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The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ foo

The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ food poising by a chain in a month. The also imagine you believe there's no problem. This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.

berbec 6y ago
Ajit Pai is Joo Dee
MechanicalTwerk 6y ago
To be fair there's way more people filming the police right now than any of those professions so I wouldn't expect the number of mishaps on video to be comparable.
- rabidrat 6y ago
  Which makes these even more egregious because it means there are still more cases that weren't recorded. These are just the ones we know about!
  - MechanicalTwerk 6y ago
    I agree we can be almost certain that there are violations that aren't being captured on video and therefore the true number of violations is actually higher (assuming all the instances presented are violations). What matters is how the true number compares to the total number of interactions and if that ratio is acceptable to society. The absolute number of violations caught on video and the comparison of that number to similar numbers in other professions doesn't really say anything.
    - toofy 6y ago
      > What matters is how the true number compares to the total number of interactions and if that ratio is acceptable to society. I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the communities directly impacted by this behavior find the abuse unacceptable no matter how muddied the “but maybe there isn’t enough abuse yet.” crowd wants to dilute the issue. And honestly, I live a fairly cushy life, and I find the officers in my city to be stand-offish and aggressive, I can only imagine how utterly horrified Id be if they behaved the way we’re seeing. There is no way anyone in my community would have been as patient if we were subjected to the same level of treatment. And also, it’s probably important to point out, it isn’t only the physical abuse, the day to day attitude of an overbearing police force can drastically impact your own day to day quality of life.
- DeonPenny 6y ago
  But osha I'd assume would have those number. I doubt they are this high.
devcpp 6y ago
To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is no excuse whatsoever for the multitude of outraging problems in the system, but the comparison isn't straightforward.
- baddox 6y ago
  Quite the opposite. The adversarial job should have higher standards of conduct, not lower.
  - user_0x 6y ago
    This is exactly how I think about the police issue in the US. If someone has more power, as in, they are allowed to carry guns and arrest people if they need to, then those people also cannot expect it to be a "normal" job where they matter more than who they are working with (the public). The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    But the comment wasn't saying the behaviour is fine, just that the job is more likely to produce this sort of content. Even countries with less violent police corps often have episodes like this. To keep it out of political rallies, just think of police vs hooligans in Europe.
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      Or police vs tekno dancers (remember CzechTek 2005?)
      - Gravityloss 6y ago
        Didn't know about this event, very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005
      - 6y ago
spike021 6y ago
>This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people. A reference I never expected to see on HN. It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Neither you or the parent poster explained what "Ba Sing Se" is. I quickly discovered that it is a reference to a city in "The last Airbender" [0]. I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_Sing_Se https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_...
  - winrid 6y ago
    It's a city where the entire population lives in ignorance of a global 100-year war, due to corruption in the government (even king does not know). https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Conspiracy_of_Ba_Sing_Se https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Conspiracy_of_Ba_Sing_Se
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - MathCodeLove 6y ago
    Not really very obscure. It's an incredibly popular show and I would be willing to bed that at minimum 50% of coworkers would understand the reference. I don't think it's very difficult to use context to understand what's being said by the commenter.
    - hellofunk 6y ago
      > at minimum 50% of coworkers would understand the reference Quick spot check in my company's Slack channel -- One person in our team of 12 knew what the reference met.
truthwhisperer 6y ago
totally agree and if you go to your neighbourhoods you should be prepared for everything with those drug and amphetamine addicts.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jsf01 6y ago
There are ~10 million arrests per year in the US. That google doc includes non-US cases as well (but is also limited by what’s caught on camera). Still, 0.0007% of arrests leading to a case like this doesn’t seem as horrible as the raw total in isolation.
- stbtrax 6y ago
  are you comparing a year timeframe (10 mil) to that of incidents recorded in the scale of a few days/weeks?
- fnord123 6y ago
  There is one UK example which is actually a counter example where the police allowed a statue to be destroyed instead of intervening and creating a potentially dangerous altercation.
  - jpxw 6y ago
    Oh yeah, we should just let the rioters destroy public property. If the police just didn’t enforce the laws, there’d be no problems!
    - fnord123 6y ago
