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[return to "Americans' perceptions of police drop significantly in one week"]
1. creati+2b[view] [source] 2020-06-07 01:57:03
>>srames+(OP)
Imagine isolated anectdata determining people's opinions of police! One of the first rules of understanding the world is to not let emotionally charged anecdotes, isolated events and individual mistakes determine how you judge groups, trends and collectives.

What's happened in the last week is that targeted propaganda has flooded people with a few isolated examples of bad things happening and letting people's emotional response mechanisms do the rest.

Did you know that tens of thousands of people die from medical malpractice and medical errors each year? There are many thousands fewer people suffering from police brutality, yet somehow the police have an infinitely worse reputation than doctors and surgeons yet your chances of being killed by a surgeon is far higher than being killed by a cop.

The police do one of the hardest jobs in the country, dealing with the worst elements of society every single day. It's shocking to me that there isn't far more "brutality" every year than there is, and I commend the police for keeping us safe while having to deal with people that hate them and want them dead every day.

The judgement callously meted out on police on HN and elsewhere is completely unjustified.

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2. Someon+Rb[view] [source] 2020-06-07 02:04:20
>>creati+2b
Your analogy kind of works against you:

Doctors have their own personal liability insurance, if they make too many mistakes they literally cannot afford to continue working in medicine (or have to move to a lower risk sub-field that have lower base premiums).

If police held their own individual liability insurance, and it too could become uneconomical for them to continue to practice law enforcement, I'd consider that a huge improvement over the status quo.

If you want law enforcement to be comparable to medicine, then oversight is going to raise tenfold.

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3. creati+Mf[view] [source] 2020-06-07 02:53:56
>>Someon+Rb
Police act in a hostile environment which can't be compared to the environment in which surgeons and doctors operate. Where their lives are not at risk. Mistakes are more understandable and more likely in hostile environments, which makes it a wonder that there are not more instances of police making serious errors given all the interactions police have with hostile and combative people.
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