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A database that lists the officers responsible for force by name, frequency and race. Resulting in neat graphs that strongly suggests that police violence is ca

• emilfihlman 8y ago
  Perhaps the individual who has been granted the right to violence will finally change their abusive and, for any normal person, illegal behaviour if they are finally outed.
• abledon 8y ago
  yeah this is not good. Being a police officer, putting your life on the line to protect citizens... the guy showing up at your place at 3 am to deal with a crazed meth addict neighbour next door.. doing this dangerous task for many years. To have armchair 'law enforcement' experts in each living room of the nation linking to an officers behaviour on twitter, not having the context of the case, the background and previous actions of the offender on file... seems like a recipe for misunderstanding. I do think those new axon body cams are a good idea though, a cop can not worry about getting skewered on public media if he has real time video proof of being provoked. Southland (Cop show) had a good episode clip of this .
  • catacombs 8y ago
    Are you a cop?
    • abledon 8y ago
      No but I think a lot of people take for granted law enforcement in modern society — things can get ugly fast when there is no one to uphold the law
      • catacombs 8y ago
        Of course. We all should be thankful there are people -- law enforcement included -- who will put their lives on the line to protect society. However, as cliched as this is, with great power comes great responsibility. And there are those, especially in law enforcement, who take their power for granted and use it to harm and, in some cases, kill people.
        • abledon 8y ago
          Yes that’s great . I don’t know how I came off as suggesting they should be thugs in the prev post . We should rather have a separate org, a police watchdog that has access to the footage and actively monitors rather than give public access to officers actions and personal info. That org should also have access to offender info and police info so they can interpret each case accordingly
  • InclinedPlane 8y ago
    Are you saying that cops are and should be thugs? I think police officers are better than that and should be held to a higher standard than that. There are plenty of good cops out there, but they are very much not advantaged by systems which protect the worst offenders, encourage silence, and discourage accountability. If you think cops are thugs then by all means, encourage a lack of accountability, and they'll become exactly that. Our communities should have higher standards, and the police themselves should have higher standards as well.
• anon2298100925 8y ago
  Police officers are unelected public officials granted permission to use deadly force on behalf of the state. The data should not be anonymized.
• pytester 8y ago
  >Listing the officers by name is a kind of online vigilantism that ultimately might threaten their personal safety. As soon as: * The blue code of silence collapses. * Judges and politicians stop covering for cop brutality and protecting cop killers. * Police are more than half as likely to die on the job as a trash collectors. I'll maybe start to buy this line of reasoning. It's an insult to the memory of every unarmed, peaceful citizen who has died at police hands to pretend that vigilantism is potentially a bigger problem than police brutality.
  • alehul 8y ago
    > * Police are more than half as likely to die on the job as a trash collectors. How is this at all relevant to whether a police officer deserves privacy? Yes, their fatality rate is around half that of a trash collector. Since when was HN anti-privacy? You can use data like this to analyze and criticize the system, but I see no reason why the officers' identities would be helpful for any legitimate purpose, especially weighed against their privacy and the danger of such exposure in this heated political environment.
    • stefan_ 8y ago
      I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of privacy. Privacy is not for government employees in the execution of their duties.
    • pessimizer 8y ago
      > How is this at all relevant to whether a police officer deserves privacy? Who was debating whether police officers deserve privacy? That's a question for theologians. The debate was about whether the threat to police officers' safety was an important enough factor to the public to merit censoring their names from reports of their conduct. If policework is currently less dangerous than trash collecting, that's an obvious argument against. I like the economic argument: if you prefer your violence anonymous, quit and find another job.
    • thatcat 8y ago
      They aren't in a three letter agency, they are low level public servants. Individuals in such a position must be held accountable for their own actions. The system of police unions protecting them is a different matter.
• perfmode 8y ago
  Your pseudoscientific dismissal of racist policing makes me ashamed to be a part of this community. The fact remains: the patterns of violence perpetrated by police indicate a distinct lack of regard for the value of the lives of people who are black. It’s incredible how easily a police officer will beat, shoot, or kill a person of color. And as a person of color myself, I find it alarming and gross when I read comments such as yours.
  • stareatgoats 8y ago
    > Your pseudoscientific dismissal of racist policing Honest question: where did I dismiss racist policing, not to mention pseudoscientifically? I really can't find it. For the record, I agree with all your statements from "The fact remains" and forward up until the last sentence. To clarify FWIW: the problem is not race, it is racism. I find it problematic that the way this database is presented points rather to the former than the latter.
    • perfmode 8y ago
      Observe the sheer number of sound rebuttals to your statements. The variety and depth of your identified misconceptions should compel you to question the body of axioms and ideas on top of which you confidently espouse such demonstrably problematic arguments.
      • stareatgoats 8y ago
        Sorry I don't buy that. I realize that race and racism are contentious topics, but we should really be able to discuss them rationally rooted in what is actually said, not based on assumptions, or by referring to number of objections etc. I grant you points for rhetoric elegance with that line though [0], but it would be even more helpful if you would exemplify that assumed body of axioms and ideas (after which I expect to prove you wrong). [0] "the body of axioms and ideas on top of which you confidently espouse such demonstrably problematic arguments"
• lizardskull 8y ago
  thank you for spreading the truth no matter how unpopular it maybe
• TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  > Race should really be stripped from this kind statistic. Race is a social construct based on superficial attributes that does not carry any explanatory meaning. It mostly serves to underpin racist prejudice, which in turn serves to blur out the real reasons for a problem. In a lot of cases, racial prejudice is the problem, or a significant aspect of it. Racism is deeply embedded in the fabric of American society.