      That's right. Depending on the law and the context, if the police don't enforce it then there are fewer problems. That's pretty much what Superintendent Andy Bennett said in the video.
  - bazzert 6y ago
    The police did that in Portsmouth, VA ie. stood back and allowed a mob to pull down a statue which struck a man causing what is probably a life long injury.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston The statue of a slaver and mass murderer had been controversial for the past 30 years. I wonder if things would have gone differently if the "recontextualisation" plaque had been allowed. There has, predictably, been a backlash. Resulting in this fiasco where a guy came from Essex to defend some statues he didn't understand ended up urinating on a monument he didn't notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040301 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040301
vegai_ 6y ago
>Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, In one month where the world is filled with hurricanes and every airstrip is flooded.
pjc50 6y ago
They don't see it as a mistake. In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  As a complete outsider to US reality, to me looking in, it seems like there is a real issue of training regarding de-escalating techniques. US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training. Compare that with European forces and you see a completely different reality. In Europe the police is generally seen as peace-keepers, force is absolutely a last resort (probably not so true for crowd control units but certainly true for daily policing).
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    Yes and no. IMO, the issue is that the US Police are not one organization. There are over 10,000 police departments in America. In some towns, the Sheriff + Deputies are less than 10 people. Some towns have a Sheriff who is democratically elected. This leads to massive lack of accountability, because there's no chance the Sheriff could be fired before the next election. Under such a system, why would a Sheriff, or their deputies, ever get deescalation training? ------------- Washington DC serves as a great example of how confusing this gets when you start actually tracing the power structures. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-church-protests-white-house/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-church-protest... The shear amount of "blame shifting" going on for the Lafayette Park clearing is staggering. > More than a half-dozen officials from the National Guard, federal law enforcement and public safety agencies have challenged the Trump administration's narrative that the clearing of peaceful protesters outside the White House earlier this month was unrelated to President Donald Trump's subsequent walk to a nearby church for a photo-op, The Washington Post reported Sunday. ... > But officials told The Post they weren't warned that US Park Police planned to push the perimeter or that force would be used. ... > The US Secret Service issued a statement Saturday admitting that an agency employee used pepper spray on June 1 during efforts to secure Lafayette Square and clear protesters. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/tear-gas-grenades-washington-dc-protests-st-johns-church-lafayette-square/65-126bad2b-7aa3-4fe7-aae6-890fbe0383ed https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/tear-gas-g... > US Park Police, Arlington Police, DC Metro Police and the Secret Service have all denied using any kind of chemical irritants in Lafayette Square Monday evening. But WUSA9 crews were there, witnessed tear gas being deployed and collected the canisters afterward. So at a minimum, there are ~5 Police Forces, each with different accountability structures, involved in the Lafyette Square clearing. It probably was only ONE Police Force that messed up (probably US Park Police??) that was the site of the brutal beatdown. But all the different organizations get the blame, even if the officers are of completely different organizations. ------------ US Citizens typically have to deal with ~3 police organizations per location. The city (or county) police, the state police, and finally the federal police. And the Feds are organized into multiple different police: DEA, ATF, FBI, and ICE. There's a "weak" culture... the "thin blue line" where Police Officers do stand to protect each other, even if they are from different organizations. But when it comes to accepting the blame, they actually shift the blame between each other a lot. So you need to be very knowledgeable about your local police structure before you can even cast blame in a proper manner. Even if some organizations are considered good (ie: FBI generally has a very good reputation), other organizations (ie: ICE) have a pretty negative reputation in unwanted use of force. ------ Finally, a little example for how confusing this can get. -- If you have a Sheriff, your only means of accountability is the election next year. A Sheriff and their deputies can pretty much do whatever they want. Any issues must be taken up with the Sheriff themselves in the meantime. If the Sheriff is uncooperative, you're left with voting them out next election (which is surprisingly difficult, because no one pays attention to local politics in America). -- A Police "Chief" is typically a position that is held accountable by the Mayor. You can ask the Chief for police reforms, but traditionally people complain to the Mayor instead. IMO, this is a bit better than the Sheriff positions, since the Mayor can run on a platform of police reform in theory. -- A Police Commissioner is held accountable by the City's Board. You need to convince a majority of the board member that there is a problem. Even if you convince your local board member that there's a problem, they will hold no power unless you convince the majority of the board. -- Some municipalities, such as NYPD, have a citizen complain board, who are the dedicated organization to hear complaints. They'll issue lawyers to citizens who complain about issues to individually represent citizens in court. In these municipalities, the best action you'll get is from the citizen review board.
