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> If this is their job then the entire institution of policing is irredeemably flawed and we ought to scrap it. Our main problem as a society is that half the

> If this is their job then the entire institution of policing is irredeemably flawed and we ought to scrap it. Our main problem as a society is that half the country believes the above, and the other half believes that the half that isn't them are all lawless savages who need order imposed by a heavy hand. This can't end well.

jMyles 9y ago
> Our main problem as a society is that half the country believes the above, and the other half believes that the half that isn't them are all lawless savages who need order imposed by a heavy hand. I have just completed an 18-month tour of the country by land (thisisthebus.com). I've met people from every corner of the land and talked politics, technology, religion, and all sorts of other things with literally hundreds, probably a couple thousand, at urban watering holes, suburban campfires, and rural churches. Please point me to the place where I might find the latter half of the population you've described. From the Everglades to the Oregon Coast, from the desert to the Hudson Valley, I've searched long and hard and haven't found them. Everybody in this country wants peace. And a chance for their families to live in harmony in their communities. Nobody - (excuse my language) fucking nobody - wants two million people in prison. Nobody.
- irrational 9y ago
  You're not sticking to the narrative.
- exelius 9y ago
  No offense, but you as an outsider are not going to see that. It's selection bias; the people willing to talk to you are going to be more open to outsiders. The people who fear the invasion of the lawless savages are holed up at home. Reagan called it the "silent majority"; and I wouldn't say it's an actual majority, but it's at least 30% of the country judging by Trump's poll numbers.
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  With all due respect and not to have a pissing contest, but I've been traveling, first in a motorhome and now with an old Avion travel trailer, for about 7 of the past 9 years (sort of hard to pin down exactly what "traveling" means in this context since sometimes I park in one place for a few months, but it includes multiple drives from coast to coast and from Alaska to southern Mexico), and I've met quite a few law-and-order Republicans who absolutely believe that the vast majority of people in prison deserve to be there, that if people just do what police say there won't be any more police brutality, and that maybe we should spend more money on law enforcement and give police more power. It's certainly not half, but it's a sizable portion of the US population, and clearly a sizeable portion of the voting population, since our government has been dramatically reshaped in the past year by them. It's sometimes surprising, too. I've met sweet old ladies that as long as topics were of the travel and weather variety seemed perfectly normal. The moment politics came up, they'd show a mean side that would really throw me for a loop. Racism with a shocking lack of self-awareness about their racism is one of the biggest surprises. That said, rather than arguing that you're wrong about the people you've met, I suspect you've experienced bias in the people you meet in traveling the way you do. I've noticed there is a bias in the people I interact with most, for sure; lots of hippies, train kids, as well as people who love the outdoors (in a hiking and biking in national and state parks sort of way, rather than a hunting and fishing sort of way), etc. frequent some of my favorite places to go. But I still meet enough middle-class white folks who have alarming (to me) ideas about police and race and justice in America. If nobody wanted 2.2 million people in prison, we wouldn't have 2.2 million people in prison. Somebody sure as hell wants it because they vote over and over for the people that perpetuate it. We can't pretend no one is responsible. There are people who made decisions that led us inexorably to this outcome, and people making decisions daily to maintain and even expand the prison industrial complex.
  - SauciestGNU 9y ago
    As an aside, the train kids are my favorite. They can be a real handful (to put it mildly) but damn if that isn't an interesting culture.
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  They're the people making dumb comments like "give 'em the chair" and other right leaning authoritarian junk on the comments of local news stories about minor crimes and "speeding fines should scale with income" and other socialist authoritarian junk on platforms like HN. They walk among us.
