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As always, you have to ask, compared to what? Are the majority of police actions brutality, or only a miniscule fraction? This is the crucial question, and a

As always, you have to ask, compared to what? Are the majority of police actions brutality, or only a miniscule fraction? This is the crucial question, and a site like this provides no insight at all. (or so I imagine, since site is down) If you want to fan the flames, though, add a section for protesters savagely kicking unconscious victims in the head.

rolae 6y ago
To document single incidents of brutality has value. The documentation of one single act of police brutality has value. As the police has a monopoly on the legal use of violence they have to be held accountable. This is like saying building a registry/counting murders has no value and brings no insight. And this has nothing todo with condoning violence of protesters, which is just as wrong as police brutality. The issue is, that police never seems to be held accountable for excessive use of force.
- downerending 6y ago
  It confirms existence, but we already knew that. The officer in question has been fired, arrested, and charged. That would seem to contradict the "never held accountable".
  - h3cate 6y ago
    Sadly this was one case. There are many others across the globe that happen and nobody is ever held accountable
    - downerending 6y ago
      It's pedantic, but we do that here: it's certainly not the case that nobody is ever held accountable, at least when speaking of criminal behavior by the police. If you want people to listen, speak carefully. Some police acts enrage me, for sure. Really. At the same time, the rioter behavior we've seen in the last three days might be worse than the sum total of all of that. And I know that the police have to deal with this shit day in and day out. It's an impossible job, and yet we cannot survive without them. Maybe someday we can have AI robot policemen instead, programmed to very careful protocols. I'm cautiously optimistic.
      - h3cate 6y ago
        Yeah sorry I think my grammar wasn't perfect there. What I meant was there are a lot of other cases of police brutality in which nobody is help accountable in that individual case. I agree with you completely that the rioter behaviour is appalling. I feel like I have seen just as bad as the things on this site from rioters and it deeply saddens me. I am confident however that those rioters that do stoop to the ultimate lows including attacking store owners will be punished to the full extent of the law.
wonderwonder 6y ago
Just so I understand, how are the 2 related? You seem to suggest that the "protesters savagely kicking unconscious victims in the head" are criminals. I agree, they likely are. By those terms then all of the police officers kicking downed protesters are criminals as well. Why are their fellow officers not arresting them on the spot? There is a very large difference between random protesters committing violent acts and government sanctioned organizations with the legal right to shoot and kill implementing a wide spread program of violence and brutality. If you cannot see the difference, then you are not looking. If an officer observes another officer committing a crime and does not intervene then that officer is corrupt. At each of these police brutality incidents there are often a number of officers observing and not intervening. When the system designed to enforce the law routinely breaks it without punishment then the system is broken and needs to be rebuilt.
- bitcharmer 6y ago
  > At each of these police brutality incidents there are often a number of officers observing and not intervening. Sadly, judging by the videos that's an overwhelming majority of the police force
- downerending 6y ago
  For starters, the rioters are already breaking the law at the point of police contact, and they know that they are. Secondly, the officers are typically in a dangerous situation, and have more pressing concerns. If you find yourself in a riot, leave. Common sense and common decency, no?
  - wonderwonder 6y ago
    So because the rioters are breaking the law it gives the police carte blanche to do the same? Amazing how cops in other western countries are able to enforce the law without killing thousands of citizens every year but ours cant. Sorry the cops have more pressing concerns than obeying the law? Then they should not be police officers. A whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching George Floyd get murdered. A whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching Rodney King get beaten. There are hundreds of incidents of whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching their fellow officers assault prone or unresisting civilians. Just so I understand, if you spent your whole life getting treated as a second class citizen and peaceful protest did not work, and voting did not work, and nothing changed, could you not see yourself getting a little tired of living a lesser life? Now imagine having kids and having to watch them live the same lesser life.
Eyas 6y ago
Is there an okay percentage of brutality by police? When a failure in the system happens, it needs to be magnified, studied, dissected, and the system must evolve to make sure it doesn't happen again. This is how we have safer nuclear plants, airplanes, etc. And in human systems too: coal miners and people on oil rigs have adopted new protocols to help their workers be more safe. The police is not immune. One act of brutality must be documented, post-mortemed, debugged, and mitigated.
- downerending 6y ago
  Failures of the system should very much be analyzed and corrected. This site doesn't appear to have that goal.
  - Eyas 6y ago
    Isn't documenting the failures the important first steps? When people seem to deny that these failures exist, deny their frequency, deny how horrific some of those failures are, etc.
