to pull down a statue which struck a man causing what is probably a life long injury.
The statue of a slaver and mass murderer had been controversial for the past 30 years. I wonder if things would have gone differently if the "recontextualisation" plaque had been allowed.
There has, predictably, been a backlash. Resulting in this fiasco where a guy came from Essex to defend some statues he didn't understand ended up urinating on a monument he didn't notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040301
Risk management. Allowing htem to tear it down vs. intervening with force to safe a piece of metal on a piece of rock. The latter can be put back up. The former carrers quite a risk for everyone involved. Sunds like a reasonable call to me.
If this were a one-time event, I suppose that might be true.
...but the unfortunate reality is that allowing mobs to destroy property become a feedback loop because they then realize that mobs can destroy anything they like with impunity.
Safely allowing protests to take place and let people have their say without fear of rubber bullets in their faces is a fantastic way to run a civilization.
The alternative would be intervening and things possibly getting violent. The well-being of a statue isn't worth the possibility of causing harm to someone.
I suppose then I could organize a mob to vandalize anything I want because the police should prioritize the well being of the mob over that of property?
Seems like that would embolden mobs to destroy whatever they want. Doesn't seem like an intelligent or sustainable strategy.
The mob may leave after the destruction, but that doesn't mean that the police don't later conduct investigations, arrests, etc based on tracking/video of the members of that mob.
I'm curious how many protestors or rioters keep their phones on them (with location/COVID apps or otherwise.) Even if they don't, plenty of others are taking the videos.
That's one in 30 being arrested in the US every year. How does that compare to other countries? Is that something that could be improved? It sounds like a lot.
Exactly. I genuinely don't think US police are individually that much worse than they are in other industrial nations (though obviously they have abusable tools available that many other regimes don't). But the US does an extraordinarily large amount of policing. On average, a US resident is far, far more likely to be confronted by police in routine circumstances where they would be ignored in the rest of the world.
Which at the end of the day is what BLM is about, not so much the individual abuses. All that extra policing isn't distributed fairly. There are some communities in the US where the police are the kind of hands-off/come-only-when-called benefactors people expect, and there are some communities where they act more like a street gang controlling their territory, stopping and confronting anyone who seems likely to challenge their authority.
Given that's not going to be evenly distributed, there will be a chunk of people who are never arrested in their lives and another group of people who get arrested all the time.
In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.
As a complete outsider to US reality, to me looking in, it seems like there is a real issue of training regarding de-escalating techniques.
US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training.
Compare that with European forces and you see a completely different reality. In Europe the police is generally seen as peace-keepers, force is absolutely a last resort (probably not so true for crowd control units but certainly true for daily policing).
IMO, the issue is that the US Police are not one organization. There are over 10,000 police departments in America. In some towns, the Sheriff + Deputies are less than 10 people.
Some towns have a Sheriff who is democratically elected. This leads to massive lack of accountability, because there's no chance the Sheriff could be fired before the next election.
Under such a system, why would a Sheriff, or their deputies, ever get deescalation training?
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Washington DC serves as a great example of how confusing this gets when you start actually tracing the power structures.
The shear amount of "blame shifting" going on for the Lafayette Park clearing is staggering.
> More than a half-dozen officials from the National Guard, federal law enforcement and public safety agencies have challenged the Trump administration's narrative that the clearing of peaceful protesters outside the White House earlier this month was unrelated to President Donald Trump's subsequent walk to a nearby church for a photo-op, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
...
> But officials told The Post they weren't warned that US Park Police planned to push the perimeter or that force would be used.
...
> The US Secret Service issued a statement Saturday admitting that an agency employee used pepper spray on June 1 during efforts to secure Lafayette Square and clear protesters.
> US Park Police, Arlington Police, DC Metro Police and the Secret Service have all denied using any kind of chemical irritants in Lafayette Square Monday evening. But WUSA9 crews were there, witnessed tear gas being deployed and collected the canisters afterward.
So at a minimum, there are ~5 Police Forces, each with different accountability structures, involved in the Lafyette Square clearing. It probably was only ONE Police Force that messed up (probably US Park Police??) that was the site of the brutal beatdown.
But all the different organizations get the blame, even if the officers are of completely different organizations.
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US Citizens typically have to deal with ~3 police organizations per location. The city (or county) police, the state police, and finally the federal police.
And the Feds are organized into multiple different police: DEA, ATF, FBI, and ICE.
There's a "weak" culture... the "thin blue line" where Police Officers do stand to protect each other, even if they are from different organizations. But when it comes to accepting the blame, they actually shift the blame between each other a lot. So you need to be very knowledgeable about your local police structure before you can even cast blame in a proper manner.
Even if some organizations are considered good (ie: FBI generally has a very good reputation), other organizations (ie: ICE) have a pretty negative reputation in unwanted use of force.
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Finally, a little example for how confusing this can get.
-- If you have a Sheriff, your only means of accountability is the election next year. A Sheriff and their deputies can pretty much do whatever they want. Any issues must be taken up with the Sheriff themselves in the meantime. If the Sheriff is uncooperative, you're left with voting them out next election (which is surprisingly difficult, because no one pays attention to local politics in America).
-- A Police "Chief" is typically a position that is held accountable by the Mayor. You...
Washington DC is unusual because it's not a state, and in practice it's the only place where the President can order the police about directly.
You would expect directly elected police to increase accountability, but the question as always is: to whom? If the local electorate is racist, they're going to support racist violence from the police.
The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.
> You would expect directly elected police to increase accountability
I don't. I have a sheriff and I barely keep up with the issue between elections. And to be honest, local police in my area are a non-issue, I've never had issues with them personally. (IMO: this is because I live in a richer suburban area. Police are well paid, college-educated, and low-stress compared to the city police)
Between the county council, my city's mayor, the state governor, the state representative, the state senator, my US Senator, my US Representative, the President, the School superintendant, roughly 4 or 5 different judges, and the sheriff... I'm frankly leaving most of my election sheet blank during elections.
Besides, the Sheriff has been running unopposed for the last decade. Even if there was an issue, its not like there's even another guy for me to vote for.
I'd have much more trust in a Chief or Commissioner setup. I at least know the name of my county executive and somewhat keep up with what my county executive does.
But the only way you can convince me that my local police, that I'm voting for directly, has any issue, is if protests erupted in my local neighborhood. A lot of these videos that are being posted online do not apply to me or my vote.
> The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.
Is it really? Think about it. The NYC officers who shoved the man were fired pretty quickly. While its basically impossible to fire a Sheriff.
Hypothetically, how would you convince me or raise awareness if my local sheriff was a problem? No major protests were in my neighborhood.
And I'm somewhat connected and informed about these matters. I've got friends who are fully ignorant, or are even 100% on the police side on this issue. How do you expect to convince them to vote for a new sheriff?
Sounds to me like your sheriff might be doing a good job and the system might be working. Now if you had a sheriff that were a real problem and still couldn't get voted out, then you'd have an example of a broken system.
Most sheriffs in USA are unopposed. Even if they do a bad job, you don't really have a choice in the vote.
Its not really a system I'm a fan of. The voting population only can pay attention to so many issues, we should have our representatives pick (and hold accountable) more positions.
> US police forces seem to have a very short training
Correct; some states have laws mandating training hours for barbers that are longer than that mandated for police [0].
> not centrally vetted by any federal organism
As with many things in the US, these rules are mostly state-based (read: 50 different, often overlapping but also often contradictory systems) but with a patchwork of federal oversight.
For example, in 2012, the federal government stepped in with a judicial document called a "consent decree" aimed at reforming the Seattle police department after "a pattern or practice of excessive force that violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law" [1].
That's an example of federal oversight, but it only happens after problems have already occurred; it only applies to the city of Seattle; and it's temporary. Only a month ago [2] the city was in court petitioning for "we're all better now, federal oversight can end".
After saying in court they were reformed and would no longer use excessive force, Seattle PD used so much tear gas in a residential neighborhood that it seeped into peoples' homes [3]. Then they announced a 30 day ban on use of tear gas [4]. Then about 48 hours later they used tear gas anyway (after using "blast balls" containing "pepper spray gas" the previous night and insisting it didn't count as tear gas). Finally a federal judge stepped in [5] and issued a 14 day ban on its use - another example of our federal oversight being reactive and not proactive.
Oh, and did I mention Seattle PD shot a "less-lethal" grenade round directly at a protester, causing enough blunt force trauma to stop her heart and require life-saving CPR? [6] That was on the same night they used tear gas after promising not to.
And they threw flashbang grenades at the medics who were trying to save her life. [7]
(in case it's not obvious, I'm a Seattle resident and I'm pissed)
Another example of how complicated our justice system can be that might surprise people from other countries is all the levels of police forces we have - city police / county sheriff / state police (plus federal law enforcement - FBI, TSA, border patrol, and so on). Especially in rural areas the county sheriff often wields a tremendous amount of power [8].
you're entirely warranted to be pissed about tear gas use, but it's misguided to expect quick and accurate federal redress, as the executive function intentionally doesn't cover state or local jurisdictions.
states run themselves, and the federal judiciary basically only steps in when state/local governments don't follow their own rules (the presumed expression of the will of the people) or violate the constitution. the constrained executive response follows from the judiciary (and sometimes the legislature).
and that's the way it should be. you want power local and limited, not consolidated and far away. that would only make things like use of force worse.
so the immediate appeal to authority should be to the local, and then state, judiciary and legislature stepping in with corrective actions. the feds aren't of much use here. they're intentionally a line of last (and slow) resort.
I'm generally for states' rights, but the federal government stepping in to enforce civil rights in the face of local corruption has a long and storied history. Furthermore, the consent decree was already in place, so yes, enforcement should have been pretty quick and should actually have teeth to get these criminals prosecuted.
Why would people want power local and limited? Noting the sordid history of local, "States Rights", Jim Crow style policies that exist at the local level. Especially when the issue concerns US policing which is the ideological descendant of slave patrols.
Sheriffs date back to the early 1300s. Even up until the 1970s, small communities had local militias and army reserves when things got beyond what a sheriff could handle. Most of these places switched to policing in the late 70s and 80s. How, precisely is that "the ideological descendent of slave patrols"?
> "Maybe in your country but in many, many places in the world this is demonstrably not the case."
as with markets, idiosyncratic conditions like sociopathy can lead to pockets of undue concentrations of power, no doubt.
but it would be even worse if those same conditions were concentrated on and elevated to wider populations. by distributing power, you can more effectively pit one against the other, and have some chance of bettering conditions over time. those chances decrease with power concentration.
I'm not sure your interpretation is required or adds value. Those with first hand experience have been protesting for over 100 years and have been very clear. Law enforcement needs more August Vollmers.
This is a really important point and you are right that the level of gun violence is abysmally higher in the US.
Nevertheless, a large percentage of situations can be de-escalated by police forces. What is even less acceptable, is that in many cases the escalation is originating from police officers. Which is why, to me, de-escalation and conflict management training is lacking among these officers.
Going back to your point, it is a really complex issue and I am not going to claim a deep understanding of US society.
There is a huge percentage of GDP spent on welfare in most EU countries, the welfare and safety nets put in place are (mostly) accepted in the EU because of a sense of solidarity and dignity and a mutual understanding that _anyone_ can be caught in a situation where they are facing social/family/health/finacial issues. Being misfortunate should not be punished with falling through the cracks of society. I get the impression that in the US this type of belief would be an outlier.
However, putting aside the humanitarian values, there is a very practical and utilitarian aspect to EU welfare and social benefits programs, they actually detract people from marginal behaviour because it stops them from being pushed into a corner.
There is a lot of evidence that social welfare safety nets reduce crime. Equally, there is evidence that insufficient welfare correlates with crime rise. [0]
And this I think, is a huge cultural shift. The outrage in the US would be huge if we tried to rationalize that we have to take tax money from everyone, to give free-money to people on the fringes of society, in order to reduce gun violence. However, all the EU policies for the past 40 years confirm this reasoning.
I recommend the latest Sam Harris podcast on this subject, he makes a ton of nuanced points that many people miss when talking about "police brutality".
I'm not neccessarily considering him an intellectual, I just find the points he makes about the instinctual reaction to be outraged compelling (and pretty common sense). What he's saying on the subject is not deep, but the current discourse is so off the rails that we need someone to pause and talk about the basics (realities of arrests, police violence statistics, how people interpret videos etc.)
> The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month,
You would easily get this from doctors in one month if they were filmed.
Considerably more in fact. Some studies say medical errors contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year or even more. That's just deaths, not maiming.
How about 2,300 vehicular deaths a month? Or 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades.
Oh, but those aren't the same thing, so they're irrelevant? That's fine, because the examples you gave (pilots, crane operators, fast food chains) also have nothing to do with one another. Not the same number of operators, not the same jobs, not the same safety systems, not the same number of potential cases, not the same risk probability, not the same variables. But why be rational about what we can just get emotional over?
The United States has 330 Million people. To come up with 700 cases of police violence, all you have to do is find 700 people out of 330 Million who are being arrested for something. Find the number of arrests, find the number where people resisted, compare it to the number of cases of police arresting or detaining people without incident.
You can't find that data in video clips or the news because nobody reports calm arrests, or non-arrests. I'd be very surprised if anyone cared to find out what the 700 number actually means in context.
This whole document is just horror porn to use for firing up people so they'll get angry and not use their brains. It's a very smart thing to do if you want to push a particular outcome. And I'm not saying that's even a bad thing under the circumstances. But it's quite clearly propaganda.
If those numbers have been consistent for decades despite the police being given harsher and harsher tools for dealing with them, perhaps those tools aren't doing anything but resulting in harm to people who are not committing those crimes.
> How about 2,300 vehicular deaths a month? Or 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades.
Those are 'real' accidents; and if some are not, like DUI, there are laws against them that are enforced. If tomorrow, society stops charging DUI offenders people would protest too.
That's not the case with police brutality. We have seen again and again the police face no consequences for their brutality. That's what the people are protesting against. If every one of these cops were appropriately fired, charged and jailed, this wouldn't be a big of an issue. That simply does not happen.
The second point being, theoretically people trust cops to keep law and order and to ensure safety. So it is rightly expected for them to have higher standard of conduct and the fact that this does not happen is a systemic failure.
> 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades
This is also a stupid, unnecessary, ongoing tragedy that America insists cannot be avoided despite being the only country where mass shootings happen anything like as regularly.
The delusion is on your side if you believe pilots, crane operators or any other profession is as much under surveillance as the police and as active dealing with risky situations that could escalate. Are you just trying to fool yourself with these comparisons or everybody?
There's no delusion on his side - there's additionally the acknowledgement that police have a much higher burden for said situations - and the videos show that they are not qualified to manage them.
"Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer.
If a pilot has a crash, the crash is reviewed by the NTSB, and the FAA. Pilots are under a huge amount of scrutiny. There are voice recorders in the cockpit, blackboxes to capture flight parameters, etc etc.
Can we stop with this BS about police brutality, perhaps we should be more vocal for the criminal's brutality? Which would limit the need of police in the first place?
There are more than 350M interactions of police with citizens in a year, and you found 400 videos - most of them questionable in the definition of brutality.
If you think their job is easy, please go with them for a daily or a nightly shift.
