Even with bipartisan support for stopping these unconstitutional practices they have enjoyed surprising staying power through different administrations.
Comes from anonymous donors [1]. Nothing strange about that.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/nyregion/terrorism-nypd-i...
>With offices in 11 foreign capitals and an unpublished budget, the ILP’s far-flung counterterrorism cops operate outside the authority of top U.S. officials abroad, including the American ambassador and the CIA station chief, who is the nominal head of U.S. intelligence in foreign countries.
>The ILP is supported by private donors through the New York Police Foundation, which won't say how much it has given the NYPD, beyond a sentence on its Web page that it sought to raise $1.5 million for the program in 2010. The NYPD itself won't say whether any of its annual $178 million budget for intelligence and counterterrorism goes to posting detectives in Paris, London, Madrid or other posh capitals.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/11/nypds_fore...
And of course the more private property one has, the better the protection...
https://blog.ap.org/announcements/the-decision-to-capitalize... https://apnews.com/71386b46dbff8190e71493a763e8f45a
The FBI and the rest of our national security apparatus exist to deal with those issues.
Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police.
(Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the police" or "defund the police", because from their point of view the police are the people most likely to assault or kill them or their children on the street, more so than random criminals)
> “Young teens or pre-teens of color were handcuffed, arrested, or held at gunpoint while participating in age-appropriate activities such as running, playing with friends, high-fiving, sitting on a stoop, or carrying a backpack.”
This is child abuse.
The problem isn't a few bad apples, it's a culture that allows a few bad apples to expect impunity and protection from the consequences of their actions.
The police don't care about your personal property. Just try to get them to do anything useful in response to a burglary.
Private property, like land, or the means of production, is an entirely different story. Those things receive full police protection.
Still... the terminology of race is never going to be precise, and to the degree it exists at all, I'm going to be seen as white rather than another thing. So we might as well be parallel, and use White along with Black and Indigenous and other tendentious but sometimes useful categories.
So if I had to bet, that's where I suspect AP will land. But I don't envy them the process of coming to that conclusion, or the backlash they're going to get either way.
"sidewalk to strike an unarmed black man on a bicycle head on."
So... "to strike" this wasn't an accident?
After living in Europe for six years now, my wife is still puzzled sometimes by the differences between Europe and North-America when it comes to the police: how they are experienced by the population and how they see and present themselves and which role they think they're playing in society. Big difference. I'm certainly over-generalizing but here, we see cops as approachable and helpful in general (with exceptions) while in North-America, at least my wife's impression is that of cops being mostly intimidating (again, with exceptions).
Of course, this is all complex and different social and societal aspects play a big role, such as e.g., the odds for a cop of running into an armed person. But when I read how the police handled the situation with the group of black trick-or-treaters, it seems so foreign to me now from a more European perspective.
I suppose accountability is always going to be an issue - who watches the watchmen? But it should not be - in a democracy especially, there should be functioning mechanism to prevent abuse of power, and that of course applies to police actions, too.
The point of abolishing police isn't so that nobody shows up when you call 911. It's so that the right person for the right situation shows up when you call 911.
Given the current state of American policing, there is only one situation where I would call the police, and expect the right person to show up.
That situation is an active shooter. For nearly everything else, I don't need an armed-to-the-teeth, compliance-at-gunpoint, qualified-immunity-protected man with a gun to show up. He is not the right person for 99% of the work the police currently engage in.
Investigation:
> civilian investigators don’t have direct access to the [body cam] footage. They email requests to the NYPD, which decides which footage is relevant. The department takes its time.
Adjudication:
> [E]ven if the CCRB substantiates a case, the commissioner still has complete authority over what to do next. He can decide to simply ignore the recommended punishment. The commissioner can also let the case go before an internal NYPD judge (whose boss is the commissioner). If the judge decides punishment is merited, the commissioner can overturn or downgrade that, too.
Punishment:
>In 2018, the CCRB looked into about 3,000 allegations of misuse of force. It was able to substantiate 73 of those allegations. The biggest punishment? Nine officers who lost vacation days, according to CCRB records.
It might still be systemically racist, but at least the consequences thereof will be lower.
We've already tried reforming departments. It doesn't work. The entire management structure of your neighbourhood police department resists reform. The line officers resist reform. The police chief resists reform. No amount of winger-wagging at them will result in reform. No amount of sensitivity training or unconscious bias training, or body cams have managed to reign them in.
Wiping the slate clean, and starting over might.
We're in very bizarre times, for sure. Is all this even meant to be constructive (because it's not), or just provocative and divisive (which it demonstrably is)? I can't help but think that the outcome we're seeing (division) is the actual goal.
I am typically a pro-union person. I even think that police unions, as a concept, should exist.
But police unions, as implemented, are the reason that civilian oversight of police is impossible.
Typical unions consist of line workers - with maybe line managers. They are then overseen by professional managers, directors, etc, who are not part of the union. The union advocates for the line workers, in opposition to managers.
Police department unions are completely different. Every level of management, except for the very top (The mayor and city council) are part of the union. And, unsurprisingly, this leads to a huge conflict of interest, where the line workers aren't opposed by the managers - but are working together, against the civilian authorities.
To draw a parallel, it would be like the entirety of GM, including the CEO, being part of the UAW union. Do you think that would represent shareholder & board interests well? Or would it lead to a completely out of control company, that would operate without any care for board oversight?
hell employers (especially state employers) require degrees and ridiculous experience levels just to wield JS on a crud app.
They are both worried about criminals. The fact that some criminals have badges and guns and a conspiracy of accomplices in positions of power shielding them from accountability for their crimes doesn't make them any less criminals.
> Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the police" or "defund the police", because from their point of view the police are the people most likely to assault or kill them or their children on the street, more so than random criminals
That's starting in the general direction of the truth, but not correct. It's not so much that Black community members (much less BLM activists, who are more likely to have detailed statistics at hand) think police are the most likely threat, but that police as currently constituted are a threat that Black communities both pay for and get poor returns from, both because of actual abuse by police and because their actual law enforcement needs (and other needs which society has shoveled into the police portfolio) are simultaneously underserved (and not just when it comes to crimes by cops; BLM, after all, didn't start in response to police violence.)
The cruiser was going at least 130mph, without lights or siren on, struck the car at the b pillar and literally sheared the car in half right behind the driver. It was unreal, the two pieces of the car looked like they had been cut in two by a giant table saw. The front end of the cruiser was smashed in pretty well.
Incredibly, when I pulled my car off the road to help, I found both drivers up, relatively unhurt, ambulatory and in a daze from shock. A few minutes later another cruiser pulled up, called a tow and drove the civilian driver home. It became a local news story as the police officer was not only not arrested, but not disciplined in any way. Insurance covered the cars and the officer was back on the beat in a new car within the week. His rush? He wanted to make it home in time to watch a college ball game after his shift was over.
...how could this be justifiable?
Seems odd.
What were the demands?
[EDIT] this and other dangerous-driving observations lead me to treat cop cars on the road like someone I've seen through the window drinking a 40 while talking on the phone. They're far and away the most likely category of vehicle to do something batshit crazy with no warning.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-qualified-immunity-p...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/atlanta-police-booked-felo...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/buffalo-police-officers-arrested-s...
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/csi-w...
It's amazing how powerful just applying capitalize() to a string can be.
I think taking away officer's weapons will drastically change who they decide to engage and how they do so.
The US has always had this exclusionary divided culture due to its diversity and racism. It makes it hard to fix some of the larger issues that exist, since much of the debate is framed as "us vs them".
You can see similar issues in countries like Malaysia, where the parties are mostly split on ethnic lines.
This isn't excusing this behavior at all. Just context.
Landowners and merchants hired private police to watch over their holdings. Over time, they convinced locals that it would be in the public good if the guards they hired were paid for by everyone.
In the 1850s, in Boston, they formalized this arrangement into the first police department in the country. (There's an interesting history here around the oppression and then incorporation of Boston's Irish population by the police force.)
Edit: Curious about the downvotes -- this is a review of US history.
If that’s the final output I suspect most people will want to retain the status quo because the primary problem is ignored at great expense.
What (some) european countries have is a much lower violent crime rate, which might jade perceptions either way.
I respect most people by default, but individuals like them make it hard for me to respect police by default. I'll be respectful, but in my head I can't help but think of all the scummy things they or their colleagues do.