  - arcticbull 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, why do you think speeding fines shouldn't scale with income? The pain that's intended to dissuade behavior is that you can do X amount less this month, but if your income is enormous you don't feel X at all, it's not really a punishment is it? If I were a billionaire and I could drive around with impunity with my checkbook open is that achieving the desired outcome? Scaling with income scales the pain and therefore the dissuasion. Legitimately curious to the counterargument. Crime is dissuaded in percentage of your life behind bars, shouldn't infractions be dissuaded in percentage of your income or net worth?
    - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      Basically because 99.9% of speeding isn't a serious crime that merits harsh punishment 1) Harsh punishment for something trivial that everyone does but is of negligible harm to society is worse for society than handing out slap on the wrist type fines. Speeding infractions, especially on limited access highways, are only slightly worse for society than parking infractions. For example, the speed limit on the highway I take to work is 55mph. 55 is pre/post rush our speed. Typical traffic flow when traffic is light is up to 80-85 as permitted by weather conditions. Writing people tickets for 30-over when 30-over is a reasonable speed does nothing good for society. 2) Why should I work hard to be a six figure software engineer if "winning" that reverse lottery gets me just as screwed as someone who's barely living paycheck to paycheck? 3) Most states have appropriate fines and penalties attached to sufficiently broad criminal violations to cover actual bad behavior. I.e. write someone a summons for reckless driving if they're actually being reckless and then fine them $500 in court rather than fine them $500 for "speeding" according to some table and formula. 4) Then there's the whole problem of misaligned incentives that comes with aggressively policing minor infractions for revenue (traffic or some other group). I'd rather have a police department of x officers all doing real work than a police department of 2x where on any given day x of the officers are always on traffic detail to pay for the costs of running the department. 5) If people want to drive "too fast" on the road then the road either needs to be redesigned (there's visual tricks the engineers can play to make the road feel smaller and make people want to go slower) so people want to go the desired speed or the desired speed needs to increase to reflect reality. If I'm being a normal person going 80 in a 55 that should be an 80 on a normal night I don't want to get a $500 ticket because my tail-light was out but it just so happened that my otherwise unremarkable speed of 80 was 25 over for that location.
- mikestew 9y ago
  Please point me to the place where I might find the latter half of the population you've described. They’re in places where they are unlikely to run into travellers from far away lands. Duh, if they were in a position to meet a more diverse set of folks, perhaps their views might be different. The extreme stereotype of this is the “hillbilly” living a holler no one visits, and which they’ve never wandered far from. Nobody - (excuse my language) fucking nobody - wants two million people in prison. The fact that there are two million people in prison belies your statement.
- DennisP 9y ago
  That's encouraging. But since you asked, I found a couple thousand at NC GOP state conventions. That's not half the population but somehow a lot of politicians they like keep getting elected.
- jaredklewis 9y ago
  America’s 2.3m+ prisoners were put in prison by the US’s criminal justice system. In a 2017 Gallup poll, 27% of Americans indicated “a great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in the criminal justice system. Another 37% indicated “some” confidence. And 34% rated their confidence “very little” or “none.” The law enforcement half of the criminal justice system (the topic of the article) is viewed more favorably, with 57% of anericans rating their confidence in the police as “quite a lot” or “a great deal.” Of course having a great deal of confidence in the criminal justice system is not synonymous with wanting 2m+ prisoners, but it does seem to indicate those respondents are not overly concerned with the high number of prisoners. As should be obvious, I think “nobody” is overstating things a great deal. http://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.asp...