I'm against any brutality, but you haven't seen the brutality they experience daily and have to follow protocol to protect us and themselves.
I'm immigrant, I lived in different counties and I can tell for a fact that my interactions with the police in the US where the most pleasant and up to the point, compared to the other 5 countries I've lived (East/West EU, South America). Granted I've never done anything illegal/criminal - except traffic violations.
There is no rule of law if the police can beat the shit out of people without even so much as due process. Yeah, criminals brutalize, even kill, police. You know what happens when they do that? They go to jail. You know what happens when cops do that? Not a goddamn thing.
Congratulations on being a well-to-do immigrant. Please expand your imagination to include centuries of institutionalized racism and decades of brutal policing which black and brown people have suffered under and are fucking fed up now.
Even if you discount the racism - why do the police kill so many dang people? Too many brown folks, white folks, and other folks - more than is reasonable.
Thousands of police officers are not killed actually, their jobs are actually not even the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. As a black man you are more likely to be killed by a cop than it is likely a cop dies in the line of duty (ftr around 1 in every 1000 black men and boys are expected to be killed by police. In 2019 there are over 600,000 law enforcement officers but the Officer Down statistic lists 106 deaths...)
> As a black man you are more likely to be killed by a cop than it is likely a cop dies in the line of duty
Same goes for criminals. And this is the mistake in your argumentation. Around 2.2% of black men were imprisoned in 2018 in the US (https://www.statista.com/statistics/252871/imprisonment-rate...). It's not per se outrageous that 5% or so of criminals die in the hands of the police, in a country with major social issues and easy access to dangerous weapons. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
> 43 people shot while carrying fake guns in 2016, as well as the same number in 2015, are based on data compiled by the paper as part of its national database of fatal police-involved shootings. Four of those killed were under the age of 17, and seven were over the age of 55. Of those killed, all but five were men, 54 were white, 19 were black and 11 were Hispanic.
700 cases of police brutality is indeed less than 100k deaths caused by authoritarian dictatorship. As a democratic country we’re trying to avoid it with peaceful organization and protest, but our law enforcement keeps violating our constitutional rights.
Yeah that’s all police brutality. I’m glad that in America our law enforcement hasn’t dove to the level of shutting off our internet, but they’ve definitely used water canons, rubber bullets, and tear gas on peaceful citizens executing their constitutional rights. I’m glad that we as a people find that even our relatively low recorded cases internationally of over 700 filmed videos of police brutality nationwide within the span of 3 weeks is totally and utterly unacceptable to such a peaceful country as ours. I hope we can further reduce this number over time!
You're cherry-picking examples of how it's worse and ignoring examples of how it's better. Why not compare to Norway, Canada, or New Zealand?
Also it's not like the same regulatory body came up with these numbers and said "this is an objective metric on the quantity of police brutality in these countries!" You just feel like 700 is low and other countries are worse, when there could be many more examples we don't know about in all of the countries!
You may not be aware of this but in the education system of the United States, which is mandatory for all of our children, we are taught that the history of America is the culture of fighting against authoritarian regimes no matter their form. While the truth is complicated(in fact we’ve helped set up authoritarian regimes), it means that Americans generally view the protests of any authoritarian moves to be a patriotic duty. If you’re not American I don’t expect you to necessarily understand our culture, but where we are from it’s generally unacceptable for the police to treat citizens this way.
Having lived in the U.S. for a couple decades, I can confirm that a fundametal aspect of American history, culture, and education is about standing up for civil and individual rights. This has been true since the founding of the country, that numerous movements and protests were necessary for social progress. Americans are taught this from an early age, that we must fight for our rights.
It's also true that authoritarianism runs deep in American culture. Its military and police force have been complicit in shameful crimes against humanity around the world and within the country.
The challenge is that this situation (and the corruption that enables it) has been systematicaly organized and developed over (at least) the past century, and is part of the reason for its wealth and privilege. Clearly, the overclass is not willing to give up its power, and will resort to the same old strategy of oppression and manipulation.
As sad as it is that protests against police brutality are met with even more brutality, it is a patriotic duty of Americans to right the wrongs, to express anger with the systemic issue of racism and violence against peaceful citizens, and to demand change.
As an American who grew up with the ideal of "America the beautiful", my hope is that the protests don't stop there. The illness runs all the way to the top, and the whole world is waiting for the U.S. to grow up and actually behave according to the principles that it claims.
No, 100k deaths is warfare. If you know how bad things can get in other countries you're more likely to try and cut this shit out in America before it gets that bad. Please don't take pride in accepting oppression meekly.
There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average!
Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1].
There are millions and millions of daily interactions between police and civilians every year. Sadly, there will be some mistakes, some of which will be caught on camera.
It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is.
>It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is.
Oh cool, a guy on Hacker News cited a John's Hopkins article. Pack it up protestors, racism isn't real and cops aren't tear gasing reporters in the face!
Huh? I didn't say racism isn't real, and I also didn't say cops aren't tear gassing reporters in the face.
GP questioned how a profession can exist when it makes so many deadly mistakes. I pointed out that there is another profession, medicine, which also makes lots of deadly mistakes. Some are accidental oversights, but you can also do some searches and find some really bad medical errors. [1] but you can find lots more.
Again, what the media draws attention to, and what is going on in society on a daily basis, are not the same thing. Racism and police misconduct existed before 2020, but it just in the last few weeks really popped onto the media's attention.
And again, because of the sheer size of the United States, you have to look at statistics in addition to anecdotes when you think about policy.
> Statistics are useless because almost all police misconduct goes unreported.
This is true, and these videos help show that. There are more and more cases being uncovered where the police blatantly lied about their own misconduct in official reports. For instance, the police claimed the the Buffalo protester fell when video shows the police pushed him over, and the police report for the killing of George Floyd made no mention of holding him down by the neck. If there hadn't been video, I doubt either of those two incidents would have been counted in police misconduct statistics.
That medical error study is awful. It categorizes any treatment that is given but doesn't work as an error. That only makes sense in a world in which a correct treatment that could cure a patient always exists and that correct option should be known ahead of time by the people treating the patient. Reality doesn't work like that. Here[1] is a write up on the issues in that study.
Sure, I think that's fair enough. I didn't mean to imply that there are 250,000 cases a year where a heart transplant is performed to cure pneumonia.
But of those 250,000, some will be small mistake, and some will be epic fuck ups (see [1]).
Similarly, the police shoot around 1,000 people per year. Of those, many are justified, some are are questionable, and a few are epic fuck ups. If you just look at the epic fuck ups, you may believe that policing is completely broken in America. If you look at it in context, you'd probably conclude that the system works well in some cases, not well in other cases, and that there are lots of tradeoffs and no easy answer.
I'd recommend Peter Moskos's blog and podcast (www.copinthehood.com and www.qualitypolicing.com) to get a more even handed perspective than you'd find in the media. I'm not defending every single police shooting, but I think the recent shift in public opinion is not based on a good understanding of policing in America.
>I didn't mean to imply that there are 250,000 cases a year where a heart transplant is performed to cure pneumonia.
Then why link to that study and specifically cite that 250,000 number?
One of the main differences with doctors is when they truly do have an epic fuck up they are personally sued and can potentially lose their medical license. How many of the epic fuck ups by police in the linked Google doc will lead to the officer being sued? How many will lead to them being forced to switch to a different profession? Why do we allow these police to epicly fuck up in ways that we don't allow other professions like doctors? Does tolerating these epic fuck ups among police make them more likely to epicly fuck up in the future?
People aren't just interested in how questionable the incidents are in isolation. They believe the system is set up such that there are more incidents than there could be. This is what they "defund" part is about. The belief that society would be healthier if some part of money today spent on police, is better spent elsewhere.
You have completely bastardized the meaning of statistics.
Statistics are meant to understand and bring meaning to chaotic events, like random car accidents, or randomly rolling a dice, or random mechanical failure of some complex system.
Statistics doesn’t work so well, when human interactions become involved.
And it doesn’t work well in this situation, when it comes to policing, where the officer is of the predominant ethnicity, and the victim is of a minority ethnicity.
However, you can probably infer that if the policing is done where the ethnicity of the officer and the civilian, is of a primary vs. minority ethnicity, that there will be enhanced levels of violence involved. This can be one way to infer the statistics.
At a fundamental level, there are human biases involved. There is no escaping this.
It’s possible that if you and the police officer are of the same ethnicity, then you likely have a lower chance of being assaulted or harassed by the police officer.
However, if you are a minority, or of a different ethnicity than the police officer which is of the primary ethnicity, then your probability of being assaulted or harassed by the officer goes up significantly.
The police enforcement system, is really a reflection of society.
Because it is the society that puts these police officers into positions of authority, and it is the same society that keeps them in authority.
So if the police system is corrupt, then at a fundamental level, the society is corrupt.
You can’t fix the problem, if you can’t even acknowledge that you have a problem.
It’s like Trump’s administration that recently said: There is no systemic racism in American Law Enforcement.
Thus, how can you fix something, if you can’t even acknowledge it.
There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average!
I think the issue people are rioting about is that it's not a 1 in a billion chance for everyone. It's more like 1 in a quintillion for a rich white person, and 1 in a million for a person of color. That inequality stems from systemic racism in the police force. What you're saying is that it would be less of a problem if the deaths were evenly distributed across the population. That may be true, but I don't think many people would suggest it as a viable solution to the problem.
This cannot be backed up by data. When I travel with a black friend in Europe, I actually get checked occasionally. That never happens when traveling alone. There seem to be issues with profiling here but I don't believe a diagnosis like systemic racism is in any way justified beyond populism.
I profoundly disagree with that definition. Racism needs animosity and distrust doesn't qualify as that. You can make a case that this is the accepted academic nomenclature but I would add that the reasoning behind it is not very sophisticated. I would argue that it could even elevate racial tensions if applied to practical problems. Even beyond factoring in the common scholar diagnosing racism in everything.
Racism needs animosity and distrust doesn't qualify as that.
Systemic racism doesn't need animosity for it to happen. Systemic racism is a term for how a system discriminates against race - that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents. That's not "racist" in the sense that someone deliberately decided to give people of color get less resources, but the outcome of the decision is that people of color get less resources. That is systemic racism. There doesn't need to be any racist intent on the part of any individuals in that system for it to happen (though there often is.)
No one is drawing the line on race. No one is saying "Let's fix race issues and ignore gender and poverty issues." All of these problems need to be fixed. People are focusing on race right now because several people have been literally killed by police officers who have been charged with their murders.
Ever seen some racists pushing their views the last 5 years in the most reactionary fashion? Of course you are drawing the line on race, believe it or not. Ever noticed the talk about white privilege by some latte-slurping pseudo academics saturating any discussion on racism without necessary experience? Some people obviously did.
You can argue that there is an established academic jargon, but I would dispute its accuracy and perspective as well.
Based on the data, deaths are relatively distributed across the population. 25% of people killed by police are black. They make up 12% of the population, so based on this it seems like they are twice as likely as normal to be killed by the police, but after normalizing for violent crime rates (for a variety of reasons including discrimination, black people commit over 50% of the homicides) police killings seem roughly similar for all races.
> Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average!
Ok, the EU has 445M citizens[1] which means, by your logic, there should statistically be 40% more police "mistakes" than the US. Except there isn't. It is radically lower[2] (1536 for the USA in 2019 vs 51 for the EU in 2018/19).
First, a disagreement. Your base assumption that police activity should scale linearly with population. This is just obviously not correct. There are huge, huge differences in countries and crime rates. You can look at differences in homicide rate, for example [1]. The united states has a pretty shockingly high homicide rate for a developed country (4.96 per 100k). This is 5x higher than France or Germany. On the other end you have Japan, which is about 5x lower than France or Germany (25x lower than United States).
But that aside, the important question is: is crime driving police activity, or are the police widely malicious and corrupt? I'll admit that I'm not knowledgable enough to give a good answer to this question, but I'm very skeptical of jumping to a conclusion based on selective evidence on social media or recent news coverage.
I don't see much discussion of root causes here. But a lot of "police ought to be this or that".
Perhaps the best solution is to have more democracy or community input into policing. It seems like it's happening now in the US (it would be quite different in other countries, where the police is national and considered civil servants; in France you can't elect sheriffs, and police is beyond the responsibility of mayors).
In the end, some communities will vote for a police that's tough, and other communities will vote for a police that's less tough. There will still be issues when criminals used to non-tough cops cross into an area with tough cops, but that's life.
One of the issues we've seen is that the police act as a political organisation. It's a message from the Police: "Look at these looters, you need us". They use their position to push for the political outcome they want. Similarly you can elect a mayor who will reform the police, but what's likely to happen is that the police just tweak their behaviour to allow an increase in crime so that come next election, the mayor's "reforms" have made his citizens less safe and you get rid of the mayor - because the police aren't accountable, the mayor is. An institutional interest has emerged and really the only way of changing that is to remove the institution and replace it.
We might not be able to agree about everything, but can we at least agree that it's in everyone's best interest to have an increasing amount of the world have a generally secure, stable, unconditional personal access to food, housing, education, healthcare, and a labor market and can lives in a society with reasonable laws that they can practically obey?
Even if we don't contribute to that personally, can we at least agree to try to avoid doing things to other countries that get in the way of doing that, in really obvious ways like not randomly bombing them and pretending? Can we just admit to ourselves that a lot of global military expenditure is just a certain kind of make work? As Americans, can we then really not think of a slightly more efficient way to allocate the $7.3T that the American government raises every year from tax revenue, much of which we just light on fire policing things parts of people's lives unnecessarily?
Come on. I'm sure we can. This is like taking your hand off the literal stove. I know how horrible this all looks, and it is horrible, but it's also really easy to propose a solution to it. Divest and reinvest. It could be so many flavors of divest and reinvest, and still be a good enough improvement over how things are right now that it would be the most impressive piece of legislation for probably a 100 year span of time if not 200 years. There has to be an opportunistic, ambitious K-street lobbyist or two reading this, right? Wanna take credit for bringing America out of the dark ages? Come on...you know you want to. Now's your chance.
The bar is at the floor. You could write the dirtiest honker of a bill you've ever seen that it could make the ACA look clean. As long as it achieves the right divestments (global windmill fighting) and reinvestments (domestic production infrastructure), you're on the right track. You don't even have to get it completely right the first time. Perfect is the enemy of done here. Just something major and timely, which lets you evangelize divest and reinvest. You can even rebrand it as "digital transformation" if you really want. I would promise to never judge it as management consultant grifting again.
Because if not...I don't know how long this situation will hold. Those riots are just a taste of unease to come, and eventually, the federal branches of the government will understand how much more powerless they are with dislocation of their local constituencies. Someone is going to figure out how to relocate those constituencies.
> Can we just admit to ourselves that a lot of global military expenditure is just a certain kind of make work?
Being the imperial power has vast benefits, do you think Rome ruled its provinces just so they had a way to spend money? Being the global power is literally worth money. It's hard to say how much, but I'm pretty sure it's larger than your military expenses.
That said, I'd love to see the US cut back, because your benefit comes at somebody else's cost.