  - h3cate 6y ago
    I would like this site to ultimately aid with that end goal. A website however cannot send somebody to jail for a crime that they have committed. It can however hold information and inform people about crimes that may of been committed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
devmunchies 6y ago
Agree. I wish this stayed on reddit and Twitter. I hate seeing this kind of hot topic stuff here.
- downerending 6y ago
  Yeah, I find it hard to resist taking the bait, but this is utterly irrelevant to HN's topics.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Technology has to intersect with society at some point. A guy who works for Google made some posts on Facebook and Egypt joined the Arab Spring. I can’t think of a better board than HN to discuss the changing implications of technology platforms. I saw a live broadcast on one of the 24-hour live cable news channels last night. Everyone had their phones out recording everything from every angle. The technology is becoming ubiquitous. Bodycams and their video recordings can be misused or edited. So too can field recordings by protesters and agents saboteur. More recordings means more checksums against tampering, deletion, and improper framing of real-world events.
  - h3cate 6y ago
    I agree with you. We as a people have eyes that cannot lie and remember everything. We are no longer in a time when things can be lied about or twisted. It's time that we started using that power to make the world a fairer place
- h3cate 6y ago
  Whilst I would usually agree I feel like the technology community as a whole can do a lot in the fight against injustice in this world. I understand your sentiment though and will not post again.
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
komali2 6y ago
> savagely kicking unconscious victims in the head. You're talking about this oft-shared video, I imagine: https://twitter.com/LibertyHangout/status/1266926402269523969 https://twitter.com/LibertyHangout/status/126692640226952396... Yea, wow, those protesters really did a number on that guy. Obviously he was just defending his shop from Thugs, right? Oh wait... no. He was a crazy person running at protesters with a sword: https://twitter.com/sable_sonya/status/1267148333203800064 https://twitter.com/sable_sonya/status/1267148333203800064 And look at that, those Thugs, after protecting themselves from him, then took on the role of First Responder, and started treating him: https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1266927491949588485 https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/126692749194958848...
- downerending 6y ago
  The first link is one of the two I saw today, yes. There's really nothing that convince me that these people are not evil. (The second was in Portland, I think.) The second link doesn't seem to have any video. But head-kicking beyond the point of unconsciousness is not how I would defend myself from a crazy person (if that's even a factual take). The third link is hard to interpret, but until someone analyzes it, I assume that the people assisting the guy are not the same ones that were committing wanton savagery. But bless them, in any case. I turned to my wife after seeing the first video and remarked, "These guys just gave the fall election to Trump.". If you're old enough to remember Nixon, you'll take the reference.
  - komali2 6y ago
    I'm not old enough, but I am aware that history hasn't been kind to Nixon :)
    - downerending 6y ago
      The reference is that he never would have been elected in the first place except for violent protests.
austincheney 6y ago
While I suspect the percentage of overall police actions that are brutal, unethical, or harmful are tiny it is still a subject that demands a far greater degree of transparency. The subject identifies several challenges: * police are falsely accused of bad behavior frequently, which can make it much harder to identify the actual extreme few bad apples which need to be identified and removed * all accused are innocent until proven guilty regardless of their profession or who they are. You don’t want police accused of horrible conduct policing but at the same time they need a process of defense, as does everybody Honestly, much of this problem could be addressed by mandating body cams. I have known police officers who live by their body cams to ensure everyone is honest. Until that happens what would you suggest to change the current situation?
- downerending 6y ago
  I agree that all police should have body cams always, for the protection of all. I'm not aware of anyone that objects to this, though probably there are some. Furthermore, incidents like this have really made me reconsider my objections to the panopticon. These days, I think we'd be better off if there were cameras everywhere always, broadcasting instantaneously for public capture.
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    > I agree that all police should have body cams always, for the protection of all. I'm not aware of anyone that objects to this, though probably there are some. The Movement for Black Lives objects to body cams: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-the-war-on-black-people/ https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-the-war-on-black-peopl...
    - downerending 6y ago
      Wow. I have no idea what to say to that.
- scarface74 6y ago
  police are falsely accused of bad behavior frequently, which can make it much harder to identify the actual extreme few bad apples which need to be identified and removed If the problem isn’t systemic then how do you explain the various studies showing that minorities are disproportionately “stopped and frisked”?
loceng 6y ago
The problem is the lack of other police officers immediately arresting an officer they just saw abusing people.
hug 6y ago
