zlacker

Corruption is a provable violation of ethics which is measurable.

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.

>>austin+(OP)
What ethics? And how can you prove anything if cops always defend their own?

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.

>>austin+(OP)
Considering we're not allowed to see officer disciplinary records, even though they work for us (the taxpayer), it's impossible to get the data you want.

>>uoaei+w
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

In practical application ethics violations are knowable breaking of rules or demonstrable malicious intentions.

>>austin+(OP)
> Corruption is a provable violation of ethics which is measurable.

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.

>>psycho+01
You can subpoena for that in the public interest otherwise that is an employer related privacy violation of an employee.

>>justin+z2
I am absolutely not objecting to oversight. I am not sure how you came to that. I am advocating for the opposite, for increased measurable data so that people don’t have to invent their own narratives.

>>austin+B1
You have an ultra-simplified view of what ethics can be and how it can be employed.

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.

>>austin+u6
> invent their own narratives

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.

>>austin+(OP)
Here you go [1]. This DB contains multiple provable violation of ethics in multiple measurable and easily digestible forms such as graphs and stats.

I assume you will agree that this is close to objectivity and therefore police are indeed corrupt?

[1] https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality

>>uoaei+Za
Then please provide a better definition.

>>fzeror+oe
Yes, qualified data is essential because the goal is accountability, but that still doesn’t answer my original question.

>>justin+Lb
Then advocate for better data. You either want accountability or you just want to have something to complain about.

>>austin+5s
Literally every person who is advocating for greater police accountability is, by definition, advocating for better data. I don't think there's an argument here about that. The point of disagreement would seem to be, most people don't believe being unable to fully quantify the corruption of the police means it does not exist.

>>austin+Mr
Your original question was 'where's the data'. I provided the data. How does that not answer it?

>>fzeror+WG
Original question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616331

>>justin+IC
The point isn’t whether there is corruption or not. In any government there is always some degree of perceived corruption. The point is the prevalence of corruption. Without some form of objective measure claiming corruption is largely meaningless, because there is nothing specifically identifiable to change.

>>austin+gI
Yes, and I provided you evidence. You claimed in an earlier post

> 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?

>>austin+kO
> The point is the prevalence of corruption. Without some form of objective measure claiming corruption is largely meaningless, because there is nothing specifically identifiable to change.

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.