If the net benefit to the US is positive however, do you believe the majority of people would be happy to work more to have the same standard of living, or the majority of well-off Americans would be happy to pay European level taxes to redistribute wealth within the US? I have sincere doubts on both fronts.
Based on past posts, I don't think it's white supremacism. I know it seems that way, but I think what's happening is the international confusion I wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438403.
That of course does not make the comment acceptable.
I agree with the premise but unfortunately the mental health system in America is itself prone to abuse of patients and bigotry against patients. We need to be able to hold psychologists, nurses in psychiatric wards, psychiatrists, and other licensed mental health workers with a similar set of accountability if we are to hope that they can be useful filters.
Is there any effort being made to archive these videos? They're actual history, and given the ephemeral nature of data on online platforms, most will probably disappear in a few years without effort to preserve them.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 410 ms ] threadI'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.
It's currently at 500+ instances of police brutality. https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1272306977872453634
Of course even one instance of brutality is too much, but take numbers like this which a huge grain of salt.
For example, the other day there was a video being posted around of alleged police brutality, where an officer was using force to arrest some woman. The video was 1) from 2018 2) conveniently trimmed to exclude the first part where the woman was resisting arrest.
There are plenty of people trying to push a narrative right now, so just be very critical of the information presented to you.
Source: https://downtownbellevue.com/2020/06/05/video-surfaces-belle...
Now take for example `greg_douchette thread` TGD #2. That shows the instant that a man with a shirt that says "NYPD" on the back shoves a woman onto the ground. Obviously that was pretty violent.
EDIT: I more or less retract the analysis below; more information here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/nyregion/nypd-officer-vin...
Leaving my original post for posterity / discussion.
---
But I've seen that same scene from a different video (sorry don't have he link to hand), and it raises a lot of questions for me. The person wearing the shirt doesn't have any other equipment on -- no helmet, no belt or walkie-talkie or anything. He's not standing side-to-side with a bunch of police facing off against protesters. There's a long stream of people mixed together, meandering in the same direction. Is this actually a protest? Is the guy in question on duty, or is he just trying to get home like everyone else?
And from the other video you can see that just before the incident, the woman was walking backwards in front of the guy. My best guess is that the guy was off-duty (or trying to get off-duty), just walking somewhere, and that the woman came up to him and was verbally harassing him. Eventually he got fed up and shoved her out of his way; but because he's huge and she's tiny, he shoved her about 5x harder than necessary, causing her injury.
These to me are very different things. In the first we have a man who is clearly on duty, doing something clearly dangerous, to someone who is clearly doing something peaceful and constitutionally protected. In the second, we have a man who may not be on duty, having someone harassing him to his face, and responding in a way that isn't obviously going to cause her injury.
But you wouldn't be able to tell any of that that from the video linked in this spreadsheet. So that makes me question -- of the 700 videos listed, how many are like #1 and how many are like #2? Maybe a lot of people don't care, but I do.
I'd put the ratio at something like 85/15.
Most of them are individual or small group acts that are completely unacceptable, fire them immediately sort of things (indiscriminately pepper spraying non-protestors walking down a public street, firing a tear gas canister into a person just standing around's chest, an insane amount of gang tackling, pummeling, and neck kneeling given the context of the protests)
Some are insidious but not necessarily criminal, just groups being tear gassed, military style shows of force, etc.
A small but real minority of vidsos are what I'd call products of anti police bias, ambiguous context, or (at least imo) felt out of context.
But also "verbally harassment" of police is largely Constitutionally protected, but yes, tons of videos of people being arrested, often violently, simply for using words.
As a whole, Greg's thread is terrifying. Our police training here is piss poor.
Despite being disgusting, unwarranted, racist and unacceptable, the sheer amount of stupidity, ignorance and arrogance this shows is just mindboggling. And makes that totally inentional.
What last link posted consisted mostly of fakes? I must have missed it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23373619
A list of three, one of which is a video of a cop slashing a tire, another is a photo of another car in the lot with slashed tires, and the third is a journalist who had to pass the National Guard to find his tires slashed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...
I'm not saying the police doesn't do wrong, they absolutely do. We have examples of rapes, unjustified murders and beatings, entrapment. They are extremely rare. I think last year the police in the US killed 9 unarmed black men and 21 unarmed white men.
400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
Now, how many are unjustified? That's the important question.
Your use of "unjustified" is entirely subjective. I don't know what your specific threshold is for justified violence against peaceful protestors, and it's a waste of time to try and guess what that threshold is. It's a waste of time for us to filter the data, only for you to then point out two videos you disagree with and ask everyone to repeat the same work over and over again.
All of the raw data is available to you in a list format. If you think there are errors, then fork the repo, file a pull request, or create an issue. Make your own list that demonstrates your point.
https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/issues
This is wrong.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed lists 1ists at least 104 unarmed black people alone killed by police in 2015.
I went though the first 20, and maybe 8 could have been accidents (one was hit by a car) or otherwise explained (2 pointed toy guns at police).
But even then, half of the cases sound like accidents, out of 104. The remaining is pretty close to 47.
There are plenty of sites that count the number of killings, but this is one of the few that looks for unarmed ones. If you are aware of better or more recent stats (for example the source of this 47 number) I'd love a link.
> half of the cases sound like accidents, out of 104. The remaining is pretty close to 47.
I find it mind-boggling that killing 52 unarmed people by accident is somehow the best case scenario here.
> Officers arrested the man for violating a domestic violence no contact order and unlawful possession of a firearm
> the man went into cardiac arrest during processing.
> Correction officers began resuscitation immediately, police said, and the man was transported to the hospital while he still had a pulse. He later died at the hospital.
https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2015/07/10/Physical-...
> Ms. Harris declined to comment through an Allegheny County Jail Health Justice project spokeswoman, but she has said that her son took an anti-seizure medication twice daily and called her from the jail to ask for help getting health care workers there to give him the medication
> He died of acute peritonitis due to colon perforation, and the death was ruled natural.
> Our records indicate that within ten minutes of Mr. Smart’s arrival at medical intake, our staff ordered the medications he said he needed, and he received those medications as prescribed. During an emergency event later that evening, our records show that our staff administered additional treatment to Mr. Smart and that he responded to the medical care provided.
This is an extremely misleading website and not a reliable source.
How do you stop someone pointing a gun at the police officer without brutality?
How do you stop someone attacking a police officer?
How do you stop someone going for their gun?
How do you stop someone going around shooting innocent people?
etc, etc, etc.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
Along with reading your other comments here, I viewed these 4 questions as a bad faith attempt at steering the conversation off topic. When people complain about police brutality, we are not talking about the times when police have to legitimately defend themselves or disarm someone. This thread is specifically about the hundreds of clearly documented examples of unprovoked violence by police in the US over the last few weeks, many of them against journalists, elderly people, kneeling protestors and so on. Please engage with that and don't try to change the subject again.
Every municipality has different rules for officer's conduct. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Part of the Federal US Department of Justice), there are 17,985 US police agencies, of which 15,400 departments govern the 39,044 distinct local governments and municipalities. These are further divided into autonomous administrative districts often referred to as precincts.
The rules for officer misconduct change in each municipality as reactions to prior conduct or complaints. The rules are based on edicts from the state, as well as interpretations of those edicts by the local police department which create internal policy. The level of compliance with creating and updating internal policies varies. No civilian is able to know or predict the various rationale an officer may use or is able to use to behave any particular way. Civilians learn after they have had a bad encounter with an officer, or are in jail or dead. Juries learn on the spot with prosecutor instructions, sometimes those instructions themselves are misleading or incorrect. The public does not necessarily ever learn what the standards were, and the media learns after the fact and only has a patchwork of "isolated incidents" that occurred in frankly different governing systems. When put together, this fuels discontent with police as an amorphous entity, an interpretation which fuels a growing divide of non-solutions.
So the term "justified" and "unjustified" means nothing because it is different and changing everywhere and is a term that only matches your pre-existing worldview, or your predilection to appeal to authority in counties and states you have never set foot in, let alone participate in.
Germany has 16 state level and one federal, plus customs (not legally a police force with a lot less jurisdiction)
France has two, Police national and Gendamerie.
Obviously a slight oversimplification when counting stuff like the BKA / LKA (maybe the German equivalent to the FBI?) as seperate bodies. But roughly across Europe you have two levels,local and federal. Both are reporting, one way or the other, to the respective Ministeries of the Interior. Quite adifference compared to the US, where the highest authority can be a mayor. or none, if I understood the thing with local Sherrifs correctly.
And those videos have uncovered many instances the the police blatantly lying about their own misconduct in official reports, which is further evidence that the videos are only the tip of the iceberg.
These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks.
That is a startlingly high number, made worse once you actually start digging into the individual incidents, because you realize they're not just isolated. A lot of these videos aren't, "a single police officer does something shifty", they're, "an entire police unit starts firing tear gas at protestors who are kneeling on the ground." And then you start to read the responses from police unions, some of which outright lie about the incidents or contradict the videos. This isn't a problem with individual officers, it's a problem with high-level commanders and police union leaders -- it's a problem that spans entire units.
I personally went through about 200 incidents for a separate project I was working on, some more in-depth than others. I think people are looking at these lists and thinking, "oh sure, but if you zoom in and examine each incident, it gets better." It really doesn't. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to seeing people tear-gassed, those videos don't even make me blink now. But even with that, I was regularly shocked while I was combing through videos with incidents that I wasn't prepared for.
"Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas, holy heck that police officer just body slammed a protestor! Tear gas, tear gas, holy crap they just punched a reporter in the face!"
And again, 4 weeks. Not years. I would challenge anyone who's saying that these are extremely rare or over-dramatized to sit down and devote an evening to just watching the videos in series. It weighs on you. And it quickly becomes obvious that these are not individual rogue officers, these are police units operating in an environment where they know they will not face consequences for hurting protestors.
But... aren't there riots everywhere right now? This isn't exactly a normal situation.
Also, are you suggesting that the riots are peaceful?
So apparently you haven't watched any of the videos, huh?
Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.
It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.
Yes, I watched a few from this link, and that admittedly small sample didn't show a single peaceful protester being abused by cops. I suppose you watched more of them?
>Guess what? The problem is that police are frequently "on edge" in their normal jobs, and as a result innocent people are seriously injured or die. And worse, police are "on edge" far more around blacks than whites, meaning far more blacks are injured by police than whites.
Could there be a reason for some of that that is not linked to racism? Are only white policemen more on-edge around black people?
>It doesn't matter what the cause is, it's a problem and is has to stop.
I can agree with that certainly.
TGD #1 shows a woman standing with a sign being run over by a horse. That's absolutely peaceful.
TGD #2 shows a woman who was walking backwards in front of a police officer being shoved so hard she flies several meters back and hits her head on the curb. She was in the officer's face, but she certainly wasn't doing anything close to rioting.
I'll watch more later, but so far that's 2/2 at the top of the list showing peaceful protesters being abused.
> Could there be a reason for some of that that is not linked to racism? Are only white policemen more on-edge around black people?
Depends on what you mean by "racism". There was a series of studies a few years ago that put people in classic "shoot / no shoot" scenarios that police are trained on (i.e., you go through a scenario and have to shoot someone before they shoot you, but only if there's actually a gun). They randomly changed the color of the skin of the people involved. Civilians shot far more blacks than whites in "no-shoot" scenarios. Police shot about the same, but there was a longer delay: meaning, their impulse was to shoot blacks faster, but their training allowed a secondary impulse to come in and moderate the first one. (Sorry I can't find a link just now.)
But there are a host of other issues as well.
That sounded interesting, so I tried to find some.
First one I found was this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235256692_Results_f...
-- the conclusion seemed to be exactly counter to what the research you were talking about showed. "In addition, where errors were made, participants across experiments were more likely to shoot unarmed White suspects than unarmed Black or Hispanic suspects, and were more likely to fail to shoot armed Black suspects than armed White or Hispanic suspects."
The fact is, I'm a white dude in my mid-30's, I make a tech salary, and I'm afraid of the police, because an officer with a hair up somewhere could ruin my life for a period of time, if not for good.
The fear I think is more along the lines that police can detain you, arrest you and so on. So I just figure, why chance it? I optimize for lowest risk and I view police as an unnecessary risk.
I'm up for helping, we did the same thing during HKs police brutality videos, please consider seeding this as well; let me know how I can help.
https://torrentz2.eu/9b85dd223c8f92c923f516ed77bbdfcb770f4dd...
Oh, also worth noting the HKPF/PLA just used the same knee-to-neck choke hold on an unarmed female protestor during the 1 year Anniversary protests on June 12th [1].
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxDKfxFrEuY
Maybe this type of project would be the thing that gets IPFS off the ground and exposing it to a more mainstream audience.
https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/tree/master/tools...
https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/tree/master/tools...
Not expecting the answer to be yes, but figured I'd ask.
One of the great things about HN is that is manages to be an interesting website that usually keeps out of flamewar american politics.
There are plenty of those pretty much everywhere on reddit/internet, and I appreciate that this kind of 'us vs them' posts usually don't stay up long on HN.
I'm a bit disappointed dang unflagged it this time.
Unfortunately the apple is the police and it's everywhere and armed.
"When you get the data into a nice, clean, dense form, stuff just falls out of it" - Saul Pwanson
[1] https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality
It seems important to understand how much that is happening and where. If that data, in combination with protest size/type data is available, it can help us better understand if protests or police are actually impacting COVID transmission (if either).
If we don't have that data available as case numbers come in, it makes the narrative of blaming protesters much more likely to stick, even if it turns out to be inaccurate later, and e.g. the primary cause is unnecessary police actions.
Is anyone doing this? (Does anyone want to start if not?)
Home, Banks, Retail, Restaurants, Hospitals
Yes
Jails, Police station
No
Can you sue police if get sick ?
There is also the issue with police chiefs publicly declaring that they will not enforce the orders of their governor.
So, that is a bigger problem to me...
Deciding to only enforce the laws you ‘like’.
The situation in local jails became a big issue at the beginning of the pandemic. I would reach out to a bail fund in your city (or read more on their web page) to see if there are useful ways to help their broader mission, which will include protestors :).
Some useful context in this slate article:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/bail-funds-donat...
https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1270402748895412224
Which isn't an example of police brutality.
The second one was this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsTkAOe5UTE
Basically a bunch of thugs attack random drivers. One of the thugs jumps into a random car, the car stops, police come, pull the thug out, he resists, they deal with him. I have zero sympathy for the thug.
If you want to create a list for this cause, at least make it good, make it solid. Don't fill it with random junk to inflate the numbers.
There have been calls to abolish the police. If Seattle can do it, maybe Atlanta and Minneapolis too.
I think that's the right answer: this should be a local decision and each community should decide the level of policing it wants (including none at all).
All I know is Fox News has been caught photoshopping images and lying during their news broadcasts about these incidents.
What is actually occurring, as I requested. It was a hint that the reply at least wasn't up to the standard of HN.
Not sure why people can't take their political hat off for HN and try to inform.
I am doing the courtesy of telling you why I downvoted you.
If telling you why I downvoted you then also compels me to justify my position in an extended way, then I will not do it in the future. Instead I will just silently downvote when I feel it is warranted.
I could put the effort in, that's true. But I'm not going to be obligated to, and I'm not going to be shamed into doing the work to educate you.