> As always, you have to ask, compared to what? What would you even compare instances of police brutality against? Is there some kind of threshold under which you think police brutality is okay? Should there be a rule that each police force gets one free brutalising a year? Or is it just that if their actions are only a little bit of brutality, just a pinch, that they should get away with it? No one has to ask what to compare it to, because in this circumstance it's a stupid question that distracts from the immediate reality of the situation: Anything adequately described as police brutality that goes uninvestigated & unpunished is unacceptable.
- downerending 6y ago
  As a programmer, I accept that I'll make mistakes from time to time. Excoriating me for doing so would not help. The bad apples should be removed. Riots and mayhem work against that goal.
  - hug 6y ago
    That doesn't answer a single one of my questions, doesn't expand upon your original point, and doesn't bear on the situation in the slightest. Unless you're implying that your job as a programmer and the job of a police officer are similar in consequences when you "make a mistake". But as to the second part of your comment, the bad apples should be removed, but are not. So what do you do about it? Put videos of the internet maybe so it's more public? Maybe you also go out and protest about it. Maybe that causes more videos to show up. Who knows.
    - downerending 6y ago
      I don't commit crimes. And I certainly don't commit aggravated assault on helpless people. Do people even need to be told not to do that?
      - hug 6y ago
        Pithy answer: Apparently police do, otherwise the US wouldn't have so many deaths in custody or complaints of police brutality. Less pithy answer: The protests, and the videos, are not examples of regular crimes or regular criminals. They're about criminal actions by police, two circles in a venn diagram that should never be crossed without black & yellow stripes and giant red "WARNING" text. It needs highlighting due to how much of an exceptional circumstance it should be. Yes, normal people commit crimes and yes, those people should be punished harshly for them, but those normal people are not people put in positions of power over others by the state, which is why you don't see quite so many protests against them. (You do see protests about them, though: Zimmerman wasn't exactly seen in a positive light, for example.) Asking "but what about regular Joe Criminal" in the face of protests about police is like a poor diversionary tactic. It's essentially just whataboutism.
ookdatnog 6y ago
You're misidentifying what the core problem is with police brutality: it's not just about relative frequency, it's about how the justice system responds to it. As a society we give police a monopoly on civilian violence, it is only reasonable to expect the holders of that power to be held to the highest possible standards. But the justice system signals the exact opposite, by systematially protecting even the worst cops from the consequences of their actions. This, I believe, lies at the core of the people's rage. I for one think that rage is justified.
- downerending 6y ago
  I agree that the situation should continue to be improved. I doubt that websites like this will help. Riots will definitely not help. The cause of righteousness has been set back a generation in a few days.
  - ookdatnog 6y ago
    Don't put words in my mouth. I never implied in any way that I think the situation is improving. I'm not sure what part of my post you're actually agreeing with. I cannot see any downsides to systematically documenting instances of police brutality and demanding justice for each instance. It seems entirely just to me.
    - downerending 6y ago
      My bad. I think the situation should continue to be improved, as it surely has in the last couple of generations. You're welcome to think otherwise, of course.
      - ookdatnog 6y ago
        I've looked around a little bit and I simply cannot find any evidence that police violence is on the decline. A cursory look at a graph of police killings over the last few years shows, if anything, a slight increase (https://www.vox.com/2020/5/31/21276004/4-charts-anger-police-killing-george-floyd-protests https://www.vox.com/2020/5/31/21276004/4-charts-anger-police... - first graph). I can only speculate about what your exact argument is: I'm guessing that what you're saying is that, surely, today's police are behaving better than the police in, say, the civil rights movement era (I couldn't find any data on that but I'm willing to accept that much for the sake of argument). And I think you infer from that that police violence is downward trending and that therefore, we should just let matters run their course: any upset to the delicate improvement might plunge us in the other direction. But your inference is incorrect. You're looking at a function over time, see that this function was (probably) higher at some point in the past than it is now, and conclude from that that the function is still trending downwards. Essentially your argument seems to be based on the entirely unjustified assumption that the function has to be monotonically decreasing. But if you don't assume monotonicity (and you really shouldn't), then function values in the far past don't give you any information about the derivative of the function at t=now. And the derivative at t=now seems to be (ever so slightly) positive, not negative as you imply. In which case, evidently, things are not improving on their own.
h3cate 6y ago
I agree. Another commenter had a good idea of adding WHY a video is on the site which I will add tonight. I'm happy to implement any other ideas that you might have. PS. site should be back up
berbec 6y ago
Compared to what? Are the vast majority of airline pilot actions intentional crashes, or only a miniscule fraction?