That point of view is just factually incorrect. It’s like thinking that the way to get rich is to become a movie star. Sure it might happen but that’s not the normal way.
Honestly, I'm somewhat sure that this is just considered a perk of the job since it lets them ignore road rules.
Continuing the theme, many police actually take indirect bribes. Look up Patrolmen's Benevolent Association cards and the like. There are different levels of tokens depending on connectedness and donation level, and you can find them openly discussed on police forums. I would guess the only reason we haven't developed a culture of on the spot cash bribes is that police would take the money and write you a ticket anyway for having insulted them. They have a psychological need to pretend they are on the right side of the law.
IMO these sorts of questions are kneejerk reactions without any significant fore- or after-thought. They only serve to disrupt the conversation.
Perhaps that distinction is more pronounced in some locations than others. I don’t see this distinction in the big city where I live and each of my neighbors are black. We have regular police patrols where I live and almost no police interventions. We also have several police officers that live in the neighborhood. My city has greater than 900,000 people, is about 60% white, and has doubled in size over the last thirty years.
A minor but significant adjustment:
Average black parents worry about both
First they inflate your ego by telling you you're joining a high and noble cause.
Then they tell you that others don't appreciate the noble work you do and they hate you for reasons out of your control. And you just want to do right in the world so that's not fair!
Then they show you every documented instance of when an officer was ambushed and/or killed. This forces you to mentally ostracize yourself from the broader community by instilling a persecution complex.
Then they teach you that only your buddies in the department have your back and everyone else is out to get you.
Then they train you literally to shoot first and ask questions later. This training consists of variations of the game "slaps" except you're drawing a gun and shooting it at the other player instead of slapping the other player's hands.
And at that point you've been shown (1) that you have a huge target on your back, (2) how to pre-empt a perceived attack, and (3) how to justify the use of force or defend your fellow officer for doing so.
An angle I don't see mentioned quite so often is that for the danger that does exist, most of it is vehicle crash related. One wonders how much is self inflicted due to dangerous driving.
Simple reason being, that random police violence just results, ultimately, in the kind of uproar and civil unrest the US experience now. Basically the last thing dictatorships want.
"the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
In so many of these police related threads on HN lately people make absurd claims and then are upset when asked about data or objectivity, which suggests people are looking to complain about something and don’t want their complaint validated with data, which is strange.
In an ideal world where we have an oracle telling us which cops are good and which are bad your comment makes sense. But the nature of corruption is to obfuscate its dealings. You can't just say "well we need independent oversight" then because there are so many institutional pivot points where cops can hide their abhorrent behavior before it gets to see the light of day.
Not to put too fine a point on it and with all due respect, but are you black? Have you asked your black neighbors about it?
I am half-black and was raised in California. I have lived in SF for the last 10 years.
While I have not directly been troubled by police in SF, I put myself on notice every. Single. Time. I go outside.
Stop and frisk policies amount to codifying assault, in my opinion.
In practical application ethics violations are knowable breaking of rules or demonstrable malicious intentions.
Obviously the ideal solution is to 10x the capacity of the criminal justice system but nobody's paying for that.
Police do everything they can to keep ethics violations from being measured. That is what the story is about. In light of that, your objection to psychometry's comment calling for oversight is quite absurd.
Their sole job is to protect the state’s property. And the lives and property of those who control the state.
Proof: every riot thus far in 2020.
Funny, I actually beat the HOV violation in court, witnesses all corroborated my story. The whole thing was super scary and frustrating.
I can only imagine how frustrating it is for black people who deal with things 10 times worse than that but it gave me a bit of empathy and understanding how a crazed a-hole cop can wreak havoc and there is nothing you can do about it. I mean all that for a dumb HOV violation for cripes sake.
The way that this dynamic extends into the busing crisis and the infamous racism of Boston sports fans should be obvious.
Similarly I've been pulled out of cell sites at gunpoint and bent over the hood of my car, and patted down several times also for "looking out of place".
I don’t think that is framed correctly.
Black or white statistically you are far more likely to be killed (or assaulted) by non-police Of the same race as you.
I think everyone knows that, and to say police are the most likely to assault of kill black people takes the wind out of the sails of the legitimate issues. In other words police represent an additional threat to one of the groups and not the other, but in either instance the police are not the most likely perpetrators to either group.
Not sure if anyone can feel anyone else's pain. If millions of people are complaining about a problem, why try to say the problem does not exist?
My experiences are nothing compared to the terrible stories I've heard from PoC, but I'll give you an example. I'm Muslim. In 2004, I ended up on the restricted fly list, effectively ending my Management Consulting career. My co-workers kept telling me, "just take your shoes off, get thru security, and stop complaining". None bothered to hear my real issue -- i could not fly. Forget security, I could not get a boarding pass issued. It would happen randomly, about 50% of the time. Once, I was stuck in Europe, unable to get back home (FYI: as a US born Citizen.) Many times, i'd get half a boarding pass and be stuck at some random airport (ATL, ORD, etc.) Once I had to take a train back from Washington DC because I couldnt get on a flight.
Co-worker opinion mattered, because it affected my ability to get on local projects (where I could avoid flights.) Eventually, I had to leave the consulting firm despite an imminent promotion.
It is so easy to dismiss people, but seriously -- if millions are complaining -- just accept there is probably something there.
Part of it is also social effect. When multiple people encounter a similar problem they have a shared experience they can talk about and that social experience can seem to magnify the importance of the problem. When nobody is having the problem and almost nobody is talking about it the concern is much lower.
"Black" isn't just about skin tone, it's about the shared cultural experience.
White Murder victims: 3,499 (2,854 of the victims were killed by other whites)
Black murder victims: 2,870 (2,570 of the victims were killed by other blacks)
2019 police killings by race:
White deceased: 370
Black deceased: 235
That really doesn't matter that much. If a stranger assaults someone and a police office assaults someone, those are not equal. The stranger can be tried and convicted, but the police officer not as easily if at all. Also the stranger is a stranger, while the police officer I pay for and exists to serve and protect me.
An example of this is a police office in San Diego sexually assaulted (forced oral sex) 16 women after going to their house after they called the police to report a crime. That is so much worse than a stranger doing those things. And by the way... the police officer was convicted and served six months.
You do it the other way and watch absolutely no one care.
Not if law enforcement institutions, and society as a whole (including jurors) doesn't treat crimes as seriously where people who look like you are the victim. Were that the case, you might want to correct it by starting a movement dedicated to convincing society of the proposition “Lives of people who look like me matter”.
Not that there is a currently-relevant group with exactly that origin story, where the crystallizing event was the lack of accountability for a particular act of non-police homicide.
Imagine we’re all streaming to a personal blackbox in the could that gets overwritten say every month or every hour or however we set it up.
This is a delusion - they are at least 2 orders of magnitude more likely to be assaulted or killed by another (non-police) black person.
This is yet another scenario where a relatively minor source of risk gets vastly disproportionate coverage and almost everyone falls for it.
ETA: it’s funny that this straightforward statement of objective fact is being so poorly received.
I have never seen a style guide make a distinction between skin colors, and I disagree that nobody would care if they capitalised 'white' but not 'black'.
Millions of people complaining about "Muslim terrorism" led to you being inappropriately placed on a no-fly list. Millions of people complaining about "the Jew" led to significant and severe atrocities (plural...).
Millions voted for Trump. Millions voted for Clinton. Millions voted for Bernie. And millions will vote for the next Stalin, Hitler, or Mao.
I don't disagree that there is a problem with policing but I can't conceive of a more evil world where millions of people are just listened to without question.
Sure, but how do others define you? Consider that tech companies and activists are trying to redefine the meaning of racism to allow others to discriminate against you based on the color of your skin.
Reading comprehension must be so hard.
2. Reforms don't work. The SPD has been under federal sanction, and has been the target of numerous reform plans for the past two decades. Nothing sticks. The department is institutionally incapable of reform or accountability.
3. Given #2, it is currently being ignored at great expense. Police are the highest-paid public servants. Police departments consume the overwhelming majority of municipal tax revenue.
Why would you hire a cop for a six figure salary, to have them spend most of their time deal with social worker problems, when social workers are already capable of doing that job, for a third the pay? Why do you have that same cop cruise around, issuing parking tickets, when you could have a bylaw officer do the same thing, for a third the pay?