cyberdrunk 6y ago
I recommend the latest Sam Harris podcast on this subject, he makes a ton of nuanced points that many people miss when talking about "police brutality".
- rantanplan 6y ago
  As Noam Chomsky said, when asked about what he believes about people considering Sam Harris as an intellectual: "Unfortunately we get the intellectuals we deserve".
  - cyberdrunk 6y ago
    I'm not neccessarily considering him an intellectual, I just find the points he makes about the instinctual reaction to be outraged compelling (and pretty common sense). What he's saying on the subject is not deep, but the current discourse is so off the rails that we need someone to pause and talk about the basics (realities of arrests, police violence statistics, how people interpret videos etc.)
  - hnra 6y ago
    Any source on that quote? A quick google search trying to relate that sentence to Chomsky and Harris only gives this thread as a result.
aaron695 6y ago
> The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, You would easily get this from doctors in one month if they were filmed. Considerably more in fact. Some studies say medical errors contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year or even more. That's just deaths, not maiming.
- tsherr 6y ago
  There's a significant difference between making a mistake and shooting someone in the back or choking him to death.
  - tosers4 6y ago
    Those can be mistakes as well.
peterwwillis 6y ago
How about 2,300 vehicular deaths a month? Or 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades. Oh, but those aren't the same thing, so they're irrelevant? That's fine, because the examples you gave (pilots, crane operators, fast food chains) also have nothing to do with one another. Not the same number of operators, not the same jobs, not the same safety systems, not the same number of potential cases, not the same risk probability, not the same variables. But why be rational about what we can just get emotional over? The United States has 330 Million people. To come up with 700 cases of police violence, all you have to do is find 700 people out of 330 Million who are being arrested for something. Find the number of arrests, find the number where people resisted, compare it to the number of cases of police arresting or detaining people without incident. You can't find that data in video clips or the news because nobody reports calm arrests, or non-arrests. I'd be very surprised if anyone cared to find out what the 700 number actually means in context. This whole document is just horror porn to use for firing up people so they'll get angry and not use their brains. It's a very smart thing to do if you want to push a particular outcome. And I'm not saying that's even a bad thing under the circumstances. But it's quite clearly propaganda.
- vertex-four 6y ago
  If those numbers have been consistent for decades despite the police being given harsher and harsher tools for dealing with them, perhaps those tools aren't doing anything but resulting in harm to people who are not committing those crimes.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades This is also a stupid, unnecessary, ongoing tragedy that America insists cannot be avoided despite being the only country where mass shootings happen anything like as regularly.
- amf12 6y ago
  > How about 2,300 vehicular deaths a month? Or 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades. Those are 'real' accidents; and if some are not, like DUI, there are laws against them that are enforced. If tomorrow, society stops charging DUI offenders people would protest too. That's not the case with police brutality. We have seen again and again the police face no consequences for their brutality. That's what the people are protesting against. If every one of these cops were appropriately fired, charged and jailed, this wouldn't be a big of an issue. That simply does not happen. The second point being, theoretically people trust cops to keep law and order and to ensure safety. So it is rightly expected for them to have higher standard of conduct and the fact that this does not happen is a systemic failure.
swiley 6y ago
700+ food poisoning actually sounds doable.
lazyjones 6y ago
The delusion is on your side if you believe pilots, crane operators or any other profession is as much under surveillance as the police and as active dealing with risky situations that could escalate. Are you just trying to fool yourself with these comparisons or everybody?
- hobs 6y ago
  There's no delusion on his side - there's additionally the acknowledgement that police have a much higher burden for said situations - and the videos show that they are not qualified to manage them. "Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer.
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    > "Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer. Why are you distorting my answer? Look, I can rephrase it for you: it's also not surprising that there aren't 700 videos of scientists molesting women on arctic research stations.
- greedo 6y ago
  If a pilot has a crash, the crash is reviewed by the NTSB, and the FAA. Pilots are under a huge amount of scrutiny. There are voice recorders in the cockpit, blackboxes to capture flight parameters, etc etc.

