* police are falsely accused of bad behavior frequently, which can make it much harder to identify the actual extreme few bad apples which need to be identified and removed
* all accused are innocent until proven guilty regardless of their profession or who they are. You don’t want police accused of horrible conduct policing but at the same time they need a process of defense, as does everybody
Honestly, much of this problem could be addressed by mandating body cams. I have known police officers who live by their body cams to ensure everyone is honest. Until that happens what would you suggest to change the current situation?
Furthermore, incidents like this have really made me reconsider my objections to the panopticon. These days, I think we'd be better off if there were cameras everywhere always, broadcasting instantaneously for public capture.
If the problem isn’t systemic then how do you explain the various studies showing that minorities are disproportionately “stopped and frisked”?
Stop and Frisk disparity between Blacks and Whites
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/nyregion/nypd-social-dist...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/new-evidence-r...
More evidence that Whites are less likely to get tickets for the same offense.
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-racial-profiling...
The Movement for Black Lives objects to body cams: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-the-war-on-black-peopl...
I want my police to skillfully work on the crime problem, not carefully spend equal minutes on each demographic group.
Why not make the people really safe and reinstate Jim Crow and laws against interracial marriage?
I’m sure you wouldn’t feel the same way if you were constantly stopped because of the color of your skin. But we should just accept it.
This also explains why minority owned startups get a lot less VC funding than people who “pattern match” with Zuckerberg.
And you wonder why there are riots...
Btw, they were wrong.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/08/the-data-can-no-longe...
But it turns out that the New York Daily News was wrong about its forecasts, which the media outlet’s editorial board wrote in an op-ed Monday that it was “delighted” to admit. Instead of bedlam up in Brooklyn and hell up in Harlem, as the paper had warned would happen as a result of scaling back “stop and frisk,” the opposite happened: “Post stop-and-frisk, the facts are clear,” wrote the editorial board Monday. “New York is safer while friction between the NYPD and the city’s minority communities has eased.
So I looked it up for my state: https://www.superlawyers.com/texas/article/stop-and-frisk-in...
Here it seems to be related almost entirely to traffic stops. I suspect, but don’t know, that racial identity would play a lesser role in that case because an officer wouldn’t likely known a driver’s race until the vehicle is already pulled over. To play devils advocate though I am white and had law enforcement ask to search my vehicle several times in my youth.
And these are the types of excuses White people make to justify and to gloss over problems.
Here are similar statistics for Florida.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/new-evidence-r...
And GA.
https://www.wabe.org/study-3-ga-locations-black-latino-drive...
But you really think racial profiling only happens in one state.
Transparency is the only way to root out actual and suspected corruption. It’s not a cure but a required prerequisite.
Many of the same people on HN want government involvement because their favorite app can’t be side loaded on an iOS device (a few apps) but excuse police brutality. How many submissions have been flagged on issues regarding police brutality on HN while submissions about an app that Apple wouldn’t allow make the front page?
It shows you where people’s priorities lie.