The style guide in question: "why we capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’)"
Your comment: "You’re quoting to a reply that replies to a link with a style guide that does exactly that. Reading comprehension must be so hard."
Yes, it must.
This is very real, though.
But the more important factor is that in most homicides the victim and the perpetrator know one another. On that basis minorities, and particularly middle-class and up members of minority groups, have good reason to be more concerned about abuse and/or murder at the hands of authorities as a more important consideration than truly random violence.
This is evidenced in how you think "ethics" can be defined by a wikipedia page.
The concept of ethics is very much different from its numerous instantiations.
In my town, the police chief noped out. A rather startled black lieutenant has found himself in the role now. AFAIK he's got a genuine desire to improve things, but I'm not holding my breath.
Meanwhile, 3 proposals to defund some programs like in school officers have been repeatedly proposed by our only black city councillor for the last couple years, always blocked by the majority of the council. The protests changed that in ONE WEEK.
We may not be getting the sweeping reform we want at the national level, but this absolutely has had a huge impact. And looking at the pooling, there's been a fundamental change in how many people agree there's a real problem.
Your comments in this thread are recursively ridiculous and I'm not sure how far I want to unwind them, but people are "inventing their own narratives" (this is an astonishingly bad way of characterizing the problem here) in preference to siting hard numbers because the police are not holding themselves accountable, a phenomenon that includes the suppression of the hard data on how many abuses there are.
The above poster said:
> from their point of view the police are the people most likely to assault or kill them or their children on the street, more so than random criminals
Leaving the "more so than criminals" part out of it:
- By your numbers, 10% of the killings are done by police officers.
- Police officers account for much less than 10% of the population.
Hence, a random police officer is much more likely to kill you than a random person.
Now, the "more so than random criminals" part is much harder to pin down. Anyway, you can't know whether someone is a criminal or not just by seeing them on the street, so I don't even see a point in trying.
"Black" = ethnicity
See also:
"deaf" = the physical condition of being unable to hear
"Deaf" = being part of the Deaf culture (sign language user, shared experiences unique to growing up deaf, etc.)
This conversation is missing another statistic: The percent of citizens who are also LEOs, which I'm seeing is about 1 in 300. Which means your chances of dying during an encounter with a random civilian are about 30 times less than your chance of dying during an encounter with a LEO. I cannot begin to express how deeply fucked up that is.
Your chances of encountering a bear in the woods are very low, but once you have done so, your focus should be almost entirely on the bear until the interaction has resolved itself. Any training you had should be employed. You should try to educate any hiking friends just in case they find themselves in such a situation.
Cops should not be a situation. They should not be like bears.
I would be considered white in most circumstances so I get a pass from a lot of discrimination that affects others. And that's why I consider it important to take a stand against that discrimination -- though unfortunately, the people propagating the worst of that discrimination see me as a traitor.
(2019 population numbers)
Whites killed by other whites: 1 per ~87982
Blacks killed by other blacks: 1 per ~17114
(2018 employed cop numbers)
Whites killed by cops: 1 per ~1855
Blacks killed by cops: 1 per ~2921
Numbers only say so much though
I assume you will agree that this is close to objectivity and therefore police are indeed corrupt?
The Sunnyvale Police told me to stop taking pictures of the accident while I was standing on my own property. They refused to release the police report of the accident to me (I needed it for insurance claims) because they claimed I was "not a victim and had no right to see it." (The car ended up on my lawn, smashed into my house.)
The only official way to file a complaint against the Police force in Sunnyvale California is to fill out a form and the Police investigate it themselves. Anything else, you have to go to court. There's no independent overseer.
All police forces are rotten to the core, and will do anything and everything to protect themselves.
Also, "at least 2 orders of magnitude" sounds like a big overestimate. In 2018, 2570 black people were killed in the US by other black people. About 250 were shot and killed by the police, in cases where the police self-admitted to killing them. This does not include the non-shooting deaths, either those that occur during an arrest, or while in custody.
Even if it were only 250/2570, that's still only about 1 order of magnitude.
You may be getting downvoted because of your false equivalences and your incorrect statistics, not because of your "objectivity."
But when I went out, my mother (and elders in our community) would say specifically, may God protect you from the police. That is a significant statement.
There are (at least) two different conditional probabilities we might be interested in here:
1. If a black child is assaulted or killed, who was responsible?
In this case you are partially correct: it is (by about one order of magnitude, not at least two) more likely that it was another non-police black person.
2. If a black child interacts with a particular person (e.g. police, or a non-police black person), how likely are they to be assaulted or killed?
If we are willing to assume (as is certainly the case) that black children have more interactions with non-police black people than they do with police, by more than one order of magnitude, then we can conclude that police are more likely to assault or kill than a non-police black person, conditional on an interaction. It is thus extremely reasonable for black parents to teach their children to avoid police and to try to keep them away from police.
Hispanics are killed at a disproportionate rate, and blacks are killed at a vastly disproportionate rate - according to the below blacks are killed at twice the rate of whites.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
I can’t say what the ratio should be...How do you know what that ratio should be?
You say cops should not be a “situation”, not sure what that means but for many of them responding to crimes is exactly what their job entails.
In other words As it relates to your ratio, is is possible a police office is 10 times more likely to encounter a murder/violent criminal in the act than a citizen? I don’t know, but that seems reasonable and probably jacks up to 100:1 to intervening to stop a crime.
I’m really not one to ask, I’ve been on all sides of it: I’ve been arrested (multiple times, including for the victimless crime of possession of marijuana); I’ve been the victim of an armed kidnapping; I’ve represented criminal defendants as an attorney. I can certainly say even being the victim of an armed kidnapping I felt more victimized more by the detective after the fact Than by the kidnapper, I can also add I felt more victimized by the insurance company of the gas station I was kidnapped from and their attorneys than either the kidnapper and detective (they literally destroyed the video of the crimes against me, falsely tried to cover up their destruction of the video claiming it never existed, claimed I falsely alleged the crimes and paid they same detective to testify the crimes happened to me across the Street from the gas station).
When she told the police this, their response was "I don’t believe you because you’re talking to police officers."
She ended up being arrested for obstruction because they kept failing to understand that her reluctance to comply was because they terrified her, and they can be heard in the bodycam footage [1] going "This is nonsense, there's something in this vehicle" after listening to her telling her dad she's afraid the police officer is going to harm her.
When the police officer starts dragging her out, she is screaming over the phone for her dad to call the police.
The officer is thankfully relatively calm, and it ended without physical harm to her, but this is a quite stark demonstration of the kind of fear the police has created, and how they then perpetuate that by not teaching their officers to understand the existence of that fear and interpret non-compliance resulting from that fear as indication of criminal activity.
She's was cleared, and is pursuing a claim against the police, but of course a claim will not address the fundamental ignorance among a lot of police officers about the fear they are inducing.
I can only imagine how much worse that fear must be in the US - at least in the UK police is rarely carrying firearms - and how awful that fear must be for parents.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/nurse-claims-m...
The vast majority of police killings are of people who were armed and chose to get in a fight with them. Even of the few unarmed cases, most of them were asking for it. So if you're just going about minding your own business, the chance is minuscule.
I assure you it matters to the victims and their families.
And I don’t disagree about the morality of police abusing their powers...but a death is a death and a tragedy is a tragedy. No one is celebrating the death of their loved one no matter what the killers skin color or occupation.
> That is so much worse than a stranger doing those things.
Again it’s not like the victim of a sexual assault is saying thank god I was rapped by a non-officer.
As the NY State report on police-on-police shootings I posted an article about elsewhere in the thread notes, rapidly turning your head to identify the source of a verbal command from a previoisly unseen police officer is the kind of thing that, to police, constitutes non-compliance and choosing to get in a fight with them. Even when you are an off-duty or plainclothes cop who has called for backup, and, much more likely if you are a Black or Latino out-of-uniform cop in that situation.
The OP's comment may be poorly worded, but in the context of current events your contributions to this discussion show virtually no sign of attempting to make good faith arguments.
https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/...
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=WLovR6DgNFEC&oi=...
https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...