I'm glad someone else did!
Also, if he can't keep his cool under those conditions, he has an obligation to change jobs because if he can't handle it he's just putting other people in danger.
LA Riots in 1992. Police pulled out to avoid conflict and it resulted in looting and burning for days until the National Guard showed up.
Minneapolis was burning before the police responded, not after.
Haven't seen or heard of any fireworks, which you can be sure the police would not tone down in reports (probably describing them as explosive projectiles).
It certainly isn't easy to keep your cool if things are been thrown at you, but that's the job. It's not an excuse to violently attack protesters who are not throwing things or use inappropriate methods.
The fact that you chose to take the video so far out of context means you're not here to argue in good faith at all. Said list isn't for people such as yourself, where no level of evidence could convince you.
Other than that, the point remains.
They "arrest" the driver, because he is not following the police instructions to get out of the car, and is actively resisting the police. We don't know if he was actually arrested or just detained. I got handcuffed once and then let go, it wasn't an arrest.
And try not putting 'arrest' in fear quotes, because they literally yanked him out of his car, threw him against his vehicle and arrested him.
I would not sit in the car if the police ordered me out. So I wouldn't get beaten. I don't mess with the police.
> And try not putting 'arrest' in fear quotes, because they literally yanked him out of his car, threw him against his vehicle and arrested him.
As I told you. I got handcuffed and put in the back of a police car once. But it wasn't an arrest. They let me go. As a lawyer explained to me later, an arrest is a specific procedure, not just the fact of getting detained/handcuffed.
> what those perps and officers have experienced
Both totally irrelevant to whether or not it's appropriate to punch a handcuffed prisoner in the face while they're not resisting.
If a cop is suffering from PTSD or stress to the point where they can't keep themselves from assaulting a handcuffed prisoner, then I am genuinely very sorry for them, but they're still in the wrong job and they still need to be let go.
I'm not totally certain there are any people who can be "good" at it in the sense that they'll never make mistakes or lose their cool. Then consider that there are over 10 million situations every year where something may go wrong. How could you make it never go wrong?
Come on.
"A lot of these videos don't show anything wrong", to
"Well, here's at least two videos that show nothing wrong", to
"Okay, the video looks bad, but the full context probably justifies it", to
"Sure it was wrong, but keep in mind that in a stressful situation everybody makes mistakes".
I'm eager to see how these arguments continue to evolve once comments move away from isolated video clips and into the territory of police departments lying about video footage[0], or 57 other officers resigning in protest over basic disciplinary actions[1].
[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/buffalo-mayor-acknowledges-mistake-...
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/us/buffalo-police-suspension-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_police_shoving_inciden...
https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/exclusive-two-buffalo-p...
So, still getting paid.
Treatment combined with appropriate work should be the first option. Treatment combined with sick leave should obviously be the second.
The word you're looking for is "racist".
Who knew HN comments could be worse than reddit?
Even when one cop punches "the thug" in the face while he's being walked away while handcuffed?
Besides, staying professional is the right thing to do and police of all should be extremely concerned with doing the right thing IMO.
At 0:16 a cop pushes Adam partially into the passenger window of an SUV, apparently hoping that he will fall out and be injured while the SUV is moving. When the SUV stops, Adam is mobbed by cops and beaten. The driver Bob (a victim of having a cop push someone into his window) is detained, his hands zip-tied. A bystander Charlie who doesn't seem to do anything is also zip-tied. At 1:43 a cop seems to spit in Adam's face and punch him while he's cuffed and being escorted by other cops.
Edited: In your first link:
If soldiers block enemy soldiers inside a 1-block length of street and use chemical weapons on them while preventing them from dispersing, it's a war crime. I don't really know why it should be fine for cops to do it to randoms.
This is the second time I've made a comment in defense of the police in a specific incident and if it's anything like last time I will be downvoted to oblivion.
Do you have any information to support your claim? (another video perhaps?) I think false claims only hurt those in support of police reform. I'm not suggesting that's your intent.
From the video in the parent post I don't understand how you reached your conclusion as I see something completely different. I see Adam attempting to enter one vehicle at 0:11 that drives off. Then he makes his second attempt with a different vehicle at 0:16 and clearly jumps into the window of an SUV. Stepping forward frame-by-frame it appears that the officer is pulling Adam's shirt[1] which would be the opposite of pushing him in. This is obviously just my opinion from that single video.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/CdEoDO9
If you made it practically impossable to disburse when using what are basically torture devices in that situation I don't see how it isn't brutality.
Or shoot an accredited camera person in the eye with less than lethal ammunition designed to only be used by shooting at the pavement first?
Did you click through the link that post had? It goes to https://medium.com/@Jeff_Jackson/review-of-incident-in-charl... which is pretty long, but about half way though shows an attack on protesters by police. Search for this:
Here is what it looked, sounded, and felt like from the perspective of the protesters as the second police unit quickly appeared in front of them and detonated tear gas and a flashbang
From then on it goes into a lot of depth about the tactics the police used to trap the crowd, teargas them and shot them with pepperballs.
EDIT Also, around 1:37 it looks like someone kicks him when he's lying on the ground, and at 1:45 someone punches him when his hands are cuffed behind his back.
That looks like an example of unnecessary force to me.
What I read is: If you want to create a list for this cause, at least make it perfect and unassailable in every possible way. Because I only need to point skeptically at one thing to dismiss the whole lot.
Is it not legitimate to want accurate sources of data? This does not mean slightly inaccurate data is unusable, simply that it is slightly inaccurate and this to some degree impugns its legitimacy (as it should).
Of course. I don't believe you honestly think that I am advocating for inaccurate sources of data.
However, finding and discussing sources of different quality among hundreds is one thing.
Saying that you only looked at two of them, expressing skepticism towards those two, and then stating that the whole thing is "filled" with "random junk to inflate the numbers" is another. That doesn't seem like the interpretation of someone who's honest about their intentions.
If I read two sentences from your thesis, find issue with them, and then claim that you have clearly filled it with random junk to inflate the word count... yould you characterize my position as believing that some parts of your thesis are "slightly inaccurate and this to some degree impugns its legitimacy"?
However personally speaking I would (and do) in fact discount a reading where even two sentences are highly suspect; it makes it not worth spending the time to read the rest of it.
As another example, I work primarily in data analytics. If I produce a report where even a single number is wrong, it almost immediately calls into question all of the other reporting I produced (did they use the same unreliable source? what transformations did they apply? was any sanity checking performed?). And, as it should.
Accuracy is incredibly important to making things appear legitimate.
I guess my main point -- phrased a bit more aggressively than needed -- was that if you have a huge community-sourced pile of data from multiple people in multiple parts of the country, relating to complex and chaotic situations that are unfolding as we speak, and all you need to dismiss it out of hand is finding a couple of things that you find suspect... well then you're always going to dismiss it.
Identifying, discussing and removing data points that don't belong is absolutely useful and fair. Taking a glance at a mountain of data, pointing out a couple pieces that you don't like and implying that the entire pile is rubbish is neither useful nor fair to me.
And I'm sorry for calling you dishonest, or at least heavily implying it. That was stupid and rash of me.
Tear-gassing a crowd is police brutality. It'd be illegal to use tear gas in warfare; many police departments around the world have banned tear gas.
One cop was paralyzed from the neck down in Vegas protests: https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/06/14/police-officer-shot-...
Retired police chief killed at 77 by looters in St. Louis: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/500839-retired-st-l...
A federal agent was killed in Oakland in connection with the protests: https://patch.com/california/alameda/fbi-ids-federal-agent-4...
The one-sided narrative against cops is getting out of hand. It's an extremely dangerous job and you cannot treat gangsters with kid gloves while they pack serious weaponry. It's a joke to talk of nerfing or defunding the police for the handful of bad incidents that occur meanwhile over 15K people a year are murdered in the country. It's completely disproportionate and not aligned with statistical reality: cops often have to make split second life or death decisions and they don't get a second shot.
According to the FBI, which publishes the data in the Uniform Crime Reports, from 1980–2018, an average of 85 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed per year.
In 2018 there were 686,665 police in the US.
I don't really want to get into the actual meat of the argument, but please use per-capita death stats so the numbers are actually comparable.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dXtv2wnutujfXWUHB9Bm...
Here's the same logic applied elsewhere:
It's not dangerous to be a black man in America. What's really dangerous is to be a El Salvadoran living in El Salvador(the country with the highest murder rate in the world).
Police officers are volunteers, not conscripts. They're free at any time to choose a less dangerous profession if they so wish.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if policing was more dangerous than working in an asbestos-uranium mine on a fault line. There's no excuse for law enforcement to be breaking laws without consequence. People who can't tolerate the risks should go do something else.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-i...
I imagine in general it's safer in most regards than many trades and MOSes but until I see the data I wouldn't want to make an actual assertion.
I'd put this together myself if I felt competent enough to do this properly but by no means am I a data scientist or anyone actually qualified to do this.
Edit: It's number 15 and only because 2019 was a near record low year, following decades of decline and improved equipment and training. That's a function of how good they are. And if you make them worse or non-existent, crime will go up.
While the construction industry is accidentally dangerous, cops are victims of intentional violence and hatred. They have to deal with drugged out, abusive, angry people all the time. They have to console rape victims. They have to help assess suicides, murders, deadly car accidents and all kinds of unpleasant bullshit. They see death on the job every single day. It's not a walk in the park. It causes unbelievable stress (especially in high crime districts) and it pays 1/3 of what a junior JS dev makes and they don't get stock options or grants
It's 5x more deadly than average occupation and 6x more injurious. It also causes loads of psychological and emotional stress because they have to deal with people going through some of the worst episodes of their lives...all the time.
https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/police-officers-2014.htm
"Police respond to murder-suicide in Durham" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei4D2toAHQ4
"Man shoots, kills police wearing body cam" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssARbfxqTh0
"Police respond to reported armed robbery on South Hill" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7iOelX_0kY
"Bodycam Footage Shows Woman Falsely Accused Cop of Sexual Assault | New York Post" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTv5VkX_T8o
"Police seek man who tried to rape elderly woman" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWPvXsUmZik
You let me know what pizza delivery driver has to deal with shit like that.
You don't have to be killed "feloniously" to be dead. And you don't have to be killed at all to have your life destroyed.
The sides here are decent folk (police and protesters) against the racists and the violent criminals (police and rioters and looters).
And the police agree: "Three big California police unions release national reform plan to remove racist officers" https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/3-big-California...
Their plan includes "a national database of former police officers fired for gross misconduct that would prevent other agencies from hiring them."
I can't even think of things they regularly do that can be called heroic? I know they do some good stuff, but nothing that comes close to the level of "hero" in my opinion.
Firefighters, EMTs, nurses, and doctors are all examples of actual heros, IMO.
The answer is, apparently, nobody. The police should not be above the law they're enforcing. The only thing that's changed is that with the mass adoption of smart phones we're able to see from multiple angles how deep the corruption goes.
A moment with a search engine will turn up story after story of people in uniform putting their lives on the line to help others.
Personally, I think they're heroes because they're people just like you and me who are willing to risk their lives to help other people. At least most of them are, I believe.
Law enforcement is necessary(strictly, a crime investigation unit, a force capable of handling armed/bomb situations, etc.) but something has seriously gone wrong with the way it’s been implemented in many cities, counties, and states.
I can't even think of things they regularly do that can be called heroic? I know they do some good stuff, but nothing that comes close to the level of "hero" in my opinion. They squirt water on hot stuff? Cool.
They also don’t have a history of killing black people at 2.5x their usual rate of killing people. (They also by and large don’t kill people, in fact they’ve killed so few people there doesn’t exist case law that prevents liability of a firefighter for killing a person. Unlike cops.)
75 year old man thrown to the floor for no reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4f4dXXbfEg
Two of the officers responsible were suspended. In response, the /ENTIRE DEPARTMENT/ resigned: https://nypost.com/2020/06/05/buffalo-emergency-response-tea...
American police need to be disarmed and fired. The idea of a professional police force (especially an /armed/ police force) makes about as much sense as a professional jury service.
Those 50 some police did not resign from being police. They resigned from emergency response duties because they were shown that their dept will not support them.
There is also more to that “poor 75yo man” story. He is a professional agitator with a now-deleted social media history of hating the police, despite this hatred he showed up hours early before police did with a police motorcycle helmet he wanted to return because it was the right thing to do, this stated by a Buffalo/NPR reporter who he happened to be there with, while BLM activists knew/recognized him as an agitator and told him to go home, asking him why he was there and replied a few times “just for fun”, then in the full video you can see he is using he is using his phone to scan over police radios (supposedly to skim Bluetooth advertising addresses and RSSI correlation, to get someone information to listen in on private band police traffic), all of this while not wearing a mask up until the interaction with police when suddenly he has “two” masks, one which appears mouth guard of some sorts with a mask over that.
But whatever... it’s a lot easier to just say the police beat this guy (pushed him back from an advancing police line)
https://twitter.com/ConservRachel/status/1268998560412033025...
https://twitter.com/PimpG18/status/1269328910988255232/photo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CubkyIzygQ
https://twitter.com/Sep112001/status/1269696080230350849/pho...
I think it would be much more productive and realistic to have a really deep study of how policing in America is different from other countries, and what can be done to normalise it. America is pretty gun crazy, and that doesn't make a cop's life any easier. The flip side of that is that some gun crazy people become cops, and shoot people on their knees with weapons engraved with "you're fucked": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver
This is a classic example of bad / misleading marketing on behalf of a reform movement. The "Defund the Police" movement has been poorly named. Yes, there are absolutely some folks on the extreme who truly want to disband the police and live in a place without police, but by and large, the major of people who are supporting this movement mean something else:
Defund == defund the CURRENT police organizational structure (militarized, etc.), reallocate funding for things like homeless support, domestic checks, etc. to other departments better suited to handle them, and KEEP a policing organization which is responsible for a much narrower scope of duty with a reformatted training program, etc.
It should be branded "Reboot the Police", not "Defund the Police"...
False dichotomy.
You can defund the police, by not sending armed, militarized police to do the bullshit parts of their jobs, while still responding to violent incidents.
For 99% of police calls, you don't need an armed gunman to show up. Of the 1% that you currently do, more often than not, that armed officer won't even show up in time.
Maybe US cops need to just leave their guns in their cars more often?
Example: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HXD0AX/windsor-uk-27th-march-2017-...
From your own link it shows less than 200 deaths of police per year from the last five years. Hundreds as you've used it imho is misleading. Furthermore those stats include accidents which makes them even more misleading. Do you honestly think deaths from cancer related to 9/11 should "count" in the context of this debate? And yet they closely trail and sometimes even eclipse the death of cops by gunfire in the past 5 years.
I do agree that it's a dangerous job but I don't agree that they're "required" to be heavy handed because of "gangsters" with "serious weaponry". The weaponry issue is a gun control one, not a "gangsters" one. There's absolutely NO NEED for so many ARs over there. NONE WHAT-SO-EVER. And I say this as a reformed red-stater expat who had a AK under my bed as a teenager and a 40 smith in the night stand.