rolae 6y ago

To document single incidents of brutality has value. The documentation of one single act of police brutality has value. As the police has a monopoly on the legal use of violence they have to be held accountable. This is like saying building a registry/counting murders has no value and brings no insight. And this has nothing todo with condoning violence of protesters, which is just as wrong as police brutality. The issue is, that police never seems to be held accountable for excessive use of force.

downerending 6y ago
It confirms existence, but we already knew that. The officer in question has been fired, arrested, and charged. That would seem to contradict the "never held accountable".
- h3cate 6y ago
  Sadly this was one case. There are many others across the globe that happen and nobody is ever held accountable
  - downerending 6y ago
    It's pedantic, but we do that here: it's certainly not the case that nobody is ever held accountable, at least when speaking of criminal behavior by the police. If you want people to listen, speak carefully. Some police acts enrage me, for sure. Really. At the same time, the rioter behavior we've seen in the last three days might be worse than the sum total of all of that. And I know that the police have to deal with this shit day in and day out. It's an impossible job, and yet we cannot survive without them. Maybe someday we can have AI robot policemen instead, programmed to very careful protocols. I'm cautiously optimistic.
    - h3cate 6y ago
      Yeah sorry I think my grammar wasn't perfect there. What I meant was there are a lot of other cases of police brutality in which nobody is help accountable in that individual case. I agree with you completely that the rioter behaviour is appalling. I feel like I have seen just as bad as the things on this site from rioters and it deeply saddens me. I am confident however that those rioters that do stoop to the ultimate lows including attacking store owners will be punished to the full extent of the law.

wonderwonder 6y ago

Just so I understand, how are the 2 related? You seem to suggest that the "protesters savagely kicking unconscious victims in the head" are criminals. I agree, they likely are. By those terms then all of the police officers kicking downed protesters are criminals as well. Why are their fellow officers not arresting them on the spot? There is a very large difference between random protesters committing violent acts and government sanctioned organizations with the legal right to shoot and kill implementing a wide spread program of violence and brutality. If you cannot see the difference, then you are not looking. If an officer observes another officer committing a crime and does not intervene then that officer is corrupt. At each of these police brutality incidents there are often a number of officers observing and not intervening. When the system designed to enforce the law routinely breaks it without punishment then the system is broken and needs to be rebuilt.

bitcharmer 6y ago
> At each of these police brutality incidents there are often a number of officers observing and not intervening. Sadly, judging by the videos that's an overwhelming majority of the police force
downerending 6y ago
For starters, the rioters are already breaking the law at the point of police contact, and they know that they are. Secondly, the officers are typically in a dangerous situation, and have more pressing concerns. If you find yourself in a riot, leave. Common sense and common decency, no?
- wonderwonder 6y ago
  So because the rioters are breaking the law it gives the police carte blanche to do the same? Amazing how cops in other western countries are able to enforce the law without killing thousands of citizens every year but ours cant. Sorry the cops have more pressing concerns than obeying the law? Then they should not be police officers. A whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching George Floyd get murdered. A whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching Rodney King get beaten. There are hundreds of incidents of whole lot of cops seem to have a whole lot of other pressing concerns standing around watching their fellow officers assault prone or unresisting civilians. Just so I understand, if you spent your whole life getting treated as a second class citizen and peaceful protest did not work, and voting did not work, and nothing changed, could you not see yourself getting a little tired of living a lesser life? Now imagine having kids and having to watch them live the same lesser life.

Eyas 6y ago

Is there an okay percentage of brutality by police? When a failure in the system happens, it needs to be magnified, studied, dissected, and the system must evolve to make sure it doesn't happen again. This is how we have safer nuclear plants, airplanes, etc. And in human systems too: coal miners and people on oil rigs have adopted new protocols to help their workers be more safe. The police is not immune. One act of brutality must be documented, post-mortemed, debugged, and mitigated.

downerending 6y ago
Failures of the system should very much be analyzed and corrected. This site doesn't appear to have that goal.
- Eyas 6y ago
  Isn't documenting the failures the important first steps? When people seem to deny that these failures exist, deny their frequency, deny how horrific some of those failures are, etc.
- h3cate 6y ago
  I would like this site to ultimately aid with that end goal. A website however cannot send somebody to jail for a crime that they have committed. It can however hold information and inform people about crimes that may of been committed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

devmunchies 6y ago

Agree. I wish this stayed on reddit and Twitter. I hate seeing this kind of hot topic stuff here.