Outside of big cities it gets even more lax. You just see police officers hanging out like regular people. I once saw an old guy get into an argument with the cops that looked like an argument between two people, not between "officer and civilian". In the US that wouldn't happen, the officer would feel slighted and probably arrest that guy, or the guy would never dare to talk back to a police officer in the first place.
But to your point I suspect the military police is very brutal.
For comparison in Italy in 2019 there have been 3 people killed by the police, and people have - rightfully IMO - complained every single time.
In US more than 1k (1040 to be precise) died shot by cops
If we compare the population, there should have been at least 180 victims of police gunning in Italy
That's clearly unacceptable.
Or, from another angle, it means that criminality in US is so much worse than the average EU country that it's ok to kill so many people in the name of safety.
Your assurance is no different than my opinion. You are speaking for victims just as I am, but I've been hurt by people I trust and I've been hurt by strangers. They aren't equal to me and I don't think I'm alone in that.
> Again it’s not like the victim of a sexual assault is saying thank god I was rapped by a non-officer.
If you think that is what I was trying to imply then I must have severely mis-worded my previous comment.
This is the fault of the media which is fishing for clicks and demonizing the police to the point that people are becoming paranoid.
I prefer 'Police Out Of Poor Neighborhoods'. Police actually add value in rich neighborhoods (maybe by definition), and it's got a humorous acronym.
Edit: And police are much less likely to be shot at in rich neighborhoods. It's really win-win-win.
No, they aren't. Because police weren't a thing in England when America split off from those roots.
Edit: so, to summarize, yes, I do think that our crazy high number of people shot by police per capita is because of and strongly related to our crazy high number of people shooting each other and themselves.
Number of homicides in the USA in 2017: 19,510
Deaths per 100,000 population: 6.0
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Number of homicides in Italy in 2017: 357
Deaths per 100,000 population: 0.6
The original Latin reflects the broader meaning of any pattern relationship, literally threads in a weave.
US is a a dangerous country and the police is not doing a good job at all
If there are so many homicides, who should prevent them?
If after killing a hundred people a month (by shooting at them, I presented only the numbers of those killed by a police shooting) they can't even make a dent on the (horrible) numbers, it means they are doing a very bad job.
Tertium non datur
The mob kills less people here.
And we have at least two of the main five criminal organizations in the entire world.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Eschew flamebait."
Even Theresa May acknowledged in her very first speech as PM that there were problems with institutional racism in the Metropolitan Police for example.
And top Met officers have also talked about problems with racism [1] and warned about misuse of stop and search. Each little abuse of power adds to an environment of fear.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/14/former-top-m...
Wow this is really scary to read. There's a miniseries on Netflix I would urge everyone to watch "When they see us" about "The Central Park 5" kids that were coerced into confessing they raped a white woman in the park. They were interrogated for hours and promised to go home if they confessed.
I 100% agree with your comment.
I cannot believe how many people I see here saying (in other places, not in the comments in this story) "see, this is proof that systemic racism is gone" ... just blows my mind.
I don’t think the implication was that police should be putting out fires once started, or that they’re doing that but selectively.
She never got the money to repair her car because they don't carry insurance the same way normal people do. She ended up buying a new car. She was lucky to not be put in jail.
It's hard to imagine there are any good cops out there with all this rot.
It’s odd you would say I’m playing a dangerous game...we are talking about murder, and if you or a loved one is murdered there is a 90% chance you will be murdered by a non-LEO. Not to mention we are playing a dangerous game by converting all justified police killings to murder.
The first American police dept was founded in the 1850s, well after the split from England. The first police department in England was founded in the 1830s.
Prior to that, our communities either took collective action to regulate themselves and the 'spirit of the community', insisted on night watch duty as a rotating responsibility, paid a constable or sheriff (a word whose roots are 'shire reeve', meaning 'shire official'), or hired private guards to protect property.
In the 1850s, around the time of the first police departments in the US, the Fugitive Slave Act was enforced as law -- requiring officials to hunt and 'return' runaway slaves. This was adopted to a greater or lesser degree depending on the area, but it absolutely was a role of law enforcement across much of the US, and it's without a doubt a part of the roots of many police departments in the US.
I think this is one of the two culture clashes happening with police versus civilians right now.
After the protests in the wake of the Michael Brown killing, there were articles written[1][2] about how there are a ton (many dozens) of tiny towns around Saint Louis each only a few city blocks large that prey on their citizens like parasites. Middle class people have largely moved out of these towns so they avoid this problem.
I don't think "defund the police" is a particularly good slogan and this is likely the reason other comfortably middle class families are likely to reject that calling.
But I also think that those who are comfortably middle class and ignoring the very real struggles of the lower class at the hands of the police and their governments have a duty to help lift their fellow Americans up and at least learn about the problems they face, if not do something about them. If we don't, we are no better than the pre Civil War city dwellers of the North comfortably ignoring the plight of the slaves and the indentured servants in the agrarian south.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/08/25/343143937/in-ferguson-court-f...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/0...
I'm immediately lit up. "Failure to yield". In addition I get an FST after "failing" the vertical nystagmus test (bear in mind at this point, my one and only pint of beer is coming up on five hours old). Cop is insistent I'm drunk, says he can go the DUI route, because my "behavior" in "failing to yield" shows I'm impaired, regardless of actual numbers. I'm lucid, but frustrated. Debates merits of blood draw, etc. Tickets me, "Get out of downtown and get home, I think we both know you're getting off lucky".
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Arizona
As two quick examples check out the open carry laws in Texas and Arizona where registered personally owned firearms per capita is among the highest in the country.
As long as we admit there's some sort of double-standard at play, I'm fine with it. Or we're consistent.
You can also buy them on eBay, unofficially. Of course, the police unions have gone after sellers there, for some reason.
In one state the union went so far as issuing registration-like tags for your FOP bumper sticker, so that if a cop was pulling you over, he'd know whether you were "paid up", so to speak. Of course, it's only about support, and not legalized proactive bribery, just to be clear...
Perhaps less people would see fascist, totalitarian overtones in law enforcement if some segments of the police wouldn't openly state this.
https://mobile.twitter.com/newyorkyearzero/status/1273754924...
I grew up poor, white, in a neighborhood with non-whites (black, asian, and hispanic). None of us was safe from the police, though whites were in marginally less danger generally.
I like to illustrate corruption in the US by showing them the fake badges that cops’ friends or family put on the windshield of (endemic in the NYC area) or the “I donate to the police union” stickers.
Or of course the actual police union gold cards or whatever that police spouses and kids get.
A more correct restatement of your claim might be that "many" Southerners openly carry, but that's still a minority of a minority given that, per capita, most Southerners don't even own a gun. "Almost everyone" is reaching into some kind of weird libertarian wild-west fantasy stereotype.
The trouble as I see it is that police broadly have two functions: to respond to emergencies where violence is likely and to suppress or tax the grey and black economy (huh. just noticed the ufnordunate linguistics of that). The 'responding to emergencies' function will of course still need to be performed, but it's fairly reliable that the poorer a neighbourhood is the less likely the residents are to voluntarily call 911 if an emergency does happen. In truly poor places the 'taxing grey and black markets' part of police work completely overshadows the good done by the 'responding to emergencies' part.
That is understandably very difficult for wealthy people to imagine, because they have very few examples of grey or black markets in their own lives, let alone instances where they have no other options. The thought that most people in any area would rather have enterprising teenagers sell bootleg cigarettes without hassle isn't even repugnant to them, it's just foreign.
Where we draw the line is debatable, but the person you were responding to wasn't really attempting to draw a line.
The increase in crime in the 60s and 70s didn't correlate with more guns, the decrease in crime in the late 90's didn't correlate with fewer guns.
There is clearly something going on in the US that drives crime that is not guns. Culture, welfare state, war on drugs, inequality, segregation, failure of the family. Better cases to be made on any of those things than guns.
There were about 1100 police killings in 2019. This includes people shot or beaten to death by officers on or off duty. [1] About 10% of these people were unarmed. This statistic is the one which is most likely under-reported. About 50 police are feloniously killed per year [2]
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ [2] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
At least 106 people shot, 14 fatally, in Chicago weekend violence
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-chicago-week...
On top of that, most experts say the US has a broken criminal justice system that actively prevents rehabilitation. If you count the resulting increase in the crime rate against the police, courts and jails, then their collective actions lead to way more than 5% of the killings.