berbec 6y ago

Ajit Pai is Joo Dee

MechanicalTwerk 6y ago

To be fair there's way more people filming the police right now than any of those professions so I wouldn't expect the number of mishaps on video to be comparable.

rabidrat 6y ago
Which makes these even more egregious because it means there are still more cases that weren't recorded. These are just the ones we know about!
- MechanicalTwerk 6y ago
  I agree we can be almost certain that there are violations that aren't being captured on video and therefore the true number of violations is actually higher (assuming all the instances presented are violations). What matters is how the true number compares to the total number of interactions and if that ratio is acceptable to society. The absolute number of violations caught on video and the comparison of that number to similar numbers in other professions doesn't really say anything.
  - toofy 6y ago
    > What matters is how the true number compares to the total number of interactions and if that ratio is acceptable to society. I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the communities directly impacted by this behavior find the abuse unacceptable no matter how muddied the “but maybe there isn’t enough abuse yet.” crowd wants to dilute the issue. And honestly, I live a fairly cushy life, and I find the officers in my city to be stand-offish and aggressive, I can only imagine how utterly horrified Id be if they behaved the way we’re seeing. There is no way anyone in my community would have been as patient if we were subjected to the same level of treatment. And also, it’s probably important to point out, it isn’t only the physical abuse, the day to day attitude of an overbearing police force can drastically impact your own day to day quality of life.
DeonPenny 6y ago
But osha I'd assume would have those number. I doubt they are this high.

devcpp 6y ago

To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is no excuse whatsoever for the multitude of outraging problems in the system, but the comparison isn't straightforward.

baddox 6y ago
Quite the opposite. The adversarial job should have higher standards of conduct, not lower.
- user_0x 6y ago
  This is exactly how I think about the police issue in the US. If someone has more power, as in, they are allowed to carry guns and arrest people if they need to, then those people also cannot expect it to be a "normal" job where they matter more than who they are working with (the public). The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.
- riffraff 6y ago
  But the comment wasn't saying the behaviour is fine, just that the job is more likely to produce this sort of content. Even countries with less violent police corps often have episodes like this. To keep it out of political rallies, just think of police vs hooligans in Europe.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    Or police vs tekno dancers (remember CzechTek 2005?)
    - Gravityloss 6y ago
      Didn't know about this event, very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005
    - 6y ago

spike021 6y ago

>This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people. A reference I never expected to see on HN. It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Neither you or the parent poster explained what "Ba Sing Se" is. I quickly discovered that it is a reference to a city in "The last Airbender" [0]. I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_Sing_Se https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_...
- winrid 6y ago
  It's a city where the entire population lives in ignorance of a global 100-year war, due to corruption in the government (even king does not know). https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Conspiracy_of_Ba_Sing_Se https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Conspiracy_of_Ba_Sing_Se
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- MathCodeLove 6y ago
  Not really very obscure. It's an incredibly popular show and I would be willing to bed that at minimum 50% of coworkers would understand the reference. I don't think it's very difficult to use context to understand what's being said by the commenter.
  - hellofunk 6y ago
    > at minimum 50% of coworkers would understand the reference Quick spot check in my company's Slack channel -- One person in our team of 12 knew what the reference met.

truthwhisperer 6y ago

totally agree and if you go to your neighbourhoods you should be prepared for everything with those drug and amphetamine addicts.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jsf01 6y ago

There are ~10 million arrests per year in the US. That google doc includes non-US cases as well (but is also limited by what’s caught on camera). Still, 0.0007% of arrests leading to a case like this doesn’t seem as horrible as the raw total in isolation.

stbtrax 6y ago
are you comparing a year timeframe (10 mil) to that of incidents recorded in the scale of a few days/weeks?
fnord123 6y ago
There is one UK example which is actually a counter example where the police allowed a statue to be destroyed instead of intervening and creating a potentially dangerous altercation.
- jpxw 6y ago
  Oh yeah, we should just let the rioters destroy public property. If the police just didn’t enforce the laws, there’d be no problems!
  - fnord123 6y ago
    That's right. Depending on the law and the context, if the police don't enforce it then there are fewer problems. That's pretty much what Superintendent Andy Bennett said in the video.
- bazzert 6y ago
  The police did that in Portsmouth, VA ie. stood back and allowed a mob to pull down a statue which struck a man causing what is probably a life long injury.
- pjc50 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Edward_Colston The statue of a slaver and mass murderer had been controversial for the past 30 years. I wonder if things would have gone differently if the "recontextualisation" plaque had been allowed. There has, predictably, been a backlash. Resulting in this fiasco where a guy came from Essex to defend some statues he didn't understand ended up urinating on a monument he didn't notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040301 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-53040301

vegai_ 6y ago

>Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, In one month where the world is filled with hurricanes and every airstrip is flooded.