From my perspective I think the narrative for cops is disproportionate and out of hand. The ample, arguably overwhelming, footage of cops beating, maiming, shooting, and killing people in the past month alone is ridiculous and should be evidence enough that the police have lost their way. Instead you're in here defending them in spite of overwhelming video evidence to the contrary.
In Australia and NZ the police are legally bound to these key principles.
• Police should only use force that is reasonable, necessary, proportionate and appropriate to the circumstances.
• Police should use no more force than is reasonably necessary for the safe and effective performance of their duties.
• Individual police are accountable and responsible for their use of force and must be able to justify their actions at law
Do you think the video below is a good example of the use of proportionate force? Do you think that shooting was justified? https://twitter.com/i/status/1272177941519257600
On a related note I found this an interesting read.
https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard...
In those examples, I’m fairly confident the perpetrators will be arrested and likely justice will be served. In the first two, arrests have already been made and they’ve been charged. Meanwhile, those that murdered Breonna Taylor are still free despite the fact that the police know exactly who the perpetrators were.
We want justice for all.
When a cop kills someone, they almost always go unpunished, no matter how unjustified it was.
Police officers die in the line of duty. Yep. It's a dangerous job. You know who else dies in the line of duty? Truck drivers. Truck drivers die at 2x the rate of police officers in America. Do they get a free pass for beating the shit out of people and killing them? Hell no.
https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/police-officers-2014.htm
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/05/08/the-nu...
https://www.policeone.com/coronavirus-covid-19/articles/covi...
Landscapers and truck drivers never have to wrestle a large, non-compliant man into handcuffs or talk down domestic dispute that turned into a potential murder suicide.
Software engineers who sit on their computers all day and try to backseat drive on these issues should probably be dragged into the streets and set on fire.
Why is it legal for police to coerce people they’ve detained into sex in many states? Why does civil forfeiture exist? Why are police not legally obligated to 1) know the law, 2) protect people?
Congratulations, I think you're qualified to be a cop.
> Of course, when a pizza delivery driver is injured in a car accident, it is not usually an isolated event; other drivers and passengers are also involved. All too often, the accident is caused by the delivery worker’s negligence. They are racing for tips, trying to uphold the company’s reputation for service, aiming for positive feedback at work, or they are simply checked out and bored because they spend so much time in the car.
Yes, cops frequently kill themselves in traffic accidents as well, but the difference is that they are usually not rushing to a place to put a few dollars in their pocket - but rushing to a place to protect or help someone who called upon them.
[0]https://southfloridainjurylawfirm.com/pizza-companies-take-r...
Just as crimes against police are more serious than crimes against civilians (rightly, IMO), crimes by police should also be more serious.
This triggers riots and protests, which require the police to work overtime.
They get paid for causing all these problems, and well paid. Their overtime costs must be tremendous. And who ends up paying? We do.
We should claw back police overtime pay for any protests or riots that are caused by the police themselves. I think that's fair and equitable.
I’ve had friends who’ve been pulled over while passing through Illinois and asked to hand over their wallets just so the cops can count their money. They only had a few bucks and were let go, but I’m sure if it was a little too much, the cops would’ve claimed it was drug money and taken it. The cops didn’t mention speeding or any sort of crime, so their reason for pulling them over was pretty clear. They probably target non-local people because nobody is going to come back just for a hundred bucks or so, and if they need to make up a ticket on the spot, few people will bother to fight it.
It’s like the Police has a letter of Marque to do piracy. [0] Except that means they are at war with you, not a foreign country.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque
The police department will determine if it is worth ‘paying off’ the remaining loan amount, so they can seize the car and sell it at auction.
This is a problem that could be easily greatly improved with legislation (and without requiring the more radical and controversial step of abolishing civil forfeiture entirely) - each state could legislate that civil forfeiture proceeds are to be paid into the general state budget not kept by the local police forces. This would remove much of the incentive for overuse of civil forfeiture.
"When a nation hoards weapons, troubles arise from within and from without.
When its leaders try to be cunning and clever, the situation spins further out of control.
When they try to fix things by passing more laws, they only increase the number of outlaws."
民多利器、國家滋昏。
人多伎巧、奇物滋起。
法令滋彰、盜賊多有。
It would have to be a lifelong pursuit like a real monk, without much financial incentive. The problem is without trust and respect it wouldn't work since no one would enlist. I'm not sure how you would bootstrap something like that.
You have some outliers that are violent and the rest just does their job - keeping the city more safe.
Also don't assume all cases of police officer shooting a person are cases of police brutality - this is for court to prove.
That it does not seem to be happening unless there is video and public outcry suggest the issue is cultural and institutional, not just individual. The good cop is not reporting bad cop and is not testifying against him. Maybe the good cop would be retaliated against, maybe nothing would be done, and all of those are reasons why bad cops are empowered.
This is similar, if you know someone you have less incentive to report on one.
The better you know them, the higher is the bar for reporting.
I don't think this comparison is as good as you think it is.
I think we need some massive overhauling of how accountability works in police situations and I think that will have to start with shit rolling uphill.
If the police were genuinely "good", they would act as a unit and reject the bad ones. In fact, the opposite happens, and they keep silent when bad cops commit crimes, and they reject the good ones who try to actually try to be good.
This is the culture that needs to be destroyed and rebuilt.
Those two scenarios are so far apart, attempting to draw a comparison is disturbing.
Let's assume two cases:
1. A programmer, his work involves programming (obvious), going to meetings, printing some reports/codes etc.
The biggest problem he can do is introduce bugs in code by mistake (yes, lives can be lost that way), would you expect his peers to tell on him that he was the guy that introduced a bug that killed 300 people in a plane crash?
2. A cop, his job involves preventing crimes, event violent ones, so he sometimes need to use his gun to prevent some of it, and sometimes he has to shoot a criminal.
His mistakes might be killing innocent person. Same thing can happen to his colleagues, so they protect him (just like any sane community would, like your family) - at least unless he turns out to be some sick sociopath.
Do you see relevance now? If you play with code you can just break code, if you play with guns you can break lives.
A side from that I don't get it why there are so many people that trash cops, but don't say a bad word about looters.
Cops protect us from crimes, small and big. They provide order, there are always black sheep, but there are less of those than you think - good guys also make mistakes.
Without a force that provides protection from crimes we would turn into vendetta like justice - have you been to countries that just went out of war? e.g. after the fall of Yugoslavia, there was no police there only tribe and vendetta justice.
Each utopia turns into dystopia sooner or later (CHAZ).
If I thought my coworker had deliberately introduced a bug that killed 300 people, I would absolutely turn them in. There is absolutely no question in my mind that I would do that.
But cops do not turn in their own when they deliberately abuse their power. They in fact resign in protest when their own are investigated (Buffalo, NY), and turn out in support when their own are arraigned for abuses of power (Philadelphia, PA).
Intent to kill is something a sociopath does, do you think police force has more of them than the rest of society?
There was a time when vigilant justice didn't need court, but I don't think we want that to return (witch hunts in middle ages or lynching in 19th and early 20th century USA).
Actually, yes, they are filled with sociopaths. It's well known that lower-intelligence people become police. The police actively reject candidates with higher intelligence because the theory is that they become bored.
Also, it's well known that the occupation attracts bullies, who love the idea of bullying people and having power over regular citizens.
What you end up having is a group of low-IQ bullies, and they control the entire police force, because the "good" cops don't want to rock the boat. The stupid, boisterous bullies are the ones that create the culture of silence and complicity, and ultimately violence. I believe that cops love the idea that they are at war against the common citizen, which is why they draw their guns and escalate situations even before anything has happened.
Any data?
> Also, it's well known that the occupation attracts bullies, who love the idea of bullying people and having power over regular citizens.
Again, data? Isn't it easier to become crook? More pay, less control, more freedom.
I know they are not PhDs but come on.
What you are doing is exactly the same what others do to different races/genders/nationalities, just replace "police" in your sentences with "black", "yellow", "women", "jewish" etc.
Hate against whole occupation, thousands of people. People start poisoning them (have you seen what happened in NY?), their children are bullied at schools.
Pure and simple hate crime.
If I reported that someone is using corporate assets (printer, laptop) for personal things, my manager would consider me crazy. If I reported someone being bit late, it would be the same.
That is exactly the culture thing. The corporate printer or laptop being used is not being seen as an issue by me, you or anybody else, regardless of what official rules say.
I mean there’s even a “good cop/bad cop” trope that’s got to be the best example of this kind of behavior—I can’t count how many times police are complicit with straight up torture and abuse of rights on Law & Order.
"The 81st Precinct covers Bedford-Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant Heights. The NYPD Tapes were secret recordings made by whistleblower officer Adrian Schoolcraft in 2008-2009 proving widespread corruption and abuse in the precinct. After voicing his complaints internally, he faced harrassment by fellow officers. High-ranking NYPD officials eventually ordered an illegal SWAT raid on his apartment, physically abducting him and involuntarily committing him to a psychiatric facility for six days. The license plate “54-EDP” references a “10-54 EDP” call, in which a so-called “emotionally disturbed person” is taken to a hospital via ambulance. The quote is the Deputy Chief ’s recorded order to remove “rat” Schoolcraft to the hospital."
NYPD have made it very clear that if you're a "good" cop, the rest of the cops will destroy you.
There is some evil that is done by good guys, and a tribe/community protects them. This is normal human behavior.
Sociopaths are a minority.
Would you protect your child if he/she did a hit&run? Would you report him/her right away?
We've had children "protesting" here in the UK too despite the police not generally participating in brutality.
Simply put, the defund the police slogans are damaging to the DNC outlooks in November and three major unions basically read the riot act to the DNC and members in Congress that no talk that can come back to collective bargaining being a reason police get away with so much abuse is allowed. Instead it must be that they lack training, the security of their pension system raises anxiety among the forces, and lack of officers incurs overtime furthering anxiety. So the only solution is more money for training, propping up their pension systems, and more money for community policing.
just put it this way, when that was dropped on me from a relative as their new marching orders I thought they were joking.
tl;dr the whole defund the police calling is poison in November and the big influences in politics has called their party to the carpet to change the direction of the debate
Their abuse is literally publicly subsidized.
Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.
No, they should come out of taxpayer funds. The principal is responsible for the actions of their agents.
If the public authority doesn't properly screen, train, supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights, it is their responsibility and the responsibility of the public who chooses that authority.
Absolving the public authority and the public of responsibility just means that there is reduced incentives to address systemic problems.
I'm pretty sure that that's what I just proposed, by causing the results of supervision and discipline to trigger negative consequences.
You may be mistakenly assuming that exhausting the pension fund directly cuts pensions for those covered, which would still be remote just in targeted individuals and time, but there is no necessary relationship there. It just makes it more likely that the public authority would be forced to declare bankruptcy because it can't meet it's pension obligations, at which point it might be able to shed pension obligations for employees (not just those covered by the fund, if the police have a distinct fund!) as part of the bankruptcy, but that could happen as a result of direct settlement payments, as well.
In the fairly common case where the police don't even have even have their own pension fund but contribute to a common fund with other employees, perhaps not even from the same local jurisdiction (e.g., California local governments where often both police and other employees are covered by CalPERS), taking it out of the fund would even lack the symbolic sense that it has in the more simple case.
If you want direct liability for the people doing the immediate wrong, you want an end to, or limitations on, qualified immunity, not redirecting public authoriry liability to pension funds. That, of course, would make the public authority not responsible, but to would mean that individual cops would also be responsible on civil suits.
The deep seated issue is the principle agent problem around elected officials. The police threaten the politicians, who don't want to rock the boat, to get a lopsided contract that makes them virtually immune to any oversight. This is why we're literally at "defund the police" - citizens are finally crying uncle and demanding that their city's entire contract be thrown away and redesigned.
Most people don't want to defund their police. Per the latest Monmouth poll, about 60% favor the police (compared to ~11% for congress) and most people see the police as their protectors.
Police don't get a lopsided contract by threatening politicians and that's a grossly inflammatory claim. Contracts are negotiated like any other, and given that most people don't want to spend their time being spit on and attacked, it turns out you get to ask for a fair bit of protection in that contract.
> Blaming voters is a fallacy of late-stage Democracy
Blaming anyone else is a fundamental misunderstanding of Democracy. Everyone pretends to like Democracy until they realize not everyone shares their opinion, and then all of a sudden pull out the insults and attacks on fellow voters.
> Per the latest Monmouth poll, about 60% favor the police (compared to ~11% for congress) and most people see the police as their protectors
Unfortunately this instance of corruption is a tough nut to crack. The sheer majority of people will never be victims of the police, just as most people will never be victims of any violent criminal. Hence the focus on video evidence and actually discussing the issue now that it has the spotlight, getting more people to care about these unaccountable criminal gangs calling themselves police. It's called solidarity and the rule of law - caring about what is right even when it does not affect you personally.
>> Blaming voters is a fallacy of late-stage Democracy
> Everyone pretends to like Democracy until they realize not everyone shares their opinion
You just seem to be going on a tangential rant here. I was referring specifically to this tendency to ascribe a democratically-chosen action as the responsibility of everyone who was given a chance to vote. I personally do not hold up Democracy as some sort of ideal, but rather Liberty.
That's false. Qualified immunity is a result of a supreme court decision and not part of police contracts. The only thing in most contracts is that police officers who are fired get a chance at mediation for firing disputes.
Police officers do get legal protections, the same way you and I get them. You can't release private records of a police officer, you can't sacrifice them publically to appease an angry group, etc etc.
In general you're repeating talking points about fragments of what I said, while ignoring my substantive points. For instance, explaining QI doesn't address how the police have also been able to weasel out of criminal and administrative penalties - eg why haven't Breonna Taylor's killers been charged and put in jail, or at the very least quickly fired? There are obviously mundane procedural answers for these, but added up it's a very lopsided contract allowing the police to play Rambo with impunity.
QI is irrelevant to crimes, it applies to torts. And when carrying out their explicit duties, police are performing ministerial tasks for which government employees, including police, have absolute immunity; it is only outside that space where they enjoy qualified immunity, and whether the requisite nexus to their official duties for QI exists is a legal question for the courts, not a matter which the city can declare dispositively after the fact.
> For instance, explaining QI doesn't address how the police have also been able to weasel out of criminal and administrative penalties
That's not contract, especially for criminal penalties, it's prosecutorial discretion which is entirely a matter of what the public looks for in choosing the (almost invariably locally elected) head public prosecutor who sets prosecutorial policy.
When the most important fact voters weigh in electing a DA is police union endorsements, they literally have no one else to blame but themselves for police impunity before criminal law.
Because they are "innocent until proven guilty". It's not as if they've been going on calls and continuing to kick in doors - the investigation was handed to the FBI (a federal body) and the officers were put on leave until that investigation is finished.
If they are fired and it turns out they were acting lawfully, then the people who fired them will get sued and lose.
> In general you're repeating talking points about fragments of what I said
I'm addressing specific cases and claims you make. We can argue loudly about whether or not the police play Rambo but that's not a productive thing we can debate. I can make specific claims about what is in police contracts versus what it is not and falls under QI or other federal law which supersedes local authority.
The issue is that you feel you are correct, and to that end you're making broad unspecific claims that aren't factual - literally not a matter of true or false but fundamentally so vague so as to not have meaning.