It's the same. That narrative you're pushing is hindering genuine discussion and potential solutions to the very real problems of abusive police and injustices within the legal system. It's them versus us - all of us - not some of us more than others.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/apocalypse...
The very simple historical trend that brought us the police we have today started with the King enforcing the peace, was delegated to sheriffs who enforced the peace among other things, was inherited in the colonies where the sheriff took on a primarily peace officer role in early states, and as the population grew and cities got bigger were augmented with more specialized and local peace officers. Slave patrols being the root of police is just propaganda.
It's a night and day difference, and I can only imagine it's much worse for those with different skin colors.
This is important point. Another one is that it's likely cops ARE some of the most violent people in society. For example, look at the instances of violent crime inside the home (i.e. when a cop is off-duty, so there should be no skew) - the numbers seem to indicate that domestic abuse is more common that not: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...
The inescapable conclusion to withdrawing the police is: 1 - response times will go up drastically, 2 - security will deteriorate, 3 - wealthier and middle class folks will stop visiting/living in those areas because of #1 and #2, 4 - the tax base will evaporate, 5 - the infrastructure, schools, and all other communal areas will deteriorate, 6 - the class divide will become a gaping chasm between the poor who are relegated to the slums and everyone else. We don't have to try this again. We know that this is what happens from our own history in the 20th century!
* Change rules of engagement for police to emphasise de-escalation when possible and gradual escalation when absolutely necessary. E.g. in the UK police won't even have firearms on them most of the time unless specifically called to deal with a suspected incident involving weapons, but even if they do, the focus tends to be on de-escalation and waiting the situation out if possible (e.g. someone sat in a car with a gun for about 12 hours a couple of miles from me some months ago; police just got people out of the way and waited until he calmed down, while neighbours talked to the press and whined about why they didn't just shoot him - he had mental issue and a young daughter that presumably was very happy police were calm and collected).
One of my pet examples here was a case in the US were a guy with an axe was shot after charging a police officer. This was a justified killing in that the police officer was under real threat. But she shouldn't have been in danger in the first place - two of them charged in and confronted the man, instead of clearing a perimeter and waiting for backing. In contrast when I called police (UK) over a possible assault near my house a couple of years ago, they sent 8 officers for an incident with no suspected weapons involved.
Bonus points for:
* Reducing sentences for crimes carried out without weapons significantly. E.g. in Norway, using firearms can easily add 10 years to a sentence that might be 5 or less without weapons.
* Treat any use of weapons to stop e.g. a robber as murder if it's not clearly done in self defense.
Point being that criminals needs to see it as worthwhile to not bring a gun. If it is more dangerous for them to do something unarmed than it is to do it armed, and there's little meaningful difference in sentencing, then why wouldn't they go in armed?
The US has created a perverse incentive for criminals to arm themselves to the teeth.
I think the GP is correct to point out the gun thing too. Having lived in a place where guns aren’t as accessible and observing how people live, I’m sure there is some correlation.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesi...
Edit: I guess I should propose a solution instead of just railing against this idea. How about we: 1 - end the war on drugs, and 2 - fundamentally address poverty for once in this country.
Part of the reason for the quick escalation is that (American) cops are taught things like the Tueller Drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwHYRBNc9r8 that claims that an attacker can close 21 feet in 1500 milliseconds and stab a victim so many times that even a fast ambulance response won't save him from bleeding out.
This idea means the cop has to unholster a pistol as soon as any sign of noncompliance is showm, start firing if a person "reaches for their waist", and empty the magazine because this Olympian attacker won't be stopped by a few bullets.
They just "want to get home to their families" despite the fact that car accidents are deadlier to cops and garbage men have more dangerous jobs.
1> Patrol public spaces to deter illegal behavior in those places, direct traffic, punish traffic offenders, offer directions to tourists, etc
2> Respond to calls from citizens, investigate the crimes that those calls are about, locate and apprehend the associated criminals.
I've only lived in places sparsely populated enough that <1> is mostly impractical except along highways and around major construction sites.
The VAST majority of the value provided to people by the police clearly comes from <2> - it's the reason that no sane person would mug me (or kill me) for $40 cash on an unpatrolled country road, or invade my home and take up residence there against my will. 99.9% of citizens benefit from <2>, as it's the main deterrent to any antisocial person coming and taking whatever they have of value.
It seems to me (though I don't have data) that most (nearly all?) the mistreatment of (maybe mainly black) citizens by police that has been garnering media attention over the past decade or so, happens during the course of <1>.
Roma were literally being sent to death camps to be exterminated throughout much of Europe 75 years ago.
I’m the first to welcome enhanced penalties for officers committing crimes in their official capacity...but I find your words very disturbing.
Cops take more in assets than robbers. [1]
[0] https://granta.com/violence-in-blue/
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
Nota Bene: your down votes are from a lack of evidence combined with an aggressive demeanor. Neither are a good look.
Or, in US police is at war
Which is equally bad
EDIT: to give more context
If poverty rate in US was worse than in Nigeria, people would say that something went horribly wrong
Homicide rate in US is actually 1.5 times worse than Nigeria and two times worse than Uganda and Congo
Since UK police only exceptionally carry firearms, they have to play things safer. E.g. respond with more people. Keeping greater distance.
But lots of other police forces have - sometimes heavily - armed police with better results because they effectively act on the basis that using their weapon is an absolute last resort, and so you keep your distance if there's a risk they're armed, and call for backup rather than approach etc.
The number of unarmed black men shot by police across the entire US in 2019 was 14. [0] How does such a small number spark this level of fear and protest?
Also, do people actually think the police generally and on average does more harm than good as to request abolishing it?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
Sure. That's obviously true. However, not very helpful to the discussion as you don't state what percent of police officers "refuse to enforce the laws"
Do 100% of police officers refuse to enforce laws? 50%? 5%. Surely that's more beneficial to talk about than simply saying "the sky isn't blue if it isn't blue".
Enforcing the law required acting as slave patrols for well over a hundred years in the US. In 1757 Georgia, for instance, the colonial assembly required white landowners to be slave patrollers, and this continued well past the civil war.
There is over a hundred years of law enforcement, particularly in the South, acting as slave patrols. It's absolutely reasonable to trace the roots from modern departments back through the nation's unique history.
Not all police followed that path, like I mentioned above, police in the North were formed more out of an interest of protecting property and landowners. Places like Boston founded their police to try and prevent crime, rather than simply exact justice post-facto. That's a different historical root of American policing, and it did not involve slave patrols.
The question to the US is: how can they become less insular and more open to ways of living that aren't strictly 'American'? You would think the constitution is now set in stone: societal progression is at a complete halt after committing to a few rules 200 or so years ago. And I know that sounds hyperbolic, but even in that time it's still the case that race is a fundamental issue in the US.
I've lived in neighborhoods in Denver where people didn't call the police. Not because they feared retribution from others, but because over and over the police have hurt them, their family, or their friends. And examples of them helping in those neighborhoods are much harder to come by( I can't think of a single time? ). The general feeling is that the police are not there to help you, they are there to watch you and keep you in line.
An encounter with the police is actually 3 times more dangerous for citizens than it is for the police. And that's for an unarmed person.
If we concede that the police "have a dangerous job", then interacting with them, (which again, is three times more dangerous) should reasonably be pretty terrifying.
Now consider we have multiple data points of police committing murder and getting away with it. How can we argue that it's rare, given that we have several instances of police getting away with it and not being considered part of said recorded statistics?
The NYPD have their own Judges?!? eh?
People are protesting because the same factors present in wrongful deaths are also present in lower-level harassment by police. Black people have lots of personal stories about police encounters which will never be widely shared because there's no video and you have to trust the storyteller that the police acted wrongly. From the article:
> A recent CCRB report focused on police abuse against Black and Latino boys: “Young teens or pre-teens of color were handcuffed, arrested, or held at gunpoint while participating in age-appropriate activities such as running, playing with friends, high-fiving, sitting on a stoop, or carrying a backpack.”
The report doesn't focus on police shootings, it focuses on police abuse. Protestors are using uncommon events to highlight common events.
First offence, depending on the severity, gets nothing. Second and subsequent get exponentially worse cuts to the pension fund. Good cops will weed out bad cops pretty quickly if they realize all their efforts are being lost because of bad behavior.