pjc50 6y ago

They don't see it as a mistake. In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
As a complete outsider to US reality, to me looking in, it seems like there is a real issue of training regarding de-escalating techniques. US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training. Compare that with European forces and you see a completely different reality. In Europe the police is generally seen as peace-keepers, force is absolutely a last resort (probably not so true for crowd control units but certainly true for daily policing).
- dragontamer 6y ago
  Yes and no. IMO, the issue is that the US Police are not one organization. There are over 10,000 police departments in America. In some towns, the Sheriff + Deputies are less than 10 people. Some towns have a Sheriff who is democratically elected. This leads to massive lack of accountability, because there's no chance the Sheriff could be fired before the next election. Under such a system, why would a Sheriff, or their deputies, ever get deescalation training? ------------- Washington DC serves as a great example of how confusing this gets when you start actually tracing the power structures. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-church-protests-white-house/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-church-protest... The shear amount of "blame shifting" going on for the Lafayette Park clearing is staggering. > More than a half-dozen officials from the National Guard, federal law enforcement and public safety agencies have challenged the Trump administration's narrative that the clearing of peaceful protesters outside the White House earlier this month was unrelated to President Donald Trump's subsequent walk to a nearby church for a photo-op, The Washington Post reported Sunday. ... > But officials told The Post they weren't warned that US Park Police planned to push the perimeter or that force would be used. ... > The US Secret Service issued a statement Saturday admitting that an agency employee used pepper spray on June 1 during efforts to secure Lafayette Square and clear protesters. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/tear-gas-grenades-washington-dc-protests-st-johns-church-lafayette-square/65-126bad2b-7aa3-4fe7-aae6-890fbe0383ed https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/tear-gas-g... > US Park Police, Arlington Police, DC Metro Police and the Secret Service have all denied using any kind of chemical irritants in Lafayette Square Monday evening. But WUSA9 crews were there, witnessed tear gas being deployed and collected the canisters afterward. So at a minimum, there are ~5 Police Forces, each with different accountability structures, involved in the Lafyette Square clearing. It probably was only ONE Police Force that messed up (probably US Park Police??) that was the site of the brutal beatdown. But all the different organizations get the blame, even if the officers are of completely different organizations. ------------ US Citizens typically have to deal with ~3 police organizations per location. The city (or county) police, the state police, and finally the federal police. And the Feds are organized into multiple different police: DEA, ATF, FBI, and ICE. There's a "weak" culture... the "thin blue line" where Police Officers do stand to protect each other, even if they are from different organizations. But when it comes to accepting the blame, they actually shift the blame between each other a lot. So you need to be very knowledgeable about your local police structure before you can even cast blame in a proper manner. Even if some organizations are considered good (ie: FBI generally has a very good reputation), other organizations (ie: ICE) have a pretty negative reputation in unwanted use of force. ------ Finally, a little example for how confusing this can get. -- If you have a Sheriff, your only means of accountability is the election next year. A Sheriff and their deputies can pretty much do whatever they want. Any issues must be taken up with the Sheriff themselves in the meantime. If the Sheriff is uncooperative, you're left with voting them out next election (which is surprisingly difficult, because no one pays attention to local politics in America). -- A Police "Chief" is typically a position that is held accountable by the Mayor. You can ask the Chief for police reforms, but traditionally people complain to the Mayor instead. IMO, this is a bit better than the Sheriff positions, since the Mayor can run on a platform of police reform in theory. -- A Police Commissioner is held accountable by the City's Board. You need to convince a majority of the board member that there is a problem. Even if you convince your local board member that there's a problem, they will hold no power unless you convince the majority of the board. -- Some municipalities, such as NYPD, have a citizen complain board, who are the dedicated organization to hear complaints. They'll issue lawyers to citizens who complain about issues to individually represent citizens in court. In these municipalities, the best action you'll get is from the citizen review board.