> There are obviously mundane procedural answers for these, but added up it's a very lopsided contract allowing the police to play Rambo with impunity.
That's a great example of exactly what I'm talking about. We have to care about mundane procedural answers. We can't just sacrifice someone to appease the angry mob.
No, I made general claims about a larger pattern. If you don't agree that police have managed to weasel out of most accountability, then there's really no discussion to be had. Yet you jumped in anyway to push some police-justifying nonsense ("Contracts are negotiated like any other") that grossly contradicts the events under discussion.
>> why haven't Breonna Taylor's killers been charged and put in jail, or at the very least quickly fired?
>Because they are "innocent until proven guilty".
The first step is charging someone, which has not been done. Everyone in jail is innocent - guilty people go to prison. Once again, procedural details that sound sensible while adding up into a constructively corrupt system. The case has been turned over to the FBI precisely due to the local corruption.
As you are implying some alternative justice path for cops, I'll be explicit: To evaluate how well the rule of law is working, you only have to ask yourself what would happen to a non-cop who performed the exact same actions. Specifically, what would have happened to a group of non-cops that committed a home invasion resulting in murder?
That...doesn't stop people from being arrested. Proof of guilt is required before imposing sentence, but arrest happens way before that.
No, they don't. You can't contract out of criminal sanction, for one thing. You could be indemnified from civil sanction, but QI makes that mostly moot anyway.
And, to the extent they do, those contracts are negotiated with and approved by local elected officials. Work—and, yes, this takes convincing others—to change those officials minds or change the officials, and you change what contracts get negotiated, or even of the police department continues to exist. Cf. Minneapolis (especially, but not exclusivelt) right now, Camden in 2012, etc.
The idea that citizens don't have control of local police through local government is wrong. Normally, local citizens are between actively approving and tacitly tolerating the behavior of police rather than actively seeking change, but they absolutely do have the power should they choose to exert it.
You're just nitpicking the word "contract". The arrangement with the cities generally result in public prosecutors do not bring charges against the police. That's part of the de-facto contract, even if it is not written down.
> The idea that citizens don't have control of local police through local government is wrong. Normally, local citizens are between actively approving and tacitly tolerating the behavior of police rather than actively seeking change, but they absolutely do have the power should they choose to exert it.
I've been caring about unaccountable police for well over a decade, so forgive me if I don't see myself as having much power to change anything. The vast majority of people will never be victims of the police, so as long as police keep up the illusion of providing safety, they will continue to be supported by the masses.
For what I was referencing specifically, look at Minneapolis city council members' descriptions of what happened to their districts when they previously tried to reign in the police. Yes, those same council members are now at a breaking point where enough is enough, and do actually have the power to act in concert and change things. This doesn't invalidate my description of where the vast majority of cities are with respect to the police unions. And the police unions know this, which is why their instinct is to start riots when citizens protest.
It's not part of a contract, which is binding and enforceable, and which once and while in place, citizens have very restricted ability to change via the political process. It's part of the policy of the existing elected officials, which is very much amenable to public pressure and elections. Given the context of the discussion is whether or not citizens have the power to effect these things through the political process, pointing out this difference is not “nitpicking”, as the difference is on the exact question being discussed.
Examining the problem constructively, then each aspect does have different details to pay attention to. But they also have similar shapes with momentum and indirection. Civil and administrative penalties need to be fixed through the explicit contract, which takes a contract cycle and can be derailed behind the scenes by corrupt officials. Criminal penalties need DAs willing to uphold the law, which takes an election cycle and can be derailed behind the scenes by corrupt officials. Analogously to what you said - once a DA is in place, "citizens have very restricted ability to change via the political process".
The biggest issue is that a small chance of a twenty million dollar payout in case of an egregious murder isn't worrisome to a municipality, and specifically to its politicians who's liability is limited to possibly losing their job. Meanwhile if they do advocate for reigning in the police, the union will most certainly make them lose their job at the next election. So while we can talk about municipalities being responsible for the paramilitary forces they're creating in the abstract, this is clearly not an effective mechanism for reigning them in.
It does not appear that this is money well spent.
On the flip side I'd like to point out that this increased OT often has downstream effects as well, most notably in pensions which are typically based on your last n months of pay. Some contracts include OT in this and some do not. So soon-to-be-retired officers could literally be increasing their pay for the rest of their lives based on increased pay due to working a riot.
It’s not wise to tear gas the people who are going to pay for your retirement.
They're not putting their financial future at risk.
Free will is a thing, and the police cannot make you go out and commit vandalism, mayhem, and murder.
BTW these are all things that protesters experience, as the police as trained in "crowd control" techniques which involve kettling and provoking masses of people so they can exert force to teach them a lesson.
And judging by the pictures, very few of the protesters were desperate, tired, hungry, downtrodden, etc. For most, it's an opportunity to virtue signal for a day or two, and then go back to their relatively affluent lives and forget about all of this.
Hardly a one would be caught dead tutoring some inner city kid with their algebra. Far more fun to taunt cops in an impossible position.
This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the communities directly impacted by this behavior find the abuse unacceptable no matter how muddied the “but maybe there isn’t enough abuse yet.” crowd wants to dilute the issue.
And honestly, I live a fairly cushy life, and I find the officers in my city to be stand-offish and aggressive, I can only imagine how utterly horrified Id be if they behaved the way we’re seeing. There is no way anyone in my community would have been as patient if we were subjected to the same level of treatment.
And also, it’s probably important to point out, it isn’t only the physical abuse, the day to day attitude of an overbearing police force can drastically impact your own day to day quality of life.
The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.
Even countries with less violent police corps often have episodes like this.
To keep it out of political rallies, just think of police vs hooligans in Europe.
Where are you going to get the humans who are able, wanting and willing to live up those higher standards is my question for you.
Last I checked, anyone can decide at any moment to be completely broke, a drug addict, a criminal, an alcoholic, a piece of shit, have an unlimited number of children and everyone else has to support them for some reason.
What kind of standard of conduct is that?
You won't ever get people to conduct themselves properly if ignore evolution and pretend you can magically educate people into not being animals. Americans don't even bother with trying to live up to the education myth, given how much they pay school teachers. They think they can just import people with higher standards of conduct when they have to and outsource the rest. It's more profitable this way you see, to ignore reality, fund bogus economics, manufacture consent and have this planet go to shit. It's more profitable this quarter you see.
Similar logic would apply to a position for a crane operator or a pilot. If an airline had a pattern of pilot errors, and their excuse was “if we required all our pilots to have adequate pilot training and meet stringent skill requirements, it would be very difficult to hire pilots,” would you accept that?
> If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever.
Let's say we decide to pay police officers 1 million/year and really raise their standards. Great! We did it!
Why don't we just do that across the board? The answer is - we have a limited number of highly capable people.
I see the shortage of highly capable people as a problem. My previous post was a way of highlighting that. One would have to think big picture to understand the point I was making.
Regarding leaving positions unfilled - I'm not sure you've thought this through. Imagine we have a shortage of doctors and your appendix burst. Would you rather a medical student try and save your life at say, an estimated 50% success rate, or simply die?
However, it is worth pointing out that there are around 750,000 police officers in the US. It is hard to deny that finding and or training 750,000 highly capable people is a very difficult problem.
There has to be a limit to 'higher standards' humans can live up to, I hope we can agree on that. If you agree, you can't deny that we can't have higher standards indefinitely.
We can have higher standards a little bit and we can fake achieving higher standards a lot by moving highly capable people from one set of jobs to another (from jobs X, Y, Z to police officer by paying them 1 million/year) and doing a marketing campaign that convinces the ignorant masses that real progress has been made.
My previous posts were pointing out that wanting higher standards and not having any standards for the people who create and raise new humans, are incompatible and have to be reconciled if you want to actually have higher standards, not fake higher standards via re-distribution of highly capable people.
In fact, you cant really call someone a criminal until they've been convicted of a crime - cue the video of the cops being called by the black store owner, punching him in the face and breaking his jaw while the white thief leaves.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/outrage-vide...
It is extremely hard to react with anything but EXTREME vitriol to comments like yours - police are using excessive force deliberately, and then arresting people with no cause who post videos of their crimes.
Without more context, I'm guessing their parents took them to a protest and acted illegally. If so, I think that's rather poor parenting.
There doesn't seem to be a link to the full video (or any video), so take that with a grain of salt.
This is a technical nicety not available to a policeman in a real situation. If someone points a gun at them, that someone is a criminal, even if they are "technically" not.
Personally, I’m not convinced cops need to go for a 100% apprehension rate all the time no matter what with 100% control of every situation.
Mostly because of the rate at which crimes happen without a cop around and then go unresolved.
But, then, why mix all of those in one big list and call them simply 'brutality'?
As much I sympathise with protestors and the cause, there's this not-very-wise tendency among this side of the conflict to portray themselves as 100% peaceful victims, and police as almost universally working for the forces of darkness.
So, I see it as a sad (yet, probably, temporary) tendency, that even the side which I'm sympathising with is feeling that treating me like a gullible person is OK - "The first casualty of War is Truth".
I've seen multiple officers unable to take down one violent criminal. Why is there not hand to hand training and strength training? With proper training surely they could do it cleanly without injuring the perp.
I've seen (videos of) cops just walking away from armed criminals, letting them rob a store then tracking them down 6 months later after they do the same thing twice more.
When I look at the US I see the opposite problem. Police shooting a man in the back multiple times. Police using excessive force when arresting people for non violent crime. Police just generally power tripping.
From that perspective I can see why you would want to defund the police but I really would hesitate to do that. The EU is fine with a softer police force because we mostly have no guns and when there are real terrorists we can still bring in armed police. That is not the case in the US plus you are talking about fully defunding the police. Seems like a dangerous experiment to me. Why not reform instead?
I think they should focus on demilitarising the police in the US, with that you also reduce the funding of the police. As a lot of the money goes into buying military-grade equipment. I really don't know why the police needs a tank (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarization_of_police)
I know a couple of police officers, funny enough from martial arts training (kickboxing, BJJ and so on). These guys can take a person down all by themselves, sure. But at the risk of serious injuriy. This kind of brutality is exactly what peple are demonstrating against.
Als, IMHO, this whole "everyone is carrying a gun" narrative is a little bit lazy. Sure, the US has a gun issue. But just throwing it out there, is just a means to justify police brutality and use of deadly force. If there is such a problem with guns, there are couple of ways to deal with it:
- stricter laws (seems to be dificult)
- specific and adequat police training to deal with it. That explicitly means to not shoot first
Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country"
To what extent do these, not uncommon - even here, sets of beliefs contribute to the problems of violence in policing? Not something that seems to me like a good idea to pretend does not exist or is minor or fringe.
Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Haiti, and Malaysia or Mexico, Madagascar, El Salvador, and Rwanda, depending on whether you take the CIA's numbers or the World Bank's. If you look at the list, you'll see that the European countries are closer together and in a different area of the list, the US isn't in their group.
Wouldn't that be a better indicator for "similar countries" than average internet speed or NATO membership status?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
But yeah, that's pretty radical what you're saying too. Maybe it's fair that you should only compare the richest nation on earth with much poorer developing nations with a short track record of democracy. Not sure I'd agree.
Why? Income inequality is correlated with crime rate, why wouldn't you use that to find comparable countries? Seems useful to me, similarly to comparing diabetes rates in countries with similar levels of obesity, not based on average hair color or amount of trees per square mile.
> the richest nation on earth
You'll need to define what "richest" means, I guess. The highest GDP? Largest military spending? Does that mean a lot to somebody that is poor in the US? Would that person possibly be better off in a European country with public health insurance, a vast social safety net, high welfare etc, even though it's not "the richest country on earth" by your standards?
I mean the richest nation on earth bar none. The amount of wealth in the nation. Literally that. The USA cannot plead poverty as an excuse for why anything is worse there than any other nation. Do you see it now?
I don't think US-citizens by and large want that change bad enough to accept restrictions upon their freedoms and an end to low taxes, European-level wealth redistribution does not seem to be popular in the US. I suppose they'd like the result without doing it. Unfortunately that's like wanting to be great at tennis without wanting to put in the training: understandable, but not happening.
I have no doubt that American can-do and talent will get it done.
None.
Just decide what it is, what the scoreboard looks like and get it done as Americans the American way.
Where I live, we drive cars, but we don’t fight the overseas oil wars. We’ve outsourced all that brutality to the US. That lets us smugly reap the benefits and point fingers at Americans for the violent, backwards, gun-toting culture.
So what though? Do European countries like the UK (that are usually with the US when it's time to bomb somebody in the Middle East) outsource their domestic violence?
Really, you need to provide some evidence for "we have less crime, less murders, less police violence because the US has more". "The US has more income inequality because it has to fight wars for the European countries" doesn't follow either, so please don't.
Your belief is (?) that the US aggregate violence/whatever is in no meaningful way confounded with the levels you measure in (say) EU nations: any confounding is small enough to make no difference?
We have a population of 200 (nations) of very diverse size and age, all related by historic and present competition and cooperation. Is there any fair shot at comparing apples to apples?
What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
But that only works for super powers? Why is there no trend visible for countries like Switzerland who are traditionally neutral and never fight wars with neighboring countries like France who or Germany who have a larger active military, do engage in NATO wars etc? Why aren't the Chinese shooting each other on a similar scale? Why weren't the Germans during the early 20th century when they were very militaristic? Why were the US already at similar levels in the first half of the 20th century, before becoming a global super power that others may have "outsourced" their wars to?
> What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
Minimum requirements: has some sort of rule that allows predictions that can be falsified other than "it's only true in this super specific narrow case of the USA in last 5 decades of human history, but not in any other place or during any other time".
It feels like looking for super complicated reasons that require American Exceptionalism (as in "does not apply to any other country") to explain something that is explained by well-studied phenomena that do not require US citizens to function fundamentally different than other humans in other places or other times.
A theory where every nation is a data point can’t get you anywhere. All the nations interact meaning we should reason about the system as a whole.
I say something about a nation, you expect me to back it up with other nations. But there are very few data points, and they are interconnected, and the problem has a huge number of dimensions.
It’s like I claim opposable thumbs are good for tool making and you ask me to show five other body parts where that applies.
Sure, but there's little/nothing that suggests the effect you speculate about, it seems to have no parallel in history although empires have existed before, there are counter examples ... so it seems not too likely that that is the cause. Of course, no two days are the same, no two countries are the same and no two countries are even the same with regard to their not-same-ness on two different days, but countries and cultures move slow enough, and countries and humans are similar enough that we'd see such obvious and large patterns, I believe.
On the other hand, we have other explanations that have supporting evidence, apply to multiple situations etc, so they seem more likely. When you present a new theory, claim that it cannot be falsified because no two countries are exactly the same (and therefore no relationships between countries can be the same), I think you should offer some evidence to support that theory instead of asking others to just accept it.
I’m not asking you to accept anything: I don’t evangelize. In particular I have no theory that generalizes over nations. It seems very limiting. Like ignoring a mechanism I see work in my apartment because it doesn’t hold true for buildings writ large.
Edit: Probably shouldn’t have written “the superpower” posts ago because that makes it sound like a general claim.