Black people killed by police in 2018 [1]: 209
Black people murdered by civilians (of any race) in 2018 [2]: 7,407
White people killed by police in 2018 [1]: 399
White people murdered by civilians in 2018 [2]: 6088
Aren’t criminals a greater threat than police for both black and white peoples? Of course this isn’t the whole picture of what interactions with police look like, but if you are scared for your children’s lives, criminals seem to be a much greater threat regardless of race.
> the police are the people most likely to assault or kill them or their children on the street, more so than random criminals
This does not seem to be even remotely correct. Am I missing something?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in...
Honestly? My fear is that governments will privatize policing. Because that's the policy that both parties can agree on / take bribes from.
This bit is child abuse? Or the bit where the cops took some suspects in for questioning?
1. Most people who dislike or distrust the police don't actually trust those numbers. There are decades worth of documented evidence of police lying about people carrying weapons, and sometimes even carrying weapons to plant on people they kill. So from the start, a lot of us think that number is an undercount, possibly by a dramatic degree.
2. Even among the people who are armed who are shot by police, there are people who weren't doing anything wrong who were still shot. The most recent high profile version of this was Philando Castile. Technically, he was armed when he was shot, but when he was killed, he had already informed the police about his licensed, legal firearm and was moving slowly towards the glove compartment, as instructed by an officer, to retrieve his registration. So it's not just shootings of unarmed people.
3. Police don't just shoot people to death. George Floyd was not shot; Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for just under nine minutes. Eric Garner was not shot; Daniel Panteleo choked him to death with an illegal chokehold. Adam Trammell was not shot; he was hit with a Taser, 18 times, while in the shower and experiencing mental issues, and it caused his heart to stop. Sandra Bland was not shot; she supposedly hung herself with a plastic grocery bag in her cell after being arrested as a result of a pretextual traffic stop. This list could go much, much longer. Only looking at shooting deaths artificially constrains the number of people police kill in a very deceptive way.
4. There are so very many other ways that police can make your life absolutely miserable without shooting or killing you. I am not Black, and so I have been spared many of these experiences, but of my Black friends and family, I can tell you this: every single one of them has had police harass them for absurdly minor issues, or sometimes no issue at all. A number of them have had a police officer point a gun at them. Almost all of them have been at some point unofficially detained for some length of time. Some of them have been arrested and then eventually released without charges. All of them who drive get pulled over at least a few times per year, without fail. These are mostly middle- or upper-middle-class professionals. They live all over the United States, in cities and towns, in places with large Black populations and small Black populations, and yet their experiences all share a commonality that is terrifying when you pull back even a little bit and look at them as a pattern.
5. But maybe this should have been #1...what do you think is a reasonable number of shootings of unarmed people? Personally, I think that number is zero, so even "just 14" is absolutely grounds for extreme anger, even if you want to ignore my first four points. I don't think the police, people who are given special dispensation and training to use violence in the name of the state, should ever shoot and kill an unarmed person. I actually think any number of deaths caused by police is too many deaths. In every situation, they are the people with the most training. They are (ultimately) the best-armed. I recognize that, in a country with as many guns as the US, maybe the police will have to kill some small number of people per year, but I think every time they do, that shooting should be heavily scrutinized. We give them these weapons and powers so they can protect people, even people who commit crimes, and if they have to kill someone, they have failed to protect that person.
I hope those points answer your first question, and start to explain the answer to your second question. In response to that, though, I would first ask what you've read about police abolition so far.
'defund the police' as I think of it isn't about defunding completely, but recognising that we are way off on the 'too many police per capita' side of the scale, possibly because poor neighborhoods are getting a police presence closer to the 'sweet spot' of rich neighborhoods.
The empathy exercise for those of us in privileged neighborhoods is to imagine: How toxic must the dynamic be for entire communities to feel less safe with police and want them out altogether?
They've described the concerns about policing as "the flavor of the week", they fought against body cams, they've defended police in well documented cases of retaliatory and unbecoming behavior.
Because the police routinely treat people who aren't police or aren't visibly well to do (which being white goes a long way toward) like crap.
People will tolerate that or they'll tolerate some deaths but they won't tolerate both.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
You are comparing the number of gun deaths in 2 populations and concluding that the difference in total deaths indicates a commensurate increase in dangerous situations faced by officers. Your inclusion of gun suicides makes it extremely difficult to be charitable with your interpretation.
Greater gun suicides correlates with hopelessness and availability of guns not danger to officers and these deaths of despair are literally 60% of the gun deaths you are talking about! Half of the remaining were murdered by someone they know. Most of the remaining 20 not 100 daily murders seemingly random violent murders aren't really random they are criminals murdering other criminals.
Cops aren't overwhelmingly dealing with gang bangers they are overwhelmingly dealing with members of the general population and lots of low level offenders because that is what's out there. That is who they are murdering. They are murdering a broad swath of the population mostly not entirely focused on black people literally because they can get away with it.
Instead of pretending we can't look at the deaths in proper context we ought to analyze the deaths in their proper context. Although this is hard to do in a comment thread your reasoning is in this case worse than nothing because it gives one the false impression that you have a handle on it.
Please stop apologizing for murderers.
The problem domain is much more granular than that. You would need to collect statistics on a specific community in order to get an informed conclusion about the events in that community.
But if we're going off statistics...
Black people are more likely to die or be injured from other black people more than they are by cops.
By, like, a lot.
this article showcases how impervious cops are to taking responsibility, especially against the poor and powerless.
But your comment of being more afraid of the cops over the crime in their own neighborhoods reeks of Americans being more scared of terrorism than heart disease.
I don't blame the people of US, but their cultural system, I do.
Those who criticize or just reports things that don't work in the States are immediately flagged as anti American, it's like an instinct.
Their homicide stats are worse than many developing countries in Africa, four time worse than Canada, six times worse than China, ten times worse than Europe and Asia
Singapore's homicide rate is 30 times lower than in US!
It's really a lot
It's a failure, no matter how one frames it
But it's still very hard to get the general population to confront the numbers
They say you shouldn't shoot the messenger, but even on HN, where people are generally more educated than the average, it's really hard to start a conversation about the causes of this debacle
I lost 20 points of karma in two days because I showed stats about police brutality in US
I hope they'll get it one day, I live in Europe, my country has a lot of problems and there are many things that US does better and we looked at them for decades in search of a solution to our shortcomings
But if there's one thing we do well in EU is how our police handles critical situation, it varies from country to country of course and there are exceptions, Poland is not Spain, but in general it's true
So why not try to listen for once?
I don't have an answer honestly.
Police murders aren't meaningfully correlated with crime prevention.
We have an inner city culture whose music celebrates violence and does not celebrate women but instead treats them like property or worse. We have an inner city culture where schools teach kids to rely on the government and not their parents and the adults. We have an culture where not getting an education can sometimes be seen as a badge of honor and time in jail as the same. We networks with endless broadcasts of cop shows and other crime and violence shows which normalize the environment
Then on top of this you get the police. A group which has been militarized from day one from boot camp, supposedly part of which is to insure healthy cops but rarely is the physical requirement part of a continued job requirement. Who have ranks like any military organization. Who salute each other like any military organization. Who have uniforms , some for daily use, which makes it near impossible to separate them from military members. Who are issued guns for all routes and allowed to keep them on their person off duty. Who are trained by their organization and union that it is them versus the bad guys.
So there is a lot to fix but it starts at the top. Politicians must be held accountable for the mess they create and division they foster. We have to get to the music industry to police itself and tone down the violence of their lyrics and treatment of women. We need a entertainment industry which does not rely on the crime and shows with excessive violence. We need schools to emphasize the good of society and how to improve each student's outcome regardless of situation.
We did not get here overnight. The riots in Detroit back in the 60s should have been understood better but instead politicians capitalized on the fear, drove further wedges among all races, and empowered the police to be more militant. Remember who has controlled politics in most major cities since then and you may understand the lie sold to everyone. They never intended to fix the problem, they intended to feed on it. The political class used it as a guarantee of power.
People who live their lives in a fashion as they are extremely unlikely to be harmed still worry that cops will murder their children for no reason. People also fear uncontrollable danger more so than things that they feel they can control even if they are in fact doing a bad job of it.