cyberdrunk 6y ago

I recommend the latest Sam Harris podcast on this subject, he makes a ton of nuanced points that many people miss when talking about "police brutality".

rantanplan 6y ago
As Noam Chomsky said, when asked about what he believes about people considering Sam Harris as an intellectual: "Unfortunately we get the intellectuals we deserve".
- cyberdrunk 6y ago
  I'm not neccessarily considering him an intellectual, I just find the points he makes about the instinctual reaction to be outraged compelling (and pretty common sense). What he's saying on the subject is not deep, but the current discourse is so off the rails that we need someone to pause and talk about the basics (realities of arrests, police violence statistics, how people interpret videos etc.)
- hnra 6y ago
  Any source on that quote? A quick google search trying to relate that sentence to Chomsky and Harris only gives this thread as a result.

aaron695 6y ago

> The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, You would easily get this from doctors in one month if they were filmed. Considerably more in fact. Some studies say medical errors contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year or even more. That's just deaths, not maiming.

tsherr 6y ago
There's a significant difference between making a mistake and shooting someone in the back or choking him to death.
- tosers4 6y ago
  Those can be mistakes as well.

peterwwillis 6y ago

How about 2,300 vehicular deaths a month? Or 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades. Oh, but those aren't the same thing, so they're irrelevant? That's fine, because the examples you gave (pilots, crane operators, fast food chains) also have nothing to do with one another. Not the same number of operators, not the same jobs, not the same safety systems, not the same number of potential cases, not the same risk probability, not the same variables. But why be rational about what we can just get emotional over? The United States has 330 Million people. To come up with 700 cases of police violence, all you have to do is find 700 people out of 330 Million who are being arrested for something. Find the number of arrests, find the number where people resisted, compare it to the number of cases of police arresting or detaining people without incident. You can't find that data in video clips or the news because nobody reports calm arrests, or non-arrests. I'd be very surprised if anyone cared to find out what the 700 number actually means in context. This whole document is just horror porn to use for firing up people so they'll get angry and not use their brains. It's a very smart thing to do if you want to push a particular outcome. And I'm not saying that's even a bad thing under the circumstances. But it's quite clearly propaganda.

vertex-four 6y ago
If those numbers have been consistent for decades despite the police being given harsher and harsher tools for dealing with them, perhaps those tools aren't doing anything but resulting in harm to people who are not committing those crimes.
pjc50 6y ago
> 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades This is also a stupid, unnecessary, ongoing tragedy that America insists cannot be avoided despite being the only country where mass shootings happen anything like as regularly.
amf12 6y ago
> How about 2,300 vehicular deaths a month? Or 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades. Those are 'real' accidents; and if some are not, like DUI, there are laws against them that are enforced. If tomorrow, society stops charging DUI offenders people would protest too. That's not the case with police brutality. We have seen again and again the police face no consequences for their brutality. That's what the people are protesting against. If every one of these cops were appropriately fired, charged and jailed, this wouldn't be a big of an issue. That simply does not happen. The second point being, theoretically people trust cops to keep law and order and to ensure safety. So it is rightly expected for them to have higher standard of conduct and the fact that this does not happen is a systemic failure.

swiley 6y ago

700+ food poisoning actually sounds doable.

lazyjones 6y ago

The delusion is on your side if you believe pilots, crane operators or any other profession is as much under surveillance as the police and as active dealing with risky situations that could escalate. Are you just trying to fool yourself with these comparisons or everybody?

hobs 6y ago
There's no delusion on his side - there's additionally the acknowledgement that police have a much higher burden for said situations - and the videos show that they are not qualified to manage them. "Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer.
- lazyjones 6y ago
  > "Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer. Why are you distorting my answer? Look, I can rephrase it for you: it's also not surprising that there aren't 700 videos of scientists molesting women on arctic research stations.
greedo 6y ago
If a pilot has a crash, the crash is reviewed by the NTSB, and the FAA. Pilots are under a huge amount of scrutiny. There are voice recorders in the cockpit, blackboxes to capture flight parameters, etc etc.