For example the Rayshard brooks shooting. Why was a gun needed to wake a man sleeping in a car. Why are guns needed to hand out speeding tickets.
I get that guns are needed if a bank is being robbed. But this is glorified customer service work. Imagine your car breaks down and the AAA guy who came to fix it had a gun. Like y tho?
Perhaps it's because at least some of the people they stop, for speeding or other possible offences, won't take kindly to being stopped and in many parts of the USA, those in the vehicle may be permitted to carry guns of their own...
Glorified customer service work? Far from it
Isn't the issue with laws that those breaking them don't usually care about laws? I'm sure you have laws in place against murder, and murder still happens. "But there's a law against burglary, why would you want additional protection and have a strong door" isn't a good argument.
There are good arguments (and the whole issue is a good gun control argument in general), but that really isn't one.
Sure, there are also some people who violate gun laws. But those people could be a threat to everyone, not just cops, yet surely we wouldn’t justify everyone to preemptively have their guns drawn in all human interactions.
Not necessarily drawn, but isn't that pretty much the reason you have public carry laws in the first place? Surely even the worst of cars does provide sufficient protection against roaming coyotes and mountain lions. The only predator left to fear is another human.
A reference I never expected to see on HN.
It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_...
https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Conspiracy_of_Ba_Sing_Se
I don't think it's very difficult to use context to understand what's being said by the commenter.
Quick spot check in my company's Slack channel -- One person in our team of 12 knew what the reference met.
I think it’d be counter-productive if everyone who didn’t understand a reference or technical concept on here wrote a comment asking for a shortcut explanation rather than maybe five minutes Googling and maybe watching a quick YouTube video (in this case).
OP is saying you’d need to be incredibly delusional to deny police are brutal and there’s a problem.
Most of us were forced to read 1984 and didn't really enjoy it. ATLA however, is something that we organically grew up with through high-school / college and actually paid attention to.
My group of friends would be aware of 1984 concepts... such as "Big Brother is Watching" (phrases / concepts which have escaped the book and become a thing of their own). But I don't think we'd recognize the phrase "At War with Eurasia".
Honestly, the only reason why I remember "At War with Eurasia" is because I was a quiz-bowl player and was forced to memorize key phrases from many books I barely read. Even if I did read 1984 in my high school classes, it never actually stuck with me.
1984 is a very popular and influential book.
I fairly confident that if you asked the authors of Avatar The Last Airbender they would tell you straight that they’d based that idea on 1984.
I’d be willing to bet people will be quoting 1984 long after ATLA has been forgotten.
The original two posters in this thread were also intimately familiar with Ba Sing Se / Avatar the Last Airbender. So multiple people here are fully aware of the reference and are in good communication.
I probably wouldn't reach for a reference to ATLA myself. But, apparently its popular enough that plenty of different posters in this very discussion are aware of it and able to explain to other people here the concept.
I'm your age and I never even heard of Avatar the Last Airbender. I'm sure my younger cousins know about it.
My anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise, but I’d love some real data - how are you measuring that?
These are all late 20s, early 30s people, Brazilians, Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch and so on, 1984 would immediately be known by most, quite a few have read it, none (even if they know about ATLA, what many don't) would get the reference.
Interesting I can cite a conversation I had not long ago with them to act as anecdotal data, I'm really interested to see what is the split here.
Since it was American made, that makes it a cartoon and not an anime.
Actual genres would be "Shonen" (Dragonball Z, Full Metal Alchemist, My Hero Academia), "RomCom" (Ah My Goddess, SNAFU), "Magical Girl" (Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure), Mecha (Gundam), "Sci Fi" (Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in a Shell), "Mindfuck" (Evangeleon, Paprika, Paranoia Agent), or "Isekai" (Overlord, Sword Art, Slime)
And a few shows are blend between genres. Both Inuyasha and Kenshin are Shonen + RomCom blends for example. There are a few shows I can't pin down exactly (Little Witch Academia doesn't seem to follow any genre rules... too many action scenes / stress to be Iyashi. Not enough transformation scenes to be magical girls. Not cute enough to be a moe. Too much supernatural to be slice of life)
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Each genre of anime has its own art style, expectations, and writing style. Avatar would probably be a Shonen if I were to pin it to a specific genre (Child protagonist, action scenes aimed primarily at young male audiences... a "Shonen" or young male demographic). Avatar's artstyle is reminiscent of Shonen as well.
Paprika is definitely an "anime", but look at Paprika's art style: https://i.imgur.com/Sf0jtn0.png
Or "Night is short, Walk on Girl": https://i.imgur.com/Tz7w9bo.png
Both Paprika and "Night is short..." are anime and considered anime by the whole community. But stylistically, they are no where close to Avatar, DBZ, Full Metal Alchemist.
--------
The most consistent definition of anime is Japanese origin, or at least "Eastern" cartoons. "Anime-style" describes Avatar, Teen Titans, and RWBY. But its not really acceptable in the community to call those shows "anime". But I guess if we want to get technical about genres and definitions, "Anime" is a word that's too ill-defined to really be useful in these kinds of discussions.
I guess I'm in favor of obscure references, I think even if I hadn't understood I would think that must mean something really delusional.
Some people just don’t spend their time watching TV.
Edit: I know downvote edits are frowned up but... I need to ask: why are people downvoting this? Do you not think NCIS is good example of a mainstream show?
Looks like the original show only (at #2, after NFL). New Orleans is at #22 and Los Angeles at #28.
Also, HN is a global community, and even though many television shows are watched internationally, their impact on pop culture overall can be drastically different. So, you can't assume a major show in your country will be readily recognized by your fellow nerds in another country.
Let me remind you that the whole discussion started by me highlighting the popularity of The Last Airbender (due to Netflix, as someone pointed out) by comparing it to a mainstream show. I could have taken any popular show but thought taking the one topping the charts would be enough to illustrate it. Apparently not, and in the future I must carefully review the viewing habits of the whole HN community in order to make a point and not offend anyone.
So let me revise the comment: The Last Airbender is as mainstream as any other popular show today.
If you read the sibling comments they are trying to say NCIS is not mainstream at all since TV ratings mean nothing, making the opposite point of yours. You guys are impossible.
Twitter as another resource was an example. But yes, you can look on Twitter and find many different perspectives about a topic. I would think someone who knows how to spend some time understanding multiple perspectives of an issue knows how to look in many different places for them.
As far as the rest of your comment, I think you're going way off-base here. Sorry.
I don't blame them, Twitter is it's own special hell and widely regarded as a bubble.
But of course that's not going to happen. For modern people with attention span of a goldfish it's too much of an effort to read long texts - thus they'll just keep watching the news, or reading short, one-sided tweets full of hate.
The statue of a slaver and mass murderer had been controversial for the past 30 years. I wonder if things would have gone differently if the "recontextualisation" plaque had been allowed.
There has, predictably, been a backlash. Resulting in this fiasco where a guy came from Essex to defend some statues he didn't understand ended up urinating on a monument he didn't notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040301
That article doesn't say much about the guy who urinate, how do you know what he knew/understood, or where he came from?
Mobs are not the law.
...but the unfortunate reality is that allowing mobs to destroy property become a feedback loop because they then realize that mobs can destroy anything they like with impunity.
That's no way to run a civilization.
Seems like that would embolden mobs to destroy whatever they want. Doesn't seem like an intelligent or sustainable strategy.
I'm curious how many protestors or rioters keep their phones on them (with location/COVID apps or otherwise.) Even if they don't, plenty of others are taking the videos.
Which at the end of the day is what BLM is about, not so much the individual abuses. All that extra policing isn't distributed fairly. There are some communities in the US where the police are the kind of hands-off/come-only-when-called benefactors people expect, and there are some communities where they act more like a street gang controlling their territory, stopping and confronting anyone who seems likely to challenge their authority.
In one month where the world is filled with hurricanes and every airstrip is flooded.
In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.
US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training.
Compare that with European forces and you see a completely different reality. In Europe the police is generally seen as peace-keepers, force is absolutely a last resort (probably not so true for crowd control units but certainly true for daily policing).
IMO, the issue is that the US Police are not one organization. There are over 10,000 police departments in America. In some towns, the Sheriff + Deputies are less than 10 people.
Some towns have a Sheriff who is democratically elected. This leads to massive lack of accountability, because there's no chance the Sheriff could be fired before the next election.
Under such a system, why would a Sheriff, or their deputies, ever get deescalation training?
-------------
Washington DC serves as a great example of how confusing this gets when you start actually tracing the power structures.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-church-protest...
The shear amount of "blame shifting" going on for the Lafayette Park clearing is staggering.
> More than a half-dozen officials from the National Guard, federal law enforcement and public safety agencies have challenged the Trump administration's narrative that the clearing of peaceful protesters outside the White House earlier this month was unrelated to President Donald Trump's subsequent walk to a nearby church for a photo-op, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
...
> But officials told The Post they weren't warned that US Park Police planned to push the perimeter or that force would be used.
...
> The US Secret Service issued a statement Saturday admitting that an agency employee used pepper spray on June 1 during efforts to secure Lafayette Square and clear protesters.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/tear-gas-g...
> US Park Police, Arlington Police, DC Metro Police and the Secret Service have all denied using any kind of chemical irritants in Lafayette Square Monday evening. But WUSA9 crews were there, witnessed tear gas being deployed and collected the canisters afterward.
So at a minimum, there are ~5 Police Forces, each with different accountability structures, involved in the Lafyette Square clearing. It probably was only ONE Police Force that messed up (probably US Park Police??) that was the site of the brutal beatdown.
But all the different organizations get the blame, even if the officers are of completely different organizations.
------------
US Citizens typically have to deal with ~3 police organizations per location. The city (or county) police, the state police, and finally the federal police.
And the Feds are organized into multiple different police: DEA, ATF, FBI, and ICE.
There's a "weak" culture... the "thin blue line" where Police Officers do stand to protect each other, even if they are from different organizations. But when it comes to accepting the blame, they actually shift the blame between each other a lot. So you need to be very knowledgeable about your local police structure before you can even cast blame in a proper manner.
Even if some organizations are considered good (ie: FBI generally has a very good reputation), other organizations (ie: ICE) have a pretty negative reputation in unwanted use of force.
------
Finally, a little example for how confusing this can get.
-- If you have a Sheriff, your only means of accountability is the election next year. A Sheriff and their deputies can pretty much do whatever they want. Any issues must be taken up with the Sheriff themselves in the meantime. If the Sheriff is uncooperative, you're left with voting them out next election (which is surprisingly difficult, because no one pays attention to local politics in America).
-- A Police "Chief" is typically a position that is held accountable by the Mayor. You...
You would expect directly elected police to increase accountability, but the question as always is: to whom? If the local electorate is racist, they're going to support racist violence from the police.
The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.
I don't. I have a sheriff and I barely keep up with the issue between elections. And to be honest, local police in my area are a non-issue, I've never had issues with them personally. (IMO: this is because I live in a richer suburban area. Police are well paid, college-educated, and low-stress compared to the city police)
Between the county council, my city's mayor, the state governor, the state representative, the state senator, my US Senator, my US Representative, the President, the School superintendant, roughly 4 or 5 different judges, and the sheriff... I'm frankly leaving most of my election sheet blank during elections.
Besides, the Sheriff has been running unopposed for the last decade. Even if there was an issue, its not like there's even another guy for me to vote for.
I'd have much more trust in a Chief or Commissioner setup. I at least know the name of my county executive and somewhat keep up with what my county executive does.
But the only way you can convince me that my local police, that I'm voting for directly, has any issue, is if protests erupted in my local neighborhood. A lot of these videos that are being posted online do not apply to me or my vote.
> The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.
Is it really? Think about it. The NYC officers who shoved the man were fired pretty quickly. While its basically impossible to fire a Sheriff.
Hypothetically, how would you convince me or raise awareness if my local sheriff was a problem? No major protests were in my neighborhood.
And I'm somewhat connected and informed about these matters. I've got friends who are fully ignorant, or are even 100% on the police side on this issue. How do you expect to convince them to vote for a new sheriff?
Its not really a system I'm a fan of. The voting population only can pay attention to so many issues, we should have our representatives pick (and hold accountable) more positions.
Correct; some states have laws mandating training hours for barbers that are longer than that mandated for police [0].
> not centrally vetted by any federal organism
As with many things in the US, these rules are mostly state-based (read: 50 different, often overlapping but also often contradictory systems) but with a patchwork of federal oversight.
For example, in 2012, the federal government stepped in with a judicial document called a "consent decree" aimed at reforming the Seattle police department after "a pattern or practice of excessive force that violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law" [1].
That's an example of federal oversight, but it only happens after problems have already occurred; it only applies to the city of Seattle; and it's temporary. Only a month ago [2] the city was in court petitioning for "we're all better now, federal oversight can end".
After saying in court they were reformed and would no longer use excessive force, Seattle PD used so much tear gas in a residential neighborhood that it seeped into peoples' homes [3]. Then they announced a 30 day ban on use of tear gas [4]. Then about 48 hours later they used tear gas anyway (after using "blast balls" containing "pepper spray gas" the previous night and insisting it didn't count as tear gas). Finally a federal judge stepped in [5] and issued a 14 day ban on its use - another example of our federal oversight being reactive and not proactive.
Oh, and did I mention Seattle PD shot a "less-lethal" grenade round directly at a protester, causing enough blunt force trauma to stop her heart and require life-saving CPR? [6] That was on the same night they used tear gas after promising not to.
And they threw flashbang grenades at the medics who were trying to save her life. [7]
(in case it's not obvious, I'm a Seattle resident and I'm pissed)
Another example of how complicated our justice system can be that might surprise people from other countries is all the levels of police forces we have - city police / county sheriff / state police (plus federal law enforcement - FBI, TSA, border patrol, and so on). Especially in rural areas the county sheriff often wields a tremendous amount of power [8].
0: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/28/us/jobs-training-police-trnd/...
1: http://www.seattlemonitor.com/overview
2: https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/05/08/city-of-seattle-fi...
3: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/04/43840246/seattle...
4: https://crosscut.com/2020/06/seattle-issues-30-day-ban-tear-...
5: https://www.kuow.org/stories/federal-judge-in-seattle-bans-u...
6: https://www.kuow.org/stories/...
Thanks for laying out some of that context on Seattle PD.
states run themselves, and the federal judiciary basically only steps in when state/local governments don't follow their own rules (the presumed expression of the will of the people) or violate the constitution. the constrained executive response follows from the judiciary (and sometimes the legislature).
and that's the way it should be. you want power local and limited, not consolidated and far away. that would only make things like use of force worse.
so the immediate appeal to authority should be to the local, and then state, judiciary and legislature stepping in with corrective actions. the feds aren't of much use here. they're intentionally a line of last (and slow) resort.
it's worse if we had the same sordid problems at a state or national level. it's rolling the dice once or 50 times vs. rolling them ~50,000 times.
Maybe in your country but in many, many places in the world this is demonstrably not the case.
as with markets, idiosyncratic conditions like sociopathy can lead to pockets of undue concentrations of power, no doubt.
but it would be even worse if those same conditions were concentrated on and elevated to wider populations. by distributing power, you can more effectively pit one against the other, and have some chance of bettering conditions over time. those chances decrease with power concentration.