Because it's on the news, while the 51 unarmed whites killed by police in 2019 [1] aren't.
My mistake - this does not change the nature of my argument at all. That's still a massive difference in risk.
Why do you think it makes sense to ignore the majority of homicides (which don't fit a popular political narrative)? That's like saying "Most car crashes happen near home, so on that basis people have good reason to be more concerned about plane crashes."
https://komonews.com/news/local/police-union-president-defen...
https://mynorthwest.com/70234/police-union-head-vehemently-d...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/07/13/se...
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/memo-seattle...
http://www.courts.wa.gov/content/publicupload/eclips/2015%20...
https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article64596437.ht...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/seattle-cop-punches-teen-in-fac...
An "honest" cop would see this behavior and report the crime appropriately. But they simply don't hold eachother accountable.
If we had guaranteed medical, we'd have a check on mental health. Probably the #1 cause of crimes in America is poor mental health and the stress of living in America.
Aside from the fact that such a victim may very well feel that way (or more likely the inverse: I wish the person who raped me had not been an officer so I could seek justice) this observation seems orthogonal to the point since it is a question of perception.
The person who has not (yet) been raped is justified in being more fearful of a random police officer than of another random human because there is the perception (and indeed often the reality) that the police officer is able to act with impunity.
Also, for some groups, each interaction with a stranger comes with a small chance that they are a criminal who seeks to do you harm, but interacting with police carries a near 100% chance that they are suspicious of you and carefully watching your every move looking to find any justification to bust you.
I am not black and I am more fearful/wary of police officers than other strangers on the street. I never even considered the actual odds before.
I have been pepper sprayed by police officers for consuming cannabis in public. I have been mugged in the night by a black man with a gun. The mugger never pointed his gun at me. When he found the food stamps in my wallet he gave it back to me and told me to "stay safe". I am more scared of random police officers than I am of black men I encounter.
> In so many of these police related threads on HN lately people make absurd claims and then are upset when asked about data or objectivity
And I provided you exactly what you wanted. Yet you seem to be dismissing said evidence out of...? Your feelings?
Is this the sort of thing you consider outrageous?
That's not a small number, though. Do you think that any number is acceptable? Any number above 0 deserves the kind of protest response we see in America today.
Your post is invalidating to the centuries of oppression faced by Blacks in America and to their struggles today.
I humbly suggest that if you give this some thought, you'll see that isn't a very good answer. Any complex system, especially one that involves humans, will have errors. There's no way around that. So the only way to eliminate errors completely is to eliminate the system entirely. This understanding is perhaps what fuels the call for police abolition: No amount of reform and training will get the error rate to zero, so the only way to get zero police accidents is to not have any police.
To illustrate my point further, consider medical malpractice. How many deaths caused by doctor error is acceptable? If the answer is zero, one needs to abolish medicine. How many automobile accidents are acceptable? If zero, we must abolish all motorized transport. I think for the most part people accept the unfortunate fact that accidents are an inevitable part of any system, and should be accepted if we consider the system to do more good than harm.
You add up all those people and the ratio is about 100:1.
This continues a pattern of excessive force from the dept. From the Justice Department's findings on the SPD:
> Our investigation finds repeated uses of excessive force for charges related to minor offenses, including pedestrian interference, obstruction, open container violations, jaywalking, and shoplifting. In a number of incidents, failure to use tactics designed to de-escalate a situation, led to increased and unnecessary force.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crt/legacy/2011/...
If the tables were turned and the police were no longer the servants of the white community, how might that look?
Patrol cars driving around suburbs at night blasting sirens then arresting people who came out to complain. Harassing middle class white dads mowing their lawns by telling them to stop and go inside, then escalating into one-sided physical altercations requiring reinforcements. Ticketing mom groups for loitering and trespassing for congregating to chat on sidewalks with baby strollers on front of their homes, or threatening them with CPS. Breaking into homes and shooting pets and family members of kids who brought home pot, or their neighbors if they show up at the wrong house.
Who would these people call to complain to if no one else cared? How would these communities look after years of being afraid? Of having to accept that their lives were forfeit and losing loved ones to the police was just a fact of life?
Unfortunately, we already know.
> reeks of Americans being more scared of terrorism than heart disease
I'd like to point out it's not just any black people that are most likely to kill/injure others. There is a very small subset (likely less than 1%) of the population. In that way, being deathly afraid of other black people in the USA, being deathly afraid of police in the USA, and being deathly afraid of terrorists in the USA are all irrational (or at least disproportionate) fears.
That said, we don't tell people their fears of lightning are unfounded or disproportionate to furniture falling on them. Using pure statistics against a limbic system response isn't particularly useful. Your limbic system remains fearful, even if your cognitive brain knows the odds don't require that same level of fear.
Plainly, I don't believe in deterrence as effective or a substantial reason why most people don't engage in bad behavior.
It doesn't. The protests aren't limited to all of the extreme cases you mention.
The way I see it, the protests are joined in by a large number of cohorts who wouldn't care about that smaller very specific demographic, but lots of people have found some reason to be empathetic to victims of police or otherwise critical of the legal/incarceration system.
Some people want more police accountability (via either employment contracts, civil law, or criminal law). Some people want to reduce or eliminate no-knock warrants/raids. Some people want to decriminalize lots of recreational drug use. Some people just want to be able to walk/drive without getting pulled over because some cop thinks they "fit a description". Some are tired of the legal system abusing/harassing them so they can see a friend / family member in jail.
Add up the list of people who have some grievances with police and I doubt you get too far from a majority of the country. There are still a ton of people who "support the police", even if they also have a grievance with "the system".
It's vaguely like optimizing a funnel in e-commerce. The point is to reduce friction at all points to optimize for the best ratio of people who are exposed to your system who then complete the desired action (purchase and have a positive experience). Police have almost no incentive to fix any of these interactions. Their fitness function as an industry has more to do with pumping stats and clearance rates and little to do with making sure your interaction with the police was pleasant. That is... unless you are a family member with police (I do so I see it).
That's why all this crying over law and order in response to the protests is kind of hilarious. Their heavy handed tactics have backfired hard, and I have no sympathy for any of them. I feel for the police the same way I'd feel for an occupying army facing resistance.
I don't understand. You're saying that individual police members are not at fault for their actions? That the police institution is rotten (barrel) but stops at the individual officer (apple)?
I 100% agree that the barrel is rotten, but there are plenty of bad individuals as a result of the barrel being rotten for so long.
A way to test this, change the 'barrel' and see which 'apples' stick around. i.e. if all apples are good changing the barrel doesn't result in difference in apples just the apples' actions.
We're already seeing #bluflu, walk outs, resignations because in some specific areas of the country, the barrel is being changed out piece by piece.
I disagree that apples are not bad. Lots of them are. It'll be a painful transition, but it will be one for better if we can keep it up.
This may be their view, but it is overwhelmingly incorrect.
Also I find it odd that decade-old events are being brought up. Yes, it’s pretty much a recorded fact that excessive force was used back then. DOJ forced the the SPD through a reform program, the result of that program should be judged to decide what if anything needs to be done at SPD. Otherwise it’s like this:
SPD did bad things in 2010, they must reform!
Ok. SPD Does reforms 2010-2020
SPD did bad things in 2010, defund!
60% of murders go unsolved because a sane murderer does not commit a murder that would be easy to solve. I'm sure many tempting, high-reward murders do not happen because they can't be committed without an ensuing police investigation.
Suppose 1% of people are currently criminals (I don't know the real number). Without an authority investigating and punishing crimes, that number might increase to 1.1% or even 2%. But a small fraction of those would likely increase their criminal behavior by an order of magnitude.
A variety of domain-specialized community services organizations, many of which will have enforcement components, some armed, and probably at least one of which is investigatory/enforcement focussed, but no single monolithic paramilitary organization.
Not a neighborhood watch, but more like how federal law enforcement, and despite the fact that “state police” organizations do exist, that of most states, is organized.
Police are generally highly biased in favor of military personnel regardless of their skin color outside of military base communities. For example if a person is pulled over, regardless of the validity of the stop or whether racial profiling is at play, the person is likely to drive away with only a warning if the officer happens to see a military ID and the person remains calm and polite. Military people have been sharing these stories for years.
Until I started working at the big bank the military is by far the most diverse group I have ever worked with.
Walmart, on the other hand, isn't exactly a part of USA, and if it needs to spy on somebody, it would have to rely on their own internal capacity.
Edit: as such, I would remove the "because of" part of the last sentence of my previous comment, and leave the "strongly related to". My bad.
This is particularly tone deaf in light of the subject matter of the article. I can point to specific things that happened and say "that should not be permitted" or "this is evidence of a corrupt system that is not holding itself to account." I can do this before I know precisely how often it's happening, and it would be wrong not to do that.
To my knowledge, that is what has been done until now - and it evidently didn't work.
While Daniel Pantaleo was murdering Erik Garner, 100% of the officers present did not enforce the law, and at least a significant percentage of the court system which did not convict Pantaleo did not enforce the law.
When Philip Brailsford murdered Daniel Shaver, 100% of the officers present did not enforce the law by arresting him. A significant percentage of the court system which did not convict him of any crime didn't enforce the law. The police department which reinstated him and then let him medically retire due to PTSD from the murder he committed and pays him $2,500/month pension didn't enforce the law.
Since three police officers murdered Breonna Taylor, 100% of the police in Louisville Metro Police Department has not enforced the law.
When ex-cops murdered Ahmaud Arbery, 100% of Glynn County Police Department did not enforce the law until months later after massive outcry, and more than one DA refused to enforce the law.
When a homeless man in a wheelchair was shot in the face with a rubber bullet by LAPD, 100% of the LAPD did not enforce the law. When Buffalo PD officers assaulted a 75 year old man, 100% of the officers present did not enforce the law, and 100% of the 57 SWAT members resigned from the SWAT team when other police did enforce the law. When Denver PD shot tear at a pregnant woman and her husband who were uninvolved in protests, 100% of Denver PD did not enforce the law. When a Philly PD officer knelt on a man while he said, "I can't breathe" and the officer responded, "Shut up asshole. Are you fucking stupid? That shit don't work here" 100% of Philly PD did not enforce the law.
With the exception of Breonna Taylor, these are just some of the incidents that were caught on video. There are many, many more on video, and we can only guess how many incidents weren't caught on video.
Obviously I'm not going to be able to give you an exact percentage number of how many police officers refuse to enforce laws when cops commit crimes, but how many examples do you need to see before you will admit it's too much for the current system to be salvageable?
[0] WTF is a "criminal" anyways? I use illegal substances sometimes. I drive above the speed limit (like everyone else does) most of the time. Back when I played poker on US sites I didn't pay taxes on my winnings even though I should have. I can think of a ton of examples where I simply do not follow the law and so according to the definition of the word I am a criminal.
Thank you for the reply. Yes, I understand that Scandinavian countries do a lot of things better. I also understand that prisons are terrible in the US and jails are worse still.
However, from stories I've heard about "interrogation techniques"...
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=https:/...
My understanding is that it is unlawful to torture (physically, mentally, ...) into answering questions and/or confessing to any crime in the US and you have a right to remain silent (in theory at least) in police custody. How well is enforced in other countries?
From what I understand, local police (talking about custody, not jail or prison) in the US will sometimes use torture techniques like isolation or suicide watch and will beat suspects when they get a chance (moving between rooms or whatever) but this is uncommon.
First, they can't really arrest you without motiv, they can't even detain you without motiv.
Second: you can confront a police officer in EU, they won't shoot you or handcuff you, unless you pose a real danger to public safety.
I had a fight with one of them three months ago, he almost ran over me with his bike and when I confronted him he removed his jacket and told he was a police officer. I said "you are two times wrong then" He yelled at me he was going to bring me in, I said "no way" and meanwhile people gathered around me and started saying to the police officer he was abusing his powers, that they had seen what he'd done with his bike and where ready to testify against him, if he didn't apologize.
He went away.
That's almost impossible in the US, where officers are trained to respond physically to basically anything that they consider a threat.
Stefano Cucchi is a very peculiar case he wasn't lawfully tortured, he was killed by the police and then they tried to cover it up.
I went to many events in support of his cause.
After years of trial the officers have been condemned and many high ranking officers asked for forgiveness to Stefano's sister, Ilaria, a great woman who stood alone against the injustice her brother faced.
But it's been a very popular case all over the news, for years, there have been a few others in Italy, but the point is it is unlawful and you can count them on the fingers of one hand.
The real problem in Italy is that it takes decades to get a final judgement.
And right now the right wing parties, that also support Trump, that wants free guns for everybody like in the US.
Anyway, torture is a crime in Italy and it is considerd an aggravating factor if it is committed by an officer.
If you are middle class and non-white your odds of being hassled by the police are quite high and probably validated by experience. The odds of such an experience escalating into violence or death may be empirically small but each and every instance of interaction with authorities is an instance of greatly increased risk and a risk that is in large part out of your control. This is something worth being concerned about and that concern has an impact on your day-to-day behaviour and well-being.
Being more concerned about police violence than random violence makes perfect sense to me. I suspect that if you dig into it that concern is also empirically more rational.
Policing has been a problem for the black community since before your "not racist" reason of detachment from central authority happened.
Thank you. I appreciate your answering my questions and not assuming I am asking rhetorical questions (something I am not very good at yet). I didn't know about the case and saw it when I googled for any case.
> And right now the right wing parties, that also support Trump, that wants free guns for everybody like in the US.
I don't know for sure as I am not friends with many 45 supporters but my understanding is the "base" is more interested in guns for everyone more than 45 himself. Not that it matters in the larger scheme but just thought I'd share my understanding.
If the ability to cover up criminal acts is a consequence of police unions, there’s no doubt in my mind that they should be abolished.
Unions make a lot of sense, unless they can negotiate impunity on behalf of their members.
EDIT: Interesting article on this subject: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trou...
Quote from the article:
When it comes to advancing their interests, public-sector unions have significant advantages over traditional unions. For one thing, using the political process, they can exert far greater influence over their members' employers — that is, government — than private-sector unions can. Through their extensive political activity, these government-workers' unions help elect the very politicians who will act as "management" in their contract negotiations — in effect handpicking those who will sit across the bargaining table from them, in a way that workers in a private corporation (like, say, American Airlines or the Washington Post Company) cannot. Such power led Victor Gotbaum, the leader of District Council 37 of the AFSCME in New York City, to brag in 1975: "We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss."
https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-police-investigating...
I didn't say they don't affect crime, but if crime spikes, then drops then spikes, while gun ownership remains steady, then it is a piece of evidence that crime is largely driven by something other than the quantity of guns.
2. There is no guarantee that the candidate you helped elect in your district will be the person responsible for negotiations. Other politicians are supposed to be a counterbalance to this, if they are doing their jobs, and actually give two figs about conflicts of interest.
This is largely a theoretical concern.
The concern I cited - that management is part of the union is not theoretical. It is one we've seen played out again and again.
Why should you have a gun? It is a personal preference. Like art or poetry. You are free to want whatever you want. If you do not like/want guns, please do not have them. But, please do not impose your preferences on others.
I'm just trying to understand what the parent comment said because I honestly am confused.
I don't want to live in anarchy, but I don't want to live in fear. Help.
Some people thrive on the empowerment, liberty and responsibility associated with these incredible death machines. But that's no reason to mistreat the data. For instance, the ratio associated with other death machines like cars, which have somewhat similar availability across the pond between US and Europe, is a more reasonable factor of 2/3.
Technically a crime. But we all knew they and their children needed the meat. If everyone did it, the deer population would collapse and no one could hunt effectively even in-season. If someone had called a wildlife officer they could have certainly made the trek down. But no one would think to call the wildlife officers on them, because we knew it would lead to their children going hungry.
I think the thing people from rich neighbourhoods miss about that sort of thing is that when they hear stories of that nature [1], people's children going hungry over a minor infraction is seen as a failure of empathy on the constabulary's part. It's not. It's a failure of the law, and the constabulary's job is to uphold the law, not play social worker to people who break it. Hence our community's collective judgement that it was in everyone's best interest if the wildlife officer never found out about our neighbor's poaching activities.
[1] Joe Oliver has a great rant about a similar situation, lest readers think this only works in rural settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto
Thanks for the heads up. Others just down voted my comment out of contempt for me I guess.