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The police follow orders from their chain of command that goes up to an elected official. You can petition the elected official, occupy their building, grill th

by DenisM 6y ago

The police follow orders from their chain of command that goes up to an elected official. You can petition the elected official, occupy their building, grill them in the media, and vote them out if you convince the other citizens. For example the knee-to-the-neck move was a part of the "orders" in that it was part of standard procedure and it is now being revised and removed. Similarly the tear gas was part of the procedure and has now been suspended by the order of the mayor. This can only be done because of the chain of command. The people with masks and weapons on the street report to no-one we know, it's either a loose anarchic group or some sort or they report to a warlord. Can you petition the warlord? Occupy their office? Vote them out? This is a regression to the medieval model of governance. It's all fun and games when no one really disagrees about anything important, but things change for the worse when disagreements start happening. This is how communes fall - either they fail to disagree constructively or they get subjugated by a dictator who forces an agreement. This is why we tolerate the police for a few hundred years now - on occasion they cause violence that's predictable and can be influenced. The alternative is the violence we cannot influence and that spiral out of control when the going gets tough.

hopfscotch2 6y ago
"on occasion" this is hysterical
- DenisM 6y ago
  I actually started with "low-grade ongoing violence" then replaced it with "occasional violence" thinking it better describes the perception in the media as attention to the subject comes and goes. What would you rather see?
noobaccount 6y ago
I believe the issue today is that the police are causing violence against the people with little power in our political system. To those people the distinction you are making is without a difference.
- DenisM 6y ago
  I feel like you're taking my reply out of context. Specifically I was addressing this questions: > Can you tell me what it is that makes these people dangerous and scary, but the similarly armed protestors who showed up at government buildings a month ago — or, frankly, the police — fine? and explaining why replacing police with warlords is not progress. Are some classes of people unable to influence the system? I readily agree with that. Are we making our society better by replacing police with warlords or anarchists? I argue not.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
> This is why we tolerate the police for a few hundred years now - on occasion they cause violence that's predictable and can be influenced. The point of these protests is that the violence is not occasional. It is endemic, and attempts to stop it stretch back centuries. It has persisted across the country, under both progressive and conservative politicians, despite many, many attempts to eliminate it. If the violent system we have has successfully resisted change and accountability for hundreds of years, how is this a regression?
- AnHonestComment 6y ago
  Police are safer than cars, by an order of magnitude. The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police. So, empirically, it seems like the violence is occasional except when you go asking for it and the protestors just have a problem with authority and society at large. It’s why their complaints are big on individual sob stories but lacking statistics to back them up.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Police are safer than cars, For whom and per...what? Encounter? Mile traveled with them? > The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police. That suggests to me that either your perception of provocation or of anomaly is skewed (or that “anomaly” is used in the software sense of “behavior out of line with spec” rather than the more general sense of “behavior out of line with what is normal”.) > So, empirically, You just recounted what is, by the terms used, your subjective impression, and termed your conclusion built on that (which go far beyond what is justified even if that impression was undisputed fact) “empirical”. That’s...not what that word means.
    - AnHonestComment 6y ago
      Per arrest to one year of driving: you would have to be arrested ten times in a year for your risk from the police to match your risk driving a car that year. Per arrest for violent crime (where most of the deaths occur), blacks are safer than whites. I’ve been reviewing the footage from Seattle — and protestors started every instance of violence by first getting forceful with the cops. Show me any evidence that there’s an endemic problem of violence — because nothing I can find in either statistics about harm or footage from protests suggests there is. That’s an empiric conclusion: studying the statistics about how often police harm people and comparing them to other sources of risk — which show they’re relatively minor.
tshaddox 6y ago
It’s bizarrely contradictory to use democracy to decrease the accountability of elected officials, because no matter how bad the supposedly democratic government is, you can always just say it’s the public’s fault for not voting good enough or hard enough. On the contrary, I think if a government claims to be democratic, then they are accountable for aligning their policies and outcomes with what the public wants. A democratic government should be actually accountable to the public.

by DenisM 6y ago

hopfscotch2 6y ago

"on occasion" this is hysterical

DenisM 6y ago
I actually started with "low-grade ongoing violence" then replaced it with "occasional violence" thinking it better describes the perception in the media as attention to the subject comes and goes. What would you rather see?

noobaccount 6y ago

I believe the issue today is that the police are causing violence against the people with little power in our political system. To those people the distinction you are making is without a difference.

DenisM 6y ago
I feel like you're taking my reply out of context. Specifically I was addressing this questions: > Can you tell me what it is that makes these people dangerous and scary, but the similarly armed protestors who showed up at government buildings a month ago — or, frankly, the police — fine? and explaining why replacing police with warlords is not progress. Are some classes of people unable to influence the system? I readily agree with that. Are we making our society better by replacing police with warlords or anarchists? I argue not.

jakelazaroff 6y ago

> This is why we tolerate the police for a few hundred years now - on occasion they cause violence that's predictable and can be influenced. The point of these protests is that the violence is not occasional. It is endemic, and attempts to stop it stretch back centuries. It has persisted across the country, under both progressive and conservative politicians, despite many, many attempts to eliminate it. If the violent system we have has successfully resisted change and accountability for hundreds of years, how is this a regression?

AnHonestComment 6y ago
Police are safer than cars, by an order of magnitude. The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police. So, empirically, it seems like the violence is occasional except when you go asking for it and the protestors just have a problem with authority and society at large. It’s why their complaints are big on individual sob stories but lacking statistics to back them up.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Police are safer than cars, For whom and per...what? Encounter? Mile traveled with them? > The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police. That suggests to me that either your perception of provocation or of anomaly is skewed (or that “anomaly” is used in the software sense of “behavior out of line with spec” rather than the more general sense of “behavior out of line with what is normal”.) > So, empirically, You just recounted what is, by the terms used, your subjective impression, and termed your conclusion built on that (which go far beyond what is justified even if that impression was undisputed fact) “empirical”. That’s...not what that word means.
  - AnHonestComment 6y ago
    Per arrest to one year of driving: you would have to be arrested ten times in a year for your risk from the police to match your risk driving a car that year. Per arrest for violent crime (where most of the deaths occur), blacks are safer than whites. I’ve been reviewing the footage from Seattle — and protestors started every instance of violence by first getting forceful with the cops. Show me any evidence that there’s an endemic problem of violence — because nothing I can find in either statistics about harm or footage from protests suggests there is. That’s an empiric conclusion: studying the statistics about how often police harm people and comparing them to other sources of risk — which show they’re relatively minor.

tshaddox 6y ago

It’s bizarrely contradictory to use democracy to decrease the accountability of elected officials, because no matter how bad the supposedly democratic government is, you can always just say it’s the public’s fault for not voting good enough or hard enough. On the contrary, I think if a government claims to be democratic, then they are accountable for aligning their policies and outcomes with what the public wants. A democratic government should be actually accountable to the public.