Normal summer weekend you have at least couple dozen people shot(not by cops, so you never hear about them)
Nevertheless, a large percentage of situations can be de-escalated by police forces. What is even less acceptable, is that in many cases the escalation is originating from police officers. Which is why, to me, de-escalation and conflict management training is lacking among these officers.
Going back to your point, it is a really complex issue and I am not going to claim a deep understanding of US society.
There is a huge percentage of GDP spent on welfare in most EU countries, the welfare and safety nets put in place are (mostly) accepted in the EU because of a sense of solidarity and dignity and a mutual understanding that _anyone_ can be caught in a situation where they are facing social/family/health/finacial issues. Being misfortunate should not be punished with falling through the cracks of society. I get the impression that in the US this type of belief would be an outlier.
However, putting aside the humanitarian values, there is a very practical and utilitarian aspect to EU welfare and social benefits programs, they actually detract people from marginal behaviour because it stops them from being pushed into a corner.
There is a lot of evidence that social welfare safety nets reduce crime. Equally, there is evidence that insufficient welfare correlates with crime rise. [0]
And this I think, is a huge cultural shift. The outrage in the US would be huge if we tried to rationalize that we have to take tax money from everyone, to give free-money to people on the fringes of society, in order to reduce gun violence. However, all the EU policies for the past 40 years confirm this reasoning.
[0] Social determinants of health in relation to firearm-related homicides in the United States: A nationwide multilevel cross-sectional study, D. Kim, 2019 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
Hiring and firing by this metric is also lacking.
"Unfortunately we get the intellectuals we deserve".
You would easily get this from doctors in one month if they were filmed.
Considerably more in fact. Some studies say medical errors contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year or even more. That's just deaths, not maiming.
Oh, but those aren't the same thing, so they're irrelevant? That's fine, because the examples you gave (pilots, crane operators, fast food chains) also have nothing to do with one another. Not the same number of operators, not the same jobs, not the same safety systems, not the same number of potential cases, not the same risk probability, not the same variables. But why be rational about what we can just get emotional over?
The United States has 330 Million people. To come up with 700 cases of police violence, all you have to do is find 700 people out of 330 Million who are being arrested for something. Find the number of arrests, find the number where people resisted, compare it to the number of cases of police arresting or detaining people without incident. You can't find that data in video clips or the news because nobody reports calm arrests, or non-arrests. I'd be very surprised if anyone cared to find out what the 700 number actually means in context.
This whole document is just horror porn to use for firing up people so they'll get angry and not use their brains. It's a very smart thing to do if you want to push a particular outcome. And I'm not saying that's even a bad thing under the circumstances. But it's quite clearly propaganda.
Those are 'real' accidents; and if some are not, like DUI, there are laws against them that are enforced. If tomorrow, society stops charging DUI offenders people would protest too.
That's not the case with police brutality. We have seen again and again the police face no consequences for their brutality. That's what the people are protesting against. If every one of these cops were appropriately fired, charged and jailed, this wouldn't be a big of an issue. That simply does not happen.
The second point being, theoretically people trust cops to keep law and order and to ensure safety. So it is rightly expected for them to have higher standard of conduct and the fact that this does not happen is a systemic failure.
This is also a stupid, unnecessary, ongoing tragedy that America insists cannot be avoided despite being the only country where mass shootings happen anything like as regularly.
"Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer.
Why are you distorting my answer?
Look, I can rephrase it for you: it's also not surprising that there aren't 700 videos of scientists molesting women on arctic research stations.
There are more than 350M interactions of police with citizens in a year, and you found 400 videos - most of them questionable in the definition of brutality.
How about thousands of police officers killed that are protecting us? Here is the latest case : https://patch.com/california/santacruz/shooting-prompts-mass...
If you think their job is easy, please go with them for a daily or a nightly shift.
I'm against any brutality, but you haven't seen the brutality they experience daily and have to follow protocol to protect us and themselves.
I'm immigrant, I lived in different counties and I can tell for a fact that my interactions with the police in the US where the most pleasant and up to the point, compared to the other 5 countries I've lived (East/West EU, South America). Granted I've never done anything illegal/criminal - except traffic violations.
There is no rule of law if the police can beat the shit out of people without even so much as due process. Yeah, criminals brutalize, even kill, police. You know what happens when they do that? They go to jail. You know what happens when cops do that? Not a goddamn thing.
Congratulations on being a well-to-do immigrant. Please expand your imagination to include centuries of institutionalized racism and decades of brutal policing which black and brown people have suffered under and are fucking fed up now.
Same goes for criminals. And this is the mistake in your argumentation. Around 2.2% of black men were imprisoned in 2018 in the US (https://www.statista.com/statistics/252871/imprisonment-rate...). It's not per se outrageous that 5% or so of criminals die in the hands of the police, in a country with major social issues and easy access to dangerous weapons. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-86-carrying-fake-or-toy-...
> 43 people shot while carrying fake guns in 2016, as well as the same number in 2015, are based on data compiled by the paper as part of its national database of fatal police-involved shootings. Four of those killed were under the age of 17, and seven were over the age of 55. Of those killed, all but five were men, 54 were white, 19 were black and 11 were Hispanic.
I've been lurking on hacker news for years and I've never really seen anything quite like it.
700 cases is very low number.
edit: my answers for posts bellow
I used countries with nation wide riots in recent internet age. US is not Norway! America is full of radicals and happy trigger rednecks.
If anything France has special anti riot units, trained to use non lethal force. US has militarized police, SWAT teams and national guards.
If you expect police to disperse crowd with zero violence, while bombarded with bricks and molotov coctails, you are out of your mind.
Also it's not like the same regulatory body came up with these numbers and said "this is an objective metric on the quantity of police brutality in these countries!" You just feel like 700 is low and other countries are worse, when there could be many more examples we don't know about in all of the countries!
But if someone complains about police brutality in this case, they have zero experience, probably never left their city or read a book.
It's also true that authoritarianism runs deep in American culture. Its military and police force have been complicit in shameful crimes against humanity around the world and within the country.
The challenge is that this situation (and the corruption that enables it) has been systematicaly organized and developed over (at least) the past century, and is part of the reason for its wealth and privilege. Clearly, the overclass is not willing to give up its power, and will resort to the same old strategy of oppression and manipulation.
As sad as it is that protests against police brutality are met with even more brutality, it is a patriotic duty of Americans to right the wrongs, to express anger with the systemic issue of racism and violence against peaceful citizens, and to demand change.
As an American who grew up with the ideal of "America the beautiful", my hope is that the protests don't stop there. The illness runs all the way to the top, and the whole world is waiting for the U.S. to grow up and actually behave according to the principles that it claims.
Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1].
There are millions and millions of daily interactions between police and civilians every year. Sadly, there will be some mistakes, some of which will be caught on camera.
It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is.
[1] Johns Hopkins: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
Oh cool, a guy on Hacker News cited a John's Hopkins article. Pack it up protestors, racism isn't real and cops aren't tear gasing reporters in the face!
GP questioned how a profession can exist when it makes so many deadly mistakes. I pointed out that there is another profession, medicine, which also makes lots of deadly mistakes. Some are accidental oversights, but you can also do some searches and find some really bad medical errors. [1] but you can find lots more.
Again, what the media draws attention to, and what is going on in society on a daily basis, are not the same thing. Racism and police misconduct existed before 2020, but it just in the last few weeks really popped onto the media's attention.
And again, because of the sheer size of the United States, you have to look at statistics in addition to anecdotes when you think about policy.
[1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...
Was one black classmate mean to you in elementary school and you've devoted your whole life to be able to smarm away racism on the internet
This is true, and these videos help show that. There are more and more cases being uncovered where the police blatantly lied about their own misconduct in official reports. For instance, the police claimed the the Buffalo protester fell when video shows the police pushed him over, and the police report for the killing of George Floyd made no mention of holding him down by the neck. If there hadn't been video, I doubt either of those two incidents would have been counted in police misconduct statistics.
[1] - https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bm...
But of those 250,000, some will be small mistake, and some will be epic fuck ups (see [1]).
Similarly, the police shoot around 1,000 people per year. Of those, many are justified, some are are questionable, and a few are epic fuck ups. If you just look at the epic fuck ups, you may believe that policing is completely broken in America. If you look at it in context, you'd probably conclude that the system works well in some cases, not well in other cases, and that there are lots of tradeoffs and no easy answer.
I'd recommend Peter Moskos's blog and podcast (www.copinthehood.com and www.qualitypolicing.com) to get a more even handed perspective than you'd find in the media. I'm not defending every single police shooting, but I think the recent shift in public opinion is not based on a good understanding of policing in America.
[1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...
Then why link to that study and specifically cite that 250,000 number?
One of the main differences with doctors is when they truly do have an epic fuck up they are personally sued and can potentially lose their medical license. How many of the epic fuck ups by police in the linked Google doc will lead to the officer being sued? How many will lead to them being forced to switch to a different profession? Why do we allow these police to epicly fuck up in ways that we don't allow other professions like doctors? Does tolerating these epic fuck ups among police make them more likely to epicly fuck up in the future?
Statistics are meant to understand and bring meaning to chaotic events, like random car accidents, or randomly rolling a dice, or random mechanical failure of some complex system.
Statistics doesn’t work so well, when human interactions become involved.
And it doesn’t work well in this situation, when it comes to policing, where the officer is of the predominant ethnicity, and the victim is of a minority ethnicity.
However, you can probably infer that if the policing is done where the ethnicity of the officer and the civilian, is of a primary vs. minority ethnicity, that there will be enhanced levels of violence involved. This can be one way to infer the statistics.
At a fundamental level, there are human biases involved. There is no escaping this.
It’s possible that if you and the police officer are of the same ethnicity, then you likely have a lower chance of being assaulted or harassed by the police officer.
However, if you are a minority, or of a different ethnicity than the police officer which is of the primary ethnicity, then your probability of being assaulted or harassed by the officer goes up significantly.
The police enforcement system, is really a reflection of society.
Because it is the society that puts these police officers into positions of authority, and it is the same society that keeps them in authority.
So if the police system is corrupt, then at a fundamental level, the society is corrupt.
You can’t fix the problem, if you can’t even acknowledge that you have a problem.
It’s like Trump’s administration that recently said: There is no systemic racism in American Law Enforcement.
Thus, how can you fix something, if you can’t even acknowledge it.
I think the issue people are rioting about is that it's not a 1 in a billion chance for everyone. It's more like 1 in a quintillion for a rich white person, and 1 in a million for a person of color. That inequality stems from systemic racism in the police force. What you're saying is that it would be less of a problem if the deaths were evenly distributed across the population. That may be true, but I don't think many people would suggest it as a viable solution to the problem.
Profiling is an aspect of systemic racism.
Systemic racism doesn't need animosity for it to happen. Systemic racism is a term for how a system discriminates against race - that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents. That's not "racist" in the sense that someone deliberately decided to give people of color get less resources, but the outcome of the decision is that people of color get less resources. That is systemic racism. There doesn't need to be any racist intent on the part of any individuals in that system for it to happen (though there often is.)
> that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents.
is purely economic discrimination. Frankly, I think the recent redefinition is lacking.
No one is drawing the line on race. No one is saying "Let's fix race issues and ignore gender and poverty issues." All of these problems need to be fixed. People are focusing on race right now because several people have been literally killed by police officers who have been charged with their murders.
Ever seen some racists pushing their views the last 5 years in the most reactionary fashion? Of course you are drawing the line on race, believe it or not. Ever noticed the talk about white privilege by some latte-slurping pseudo academics saturating any discussion on racism without necessary experience? Some people obviously did.
You can argue that there is an established academic jargon, but I would dispute its accuracy and perspective as well.
Ok, the EU has 445M citizens[1] which means, by your logic, there should statistically be 40% more police "mistakes" than the US. Except there isn't. It is radically lower[2] (1536 for the USA in 2019 vs 51 for the EU in 2018/19).
[1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/figures/living_en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
First, a disagreement. Your base assumption that police activity should scale linearly with population. This is just obviously not correct. There are huge, huge differences in countries and crime rates. You can look at differences in homicide rate, for example [1]. The united states has a pretty shockingly high homicide rate for a developed country (4.96 per 100k). This is 5x higher than France or Germany. On the other end you have Japan, which is about 5x lower than France or Germany (25x lower than United States).
But that aside, the important question is: is crime driving police activity, or are the police widely malicious and corrupt? I'll admit that I'm not knowledgable enough to give a good answer to this question, but I'm very skeptical of jumping to a conclusion based on selective evidence on social media or recent news coverage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Perhaps the best solution is to have more democracy or community input into policing. It seems like it's happening now in the US (it would be quite different in other countries, where the police is national and considered civil servants; in France you can't elect sheriffs, and police is beyond the responsibility of mayors).
In the end, some communities will vote for a police that's tough, and other communities will vote for a police that's less tough. There will still be issues when criminals used to non-tough cops cross into an area with tough cops, but that's life.
Even if we don't contribute to that personally, can we at least agree to try to avoid doing things to other countries that get in the way of doing that, in really obvious ways like not randomly bombing them and pretending? Can we just admit to ourselves that a lot of global military expenditure is just a certain kind of make work? As Americans, can we then really not think of a slightly more efficient way to allocate the $7.3T that the American government raises every year from tax revenue, much of which we just light on fire policing things parts of people's lives unnecessarily?
Come on. I'm sure we can. This is like taking your hand off the literal stove. I know how horrible this all looks, and it is horrible, but it's also really easy to propose a solution to it. Divest and reinvest. It could be so many flavors of divest and reinvest, and still be a good enough improvement over how things are right now that it would be the most impressive piece of legislation for probably a 100 year span of time if not 200 years. There has to be an opportunistic, ambitious K-street lobbyist or two reading this, right? Wanna take credit for bringing America out of the dark ages? Come on...you know you want to. Now's your chance.
The bar is at the floor. You could write the dirtiest honker of a bill you've ever seen that it could make the ACA look clean. As long as it achieves the right divestments (global windmill fighting) and reinvestments (domestic production infrastructure), you're on the right track. You don't even have to get it completely right the first time. Perfect is the enemy of done here. Just something major and timely, which lets you evangelize divest and reinvest. You can even rebrand it as "digital transformation" if you really want. I would promise to never judge it as management consultant grifting again.
Because if not...I don't know how long this situation will hold. Those riots are just a taste of unease to come, and eventually, the federal branches of the government will understand how much more powerless they are with dislocation of their local constituencies. Someone is going to figure out how to relocate those constituencies.
Being the imperial power has vast benefits, do you think Rome ruled its provinces just so they had a way to spend money? Being the global power is literally worth money. It's hard to say how much, but I'm pretty sure it's larger than your military expenses.
That said, I'd love to see the US cut back, because your benefit comes at somebody else's cost.
If the net benefit to the US is positive however, do you believe the majority of people would be happy to work more to have the same standard of living, or the majority of well-off Americans would be happy to pay European level taxes to redistribute wealth within the US? I have sincere doubts on both fronts.
All the money made being an imperial power just lines the pockets of the rich.
Also very disappointing to see openly white supremacist posts on HN. Shameful.
That of course does not make the comment acceptable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality