In Australia I wouldn’t hesitate to contact the police or talk to them on the street if something happened. (Just like I wouldn’t hesitate to call an ambulance if someone gets hurt). When I lived in the Bay Area that attitude seemed naive and stupid / dangerous.
They also have a pretty decent rep for brutality themselves, particularly if you're indigenous.
So you are presenting a very misleading view.
No they don't have a 'decent rep' for brutality, whatever that means. Comparing AU police to US police is insane. Every encounter with police like a traffic stop in the US is a nonzero chance of getting killed. That's not at all comparable to Australia where there are no tasers and the use of lethal force is in the single digits per year nationally.
The view you're presenting is significantly more divorced from reality than the GP. Just like GP said, calling the police in the states even if you need their aid, is a gamble. In Australia I would not hesitate to call or interact with the police under any circumstances. Even in the immediate vicinity the Bourke St incident, I felt safe approaching and interacting with the SRG guys decked out in their military gear and automatic rifles. They went out of their way to make sure me and people with me got a safe corridor to leave the area. In the states, that'd be about a 100% chance of getting shot.
"Noor was convicted of third degree murder and second degree manslaughter for killing Ms Damond Ruszczyk just minutes after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her Minneapolis home in July 2017."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-08/mohamed-noor-sentence...
> The risk is not to the caller
Just yesterday there was news coverage of a store owner who called police for aid against looters and was attacked and handcuffed by those same police when they arrived on the scene.
Also, incidents like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/26/kazeem-oyen...
Any single one of these stories would provoke a national outcry here. They're unthinkable here. But it's everyday life in the US.
> But you don’t make a mental “death chance calculation” when you call the cops.
Yeah I do. When I was visiting the states my friend was instructing me to do things like turn on my interior car light and slowly put my hands on the steering wheel and do absolutely nothing that could possibly provoke the cop. That sounded fucking insane to me, coming from Australia.
Because domestic calls are so unpredictable in a gun-owning society, callers can expect to see a drawn gun pointing at you.
The police often do no-knock residential intrusions, while throwing a grenade into the house.
(For non-US readers: I'm not exaggerating. "Dirty Harry" movies are documentaries about living in the US.)
US 30.4 vs Australia 1.7
So yeah, there are are issues with police in Australia, but the issues are far more extreme in the US.
They definitely still carry firearms, and (although they're not as bad as american police) they definitely do abuse their power.
Just this week we had yet another story about this: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/02/video...
That's certainly not the case in Victoria. Aussie cops might be better than American ones, if you're respectable looking, but they still have the same attitude that comes with carrying a gun and being willing and able to use it.
Victoria and NSW police have a bad track record when it comes to abusing their powers and unnecessary violence. Just look at the recent case of an NSW police officer slamming an aboriginal kid to the ground because he'd had a "bad day", or the multiple cases of unlawful strip searches on minors, or the vicpol officers who pepper sprayed and verbally abused a disabled man who they were called to do a welfare check on, or the gay man who's arm they shattered when they raided the wrong house.
The way the police treat you here is highly dependent on how they perceive you. If you ever have the misfortune of getting in trouble with the police, they'll grill you on all sorts of irrelevant shit trying to get a read on you: what suburb you live in, what you do for a job, whether you have a girlfriend/boyfriend. If you're a single man living in a western suburb (in Sydney/Melbourne) with a blue collar job, they'll treat you like dirt. I ended up getting arrested a while back, and when they found out I'm a software engineer living in a more affluent suburb, their demeanour changed instantly.
Don't just judge the police on your experiences as an innocent bystander, but by how they treat those they think are less innocent. Police in Australia are far more likely to use violence and intimidation than Kiwi cops, in a large part because they are armed. Carrying a firearm creates an inherent power imbalance and a willingness to use violence and force to resolve an incident than deescalation techniques. NZ cops are much more likely to attempt to defuse the situation, or avoid the situation becoming (potentially) violent in the first place, using force is seen as a last resort than a first option (although it's a different story if you're Maori or Polynesian).
https://www.smh.com.au/national/it-does-happen-here-calls-to...
> “The family of an Aboriginal man who died in custody says protests against police brutality in the US should be a wake-up call about the plight of Indigenous Australians in the justice system.
> Speaking in the wake of video footage of an Aboriginal teenager being kicked to the ground by a NSW policeman, Paul Francis-Silva, whose uncle died in a Sydney prison in 2015, said: "It does happen here in Australia - the brutality, and the injustice against the First Nations people.”
You could also agree Australians are full of racist, evil cops as well, yes? Or is picking a few extreme examples not allowed for your country?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFaPooJBDSg
Imagine this situation playing out in the states. Guy would be riddled with bullets in seconds.
If the police have an image problem then perhaps they need to promote a culture of restraint, civility, and justice by enforcing the law against their own at all times not just when the criminals behavior makes it onto television and sparks riots that threatens to burn down the nation.
> Somehow we lost all perspective and have come to expect that our officers, whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature, will always display the same perfect virtues we carefully signal everyday on Facebook.
We can work on the them becoming paragons of virtue after they stop executing citizens in the street, attacking people peacefully protesting, planting drugs on people, and raping them.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/11/us/florida-deputy-arrested-pl...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pennsylvania-police-officer-ch...
After we get we stop raping, framing, and murdering people yes I do in fact expect those charged with serving law and order to deal with bad people without themselves becoming bad people. People in most of the developed world seem to be managing this so I don't agree that it is an impossible dream.
Many people expressed and believed that automotive fatalities were just an inevitable consequence of the the mode of transport while others insisted on pushing for systematic reforms that drastically reduced fatalities.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/automobiles/50-years-ago-...
Similarly you argue that bad behavior by some police is inevitable. I don't agree
Not nonzero but... well, you can do the math.
Police officers in the US face 12.9 fatalities per 100,000 workers. In comparison, construction workers see 14.3, agricultural workers see 17.7, farmers and ranchers around 24 and truck drivers 26.9.
As for the rest of your argument, if the 'fine' police officers don't do anything to stand up to the bad police officers or adhere to the blue wall of silence: Then they are not fine people.
I can understand how it might feel scary, though. Just because they don't have much worse outcomes than the average American of their demographic doesn't mean that they don't have more terrifying experiences than average. That's not an excuse, though. Abusive parents are often reacting to past trauma that was inflicted on them, but we still shouldn't allow them to abuse their children. Protecting the public in a constitutional way needs to be the top priority. Officer safety and wellbeing come close behind, but they should still always be in second place.
I don't know about you but I don't have to "carefully" display not killing people who are on the ground unarmed. You're depicting people with 6 months of training as if they were in a fucking warzone every day.
This sort of thing add to the perception of American police.
It is true American cops do shoot more people than their counterparts in non gun owning countries. And they can get a bit jumpy until they see what a person is about, which is somewhat understandable given the environment.
The advice to keep your hands in plain sight and don't make quick movements is good. It's very unlikely you'll get shot (as per the stats above) but to help keep everyone calm and happy. It's not really a big imposition.
This probably sounds like weird advice coming from another place. But every place has it's strange things. You have to understand, America is not far removed from it's frontier days. It's always been a fairly violent country. That doesn't mean it's not in general safe, it is for the most part, it's just there are a lot of guns and a fair amount of violence compared to Sweden or some place like that.