downerending 6y ago
Yeah, I find it hard to resist taking the bait, but this is utterly irrelevant to HN's topics.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
aspenmayer 6y ago
Technology has to intersect with society at some point. A guy who works for Google made some posts on Facebook and Egypt joined the Arab Spring. I can’t think of a better board than HN to discuss the changing implications of technology platforms. I saw a live broadcast on one of the 24-hour live cable news channels last night. Everyone had their phones out recording everything from every angle. The technology is becoming ubiquitous. Bodycams and their video recordings can be misused or edited. So too can field recordings by protesters and agents saboteur. More recordings means more checksums against tampering, deletion, and improper framing of real-world events.
- h3cate 6y ago
  I agree with you. We as a people have eyes that cannot lie and remember everything. We are no longer in a time when things can be lied about or twisted. It's time that we started using that power to make the world a fairer place
h3cate 6y ago
Whilst I would usually agree I feel like the technology community as a whole can do a lot in the fight against injustice in this world. I understand your sentiment though and will not post again.
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

komali2 6y ago

> savagely kicking unconscious victims in the head. You're talking about this oft-shared video, I imagine: https://twitter.com/LibertyHangout/status/1266926402269523969 https://twitter.com/LibertyHangout/status/126692640226952396... Yea, wow, those protesters really did a number on that guy. Obviously he was just defending his shop from Thugs, right? Oh wait... no. He was a crazy person running at protesters with a sword: https://twitter.com/sable_sonya/status/1267148333203800064 https://twitter.com/sable_sonya/status/1267148333203800064 And look at that, those Thugs, after protecting themselves from him, then took on the role of First Responder, and started treating him: https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1266927491949588485 https://twitter.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/126692749194958848...

downerending 6y ago
The first link is one of the two I saw today, yes. There's really nothing that convince me that these people are not evil. (The second was in Portland, I think.) The second link doesn't seem to have any video. But head-kicking beyond the point of unconsciousness is not how I would defend myself from a crazy person (if that's even a factual take). The third link is hard to interpret, but until someone analyzes it, I assume that the people assisting the guy are not the same ones that were committing wanton savagery. But bless them, in any case. I turned to my wife after seeing the first video and remarked, "These guys just gave the fall election to Trump.". If you're old enough to remember Nixon, you'll take the reference.
- komali2 6y ago
  I'm not old enough, but I am aware that history hasn't been kind to Nixon :)
  - downerending 6y ago
    The reference is that he never would have been elected in the first place except for violent protests.

austincheney 6y ago

While I suspect the percentage of overall police actions that are brutal, unethical, or harmful are tiny it is still a subject that demands a far greater degree of transparency. The subject identifies several challenges: * police are falsely accused of bad behavior frequently, which can make it much harder to identify the actual extreme few bad apples which need to be identified and removed * all accused are innocent until proven guilty regardless of their profession or who they are. You don’t want police accused of horrible conduct policing but at the same time they need a process of defense, as does everybody Honestly, much of this problem could be addressed by mandating body cams. I have known police officers who live by their body cams to ensure everyone is honest. Until that happens what would you suggest to change the current situation?

downerending 6y ago
I agree that all police should have body cams always, for the protection of all. I'm not aware of anyone that objects to this, though probably there are some. Furthermore, incidents like this have really made me reconsider my objections to the panopticon. These days, I think we'd be better off if there were cameras everywhere always, broadcasting instantaneously for public capture.
- josephcsible 6y ago
  > I agree that all police should have body cams always, for the protection of all. I'm not aware of anyone that objects to this, though probably there are some. The Movement for Black Lives objects to body cams: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-the-war-on-black-people/ https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/end-the-war-on-black-peopl...
  - downerending 6y ago
    Wow. I have no idea what to say to that.
scarface74 6y ago
police are falsely accused of bad behavior frequently, which can make it much harder to identify the actual extreme few bad apples which need to be identified and removed If the problem isn’t systemic then how do you explain the various studies showing that minorities are disproportionately “stopped and frisked”?

loceng 6y ago

The problem is the lack of other police officers immediately arresting an officer they just saw abusing people.