  • stareatgoats 8y ago
    > Racism is deeply embedded in the fabric of American society. Yes, I'm sure, and racism is for sure "a significant aspect" of police brutality, I don't contest it. But racism is nonetheless merely a stupid pattern of thought, and I oppose the notion that combating it is to apply more racism. You'll note that the database doesn't analyze racism, it analyses race.
    • TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
      Noting that race is a factor in police brutality is not racist, it is an anti-racist act.
    • danso 8y ago
      > You'll note that the database doesn't analyze racism, it analyses race. It's impossible to do any analysis of racial disparity unless the race element is specifically recorded. And, as data collection is as much a political endeavor as it is technical, not every agency or state tracks race. You can see a not-quite complete collection and comparison of nationwide police data in the Stanford Open Policing Project (disclosure: started by one of my former colleagues) [0], and which states do/don't track driver race. Not all states have agreed to release their data. I wonder how you propose that a database "analyze racism"? A database contains data. If it's hard as it is to define and get data on race, you think there exists an arbiter and resulting data source for racism? [0] https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/data/ https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/data/
      • stareatgoats 8y ago
• 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  This use of "race is a social construct" seems strange. When people say that, the key point is typically that it has no biological meaning. It's still often a highly relevant variable when studying social trends and public policy. The institution of a formal police force with its own sociopolitical identity and career prospects is also a social construct, after all.
  • stareatgoats 8y ago
    >"race is a social construct" seems strange. It merely means that race is something that doesn't exist outside of the social conventions of a society, an identity pasted onto oneself or someone else based on superficial and meaningless biological attributes. Racism can be physically dangerous if 'race' is associated with ethics (be it high or low), such as in this database. But mainly, racism is just stupid (i.e. it obfuscates the real issues). To think of 'race' as a meaningful category in research underpinning policy mostly proves to an outsider how ingrained racism is in the US.
    • adjkant 8y ago
      Just because race doesn't exist outside of social conventions doesn't mean it isn't a relevant factor. In fact, it's explicitly not irrelevant for things within our society, such as the conduct of our police force. For better (or in this case worse), race is a very relevant factor in our society currently.
    • lbotos 8y ago
      > It merely means that race is something that doesn't exist outside of the social conventions of a society, an identity pasted onto oneself or someone else based on superficial and meaningless biological attributes. With this in mind, are police not agents working on behalf of a society? Funded largely (if not solely) by members of that society? You don't have to look much further than "blue lives matter" to see that police in America are almost looked at as a psuedo-race. > racism is just stupid (i.e. it obfuscates the real issues). A lot of people think Racism in policing is the real issue. A core one. What do you think the real issues that are being obfuscated are?
• CptFribble 8y ago
  > Race is a social construct [...] that does not carry any explanatory meaning. It may be a social construct, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant. Bias is real. Race-based bias is real. People make decisions based on conscious and unconscious thoughts and beliefs about race. This has been demonstrated through numerous behavioral studies. What if the real reasons for a police departments behavior involve internally common beliefs about a particular race? What if a majority of police in a particular department just don't like Asians, for example? In that case, race is very relevant to the "real reasons for a problem." I would love to say racism would go away if we just stopped acknowledging race, but the fact remains that many, many people have closely held beliefs about a particular race, whether it's out-and-out racism, or whether it's the assumption that a black kid in a mostly white neighborhood walking alone must necessarily be an intruder. In 2018, we can't discuss real reasons for police violence without race. In many cases, it is the reason.
  • stareatgoats 8y ago
    No, you are confusing race with racism: > In that case, race is very relevant to the "real reasons for a problem." I'm sure you mean that racism is very relevant etc. > In 2018, we can't discuss real reasons for police violence without race. In many cases, it is the reason. Same here, you can't reasonably mean that race "is" the reason for police violence, you (most probably) meant that racism is the reason for police brutality. This kind of mixing up of the concepts is precisely what I object to.
    • mindslight 8y ago
      You're right - the real issue is probably more like the community an officer socializes in versus the one they police. But their own "race" is an easily-obtainable correlated proxy, and if your intention is to enlighten the discourse you'd be better off making the point as a constructive nitpick rather than sounding dismissive.
    • DarthTetanus 8y ago
      They’re not mixing up concepts. You’re being pedantic.
• mindslight 8y ago
  We know the "real reasons" from first principles - the people tasked with upholding the law have taken that as a license to flout it. Everything beyond that is a window dressing of politics, unfortunately necessary to rally outside pressure for these corrupt institutions to be reformed. These statistics shouldn't need to be publicly done by independent groups, but could easily be done confidentially by the police departments themselves to avoid having to pay out compensation for their employees' crimes. Alas, police forces find it easier to double down and shirk off liability for the damage they cause, so here we are.