What's the analogous conclusion from this to police brutality videos? You watch 100 and begin to think you should never talk to a cop again?
Sure you can post up a bad conclusion to draw and then attack it. I'm pretty sure there's a name for this sort of thing.
You can do better than this rhetoric question. The analogous conclusion would be that there is a systemic issue with the police and you'd prefer not to deal with them again, by defunding or dissolving the police force (seems to be a current wish by many).
> Sure you can post up a bad conclusion to draw and then attack it. I'm pretty sure there's a name for this sort of thing.
Sure you can pretend it's a bad conclusion when it's about the effect of watching selected videos and how drawing any conclusions from that is naive.
That's not my impression when people are openly calling for defunding or disbanding police departments. Those who are concerned with the tails are the sane voices drowning in a sea of insanity these days.
I agree that the outliers are the problem, but how uncommon they are cannot be determined in this way.
At least this one comes clearly labelled and backed by some evidence.
If you see a single restaurant chain use horrible ingredients for humans, trans fats, far too many preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, over and over, you should never eat there again. I've personally cut out mcdonalds, and the fast food garbage restaurants. It doesn't mean every restaurant is bad, it means some restaurant models are bad. I still eat shawarma, I still eat indian and thai, and my family still owns an italian restaurant where we also don't try to poison our customers with horrible ingredients.
If you're comparing police to restaurants, then let me ask you, then on a scale of Taco Bell to El Buli, where does the current american system police system lie on the scale? I'd argue it's more like at the dumpster outside of your local mcdonalds.
Compare that to the opaqueness of police misconduct/brutality internal investigations, or how frequently even the bad actors that are known to have done wrong, are still granted their pensions. Where is the equivalent payout for a restaurant owner who doesn't follow health rules? Where do you see other restaurant owners banding together to defend a restaurateur who's had their misconduct exposed? Where do you see something equivalent to "qualified immunity" for the food industry?
In other words, this is a great example of a reasonably well-functioning market. If regulating the police behaved much more like regulating the food industry, that would actually be fantastic. In many ways, that is exactly the goal of the protests, to bring a similar level of transparency and accountability and high standards to policing, as most people already expect and has long been standard for the food industry (in developed countries).
What about just thinking that restaurants need serious reform and accountability?
If you watched 100 videos of kitchen malpractice within restaurants in which:
- The acts of malpractice had broadly consistent characteristics
- The restaurants in question were all owned under the same organizational umbrella
- That organizational umbrella had the authority and exclusive control of the US government
And then drew the conclusion that maybe there were systemic problems that lead to these remarkably consistent issues, you'd be completely rational.
As for your other comparison between this and "the media" curating street interviews, I don't see the parallels at all.
A news outlet using a random interview with a person on the street as evidence that people are "divided over climate change" is clearly manipulative. In this case, a person is saying "Police are routinely using military equipment and force tactics against US citizens in disturbing ways. Here are 700 videos of it as evidence."
No of course not, but there are measures you can take to reduce bad practices, which is why we do those measures for restaurants! Let's make police accountable for their crimes the same way we make restaurant owners and employees accountable for e.g. food safety issues.
Police don't have a centralized authority. And it really depends on how big the chain restaurant is if 100 videos would have it shut down.
The better argument is that each one of those restaurants would be exposed and either they would put in enough effort to show they have improved or people would stop eating there. You can't boycott your local police.
If you did that, and then decided we needed either better laws concerning food safety, or better enforcement of existing laws... where is the logical issue? If someone was to make the argument that a certain tolerance of bad food handling is to be allowed, then we would need to know the rate to know if we needed to make changes, but if the view point is that no restaurant should be engaging in that behavior then I don't particularly see the issue.
Yeah there's no reason to make a fuzz about it. It becomes a bit different when the food and safety inspection routinely comes in and says yeah that's alright, keep going.
Perhaps not at a national level if there's no clear unison there but at least at a local level. Like, for example it doesn't get to me much that Philip Brailsford killed a guy. I've been desensitized much by the internet. The fact that he was rehired to get a lifelong 2500$ a month tho gives a different message about accountability in that area.
Living there would make me look differently at the taxes I pay and make me fearfull and distrustfull of police.
The police are uniquely powerful against normal citizens. Not only are these videos clearly representative of a large number of abuses, but their colleagues rarely try to stop those abuses. Few of them will be held accountable. The police are almost always above the law, if not outright immune.
In "cop vs. citizen" when it's just words, cops will always win. Even when there is video, it is difficult to get justice. A cop unjustly hitting someone and a citizen unjustly hitting someone are two different crimes, in my opinion, and the cop committed the far worse of the two.
The fact that everyone watching George Floyd get murdered in slow motion was too scared to tackle that cop is proof enough of the power to kill with impunity that cops have.
You lost that bet.