hug 6y ago

> As always, you have to ask, compared to what? What would you even compare instances of police brutality against? Is there some kind of threshold under which you think police brutality is okay? Should there be a rule that each police force gets one free brutalising a year? Or is it just that if their actions are only a little bit of brutality, just a pinch, that they should get away with it? No one has to ask what to compare it to, because in this circumstance it's a stupid question that distracts from the immediate reality of the situation: Anything adequately described as police brutality that goes uninvestigated & unpunished is unacceptable.

downerending 6y ago
As a programmer, I accept that I'll make mistakes from time to time. Excoriating me for doing so would not help. The bad apples should be removed. Riots and mayhem work against that goal.
- hug 6y ago
  That doesn't answer a single one of my questions, doesn't expand upon your original point, and doesn't bear on the situation in the slightest. Unless you're implying that your job as a programmer and the job of a police officer are similar in consequences when you "make a mistake". But as to the second part of your comment, the bad apples should be removed, but are not. So what do you do about it? Put videos of the internet maybe so it's more public? Maybe you also go out and protest about it. Maybe that causes more videos to show up. Who knows.
  - downerending 6y ago
    I don't commit crimes. And I certainly don't commit aggravated assault on helpless people. Do people even need to be told not to do that?
    - hug 6y ago
      Pithy answer: Apparently police do, otherwise the US wouldn't have so many deaths in custody or complaints of police brutality. Less pithy answer: The protests, and the videos, are not examples of regular crimes or regular criminals. They're about criminal actions by police, two circles in a venn diagram that should never be crossed without black & yellow stripes and giant red "WARNING" text. It needs highlighting due to how much of an exceptional circumstance it should be. Yes, normal people commit crimes and yes, those people should be punished harshly for them, but those normal people are not people put in positions of power over others by the state, which is why you don't see quite so many protests against them. (You do see protests about them, though: Zimmerman wasn't exactly seen in a positive light, for example.) Asking "but what about regular Joe Criminal" in the face of protests about police is like a poor diversionary tactic. It's essentially just whataboutism.

ookdatnog 6y ago

You're misidentifying what the core problem is with police brutality: it's not just about relative frequency, it's about how the justice system responds to it. As a society we give police a monopoly on civilian violence, it is only reasonable to expect the holders of that power to be held to the highest possible standards. But the justice system signals the exact opposite, by systematially protecting even the worst cops from the consequences of their actions. This, I believe, lies at the core of the people's rage. I for one think that rage is justified.

downerending 6y ago
I agree that the situation should continue to be improved. I doubt that websites like this will help. Riots will definitely not help. The cause of righteousness has been set back a generation in a few days.
- ookdatnog 6y ago
  Don't put words in my mouth. I never implied in any way that I think the situation is improving. I'm not sure what part of my post you're actually agreeing with. I cannot see any downsides to systematically documenting instances of police brutality and demanding justice for each instance. It seems entirely just to me.
  - downerending 6y ago
    My bad. I think the situation should continue to be improved, as it surely has in the last couple of generations. You're welcome to think otherwise, of course.
    - ookdatnog 6y ago
      I've looked around a little bit and I simply cannot find any evidence that police violence is on the decline. A cursory look at a graph of police killings over the last few years shows, if anything, a slight increase (https://www.vox.com/2020/5/31/21276004/4-charts-anger-police-killing-george-floyd-protests https://www.vox.com/2020/5/31/21276004/4-charts-anger-police... - first graph). I can only speculate about what your exact argument is: I'm guessing that what you're saying is that, surely, today's police are behaving better than the police in, say, the civil rights movement era (I couldn't find any data on that but I'm willing to accept that much for the sake of argument). And I think you infer from that that police violence is downward trending and that therefore, we should just let matters run their course: any upset to the delicate improvement might plunge us in the other direction. But your inference is incorrect. You're looking at a function over time, see that this function was (probably) higher at some point in the past than it is now, and conclude from that that the function is still trending downwards. Essentially your argument seems to be based on the entirely unjustified assumption that the function has to be monotonically decreasing. But if you don't assume monotonicity (and you really shouldn't), then function values in the far past don't give you any information about the derivative of the function at t=now. And the derivative at t=now seems to be (ever so slightly) positive, not negative as you imply. In which case, evidently, things are not improving on their own.

h3cate 6y ago

I agree. Another commenter had a good idea of adding WHY a video is on the site which I will add tonight. I'm happy to implement any other ideas that you might have. PS. site should be back up

berbec 6y ago

Compared to what? Are the vast majority of airline pilot actions intentional crashes, or only a miniscule fraction?