jMyles 9y ago

> Our main problem as a society is that half the country believes the above, and the other half believes that the half that isn't them are all lawless savages who need order imposed by a heavy hand. I have just completed an 18-month tour of the country by land (thisisthebus.com). I've met people from every corner of the land and talked politics, technology, religion, and all sorts of other things with literally hundreds, probably a couple thousand, at urban watering holes, suburban campfires, and rural churches. Please point me to the place where I might find the latter half of the population you've described. From the Everglades to the Oregon Coast, from the desert to the Hudson Valley, I've searched long and hard and haven't found them. Everybody in this country wants peace. And a chance for their families to live in harmony in their communities. Nobody - (excuse my language) fucking nobody - wants two million people in prison. Nobody.

irrational 9y ago
You're not sticking to the narrative.
exelius 9y ago
No offense, but you as an outsider are not going to see that. It's selection bias; the people willing to talk to you are going to be more open to outsiders. The people who fear the invasion of the lawless savages are holed up at home. Reagan called it the "silent majority"; and I wouldn't say it's an actual majority, but it's at least 30% of the country judging by Trump's poll numbers.
SwellJoe 9y ago
With all due respect and not to have a pissing contest, but I've been traveling, first in a motorhome and now with an old Avion travel trailer, for about 7 of the past 9 years (sort of hard to pin down exactly what "traveling" means in this context since sometimes I park in one place for a few months, but it includes multiple drives from coast to coast and from Alaska to southern Mexico), and I've met quite a few law-and-order Republicans who absolutely believe that the vast majority of people in prison deserve to be there, that if people just do what police say there won't be any more police brutality, and that maybe we should spend more money on law enforcement and give police more power. It's certainly not half, but it's a sizable portion of the US population, and clearly a sizeable portion of the voting population, since our government has been dramatically reshaped in the past year by them. It's sometimes surprising, too. I've met sweet old ladies that as long as topics were of the travel and weather variety seemed perfectly normal. The moment politics came up, they'd show a mean side that would really throw me for a loop. Racism with a shocking lack of self-awareness about their racism is one of the biggest surprises. That said, rather than arguing that you're wrong about the people you've met, I suspect you've experienced bias in the people you meet in traveling the way you do. I've noticed there is a bias in the people I interact with most, for sure; lots of hippies, train kids, as well as people who love the outdoors (in a hiking and biking in national and state parks sort of way, rather than a hunting and fishing sort of way), etc. frequent some of my favorite places to go. But I still meet enough middle-class white folks who have alarming (to me) ideas about police and race and justice in America. If nobody wanted 2.2 million people in prison, we wouldn't have 2.2 million people in prison. Somebody sure as hell wants it because they vote over and over for the people that perpetuate it. We can't pretend no one is responsible. There are people who made decisions that led us inexorably to this outcome, and people making decisions daily to maintain and even expand the prison industrial complex.
- SauciestGNU 9y ago
  As an aside, the train kids are my favorite. They can be a real handful (to put it mildly) but damn if that isn't an interesting culture.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
They're the people making dumb comments like "give 'em the chair" and other right leaning authoritarian junk on the comments of local news stories about minor crimes and "speeding fines should scale with income" and other socialist authoritarian junk on platforms like HN. They walk among us.
- arcticbull 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, why do you think speeding fines shouldn't scale with income? The pain that's intended to dissuade behavior is that you can do X amount less this month, but if your income is enormous you don't feel X at all, it's not really a punishment is it? If I were a billionaire and I could drive around with impunity with my checkbook open is that achieving the desired outcome? Scaling with income scales the pain and therefore the dissuasion. Legitimately curious to the counterargument. Crime is dissuaded in percentage of your life behind bars, shouldn't infractions be dissuaded in percentage of your income or net worth?
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Basically because 99.9% of speeding isn't a serious crime that merits harsh punishment 1) Harsh punishment for something trivial that everyone does but is of negligible harm to society is worse for society than handing out slap on the wrist type fines. Speeding infractions, especially on limited access highways, are only slightly worse for society than parking infractions. For example, the speed limit on the highway I take to work is 55mph. 55 is pre/post rush our speed. Typical traffic flow when traffic is light is up to 80-85 as permitted by weather conditions. Writing people tickets for 30-over when 30-over is a reasonable speed does nothing good for society. 2) Why should I work hard to be a six figure software engineer if "winning" that reverse lottery gets me just as screwed as someone who's barely living paycheck to paycheck? 3) Most states have appropriate fines and penalties attached to sufficiently broad criminal violations to cover actual bad behavior. I.e. write someone a summons for reckless driving if they're actually being reckless and then fine them $500 in court rather than fine them $500 for "speeding" according to some table and formula. 4) Then there's the whole problem of misaligned incentives that comes with aggressively policing minor infractions for revenue (traffic or some other group). I'd rather have a police department of x officers all doing real work than a police department of 2x where on any given day x of the officers are always on traffic detail to pay for the costs of running the department. 5) If people want to drive "too fast" on the road then the road either needs to be redesigned (there's visual tricks the engineers can play to make the road feel smaller and make people want to go slower) so people want to go the desired speed or the desired speed needs to increase to reflect reality. If I'm being a normal person going 80 in a 55 that should be an 80 on a normal night I don't want to get a $500 ticket because my tail-light was out but it just so happened that my otherwise unremarkable speed of 80 was 25 over for that location.
mikestew 9y ago
Please point me to the place where I might find the latter half of the population you've described. They’re in places where they are unlikely to run into travellers from far away lands. Duh, if they were in a position to meet a more diverse set of folks, perhaps their views might be different. The extreme stereotype of this is the “hillbilly” living a holler no one visits, and which they’ve never wandered far from. Nobody - (excuse my language) fucking nobody - wants two million people in prison. The fact that there are two million people in prison belies your statement.
DennisP 9y ago
That's encouraging. But since you asked, I found a couple thousand at NC GOP state conventions. That's not half the population but somehow a lot of politicians they like keep getting elected.
jaredklewis 9y ago
America’s 2.3m+ prisoners were put in prison by the US’s criminal justice system. In a 2017 Gallup poll, 27% of Americans indicated “a great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in the criminal justice system. Another 37% indicated “some” confidence. And 34% rated their confidence “very little” or “none.” The law enforcement half of the criminal justice system (the topic of the article) is viewed more favorably, with 57% of anericans rating their confidence in the police as “quite a lot” or “a great deal.” Of course having a great deal of confidence in the criminal justice system is not synonymous with wanting 2m+ prisoners, but it does seem to indicate those respondents are not overly concerned with the high number of prisoners. As should be obvious, I think “nobody” is overstating things a great deal. http://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.asp...