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There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an eve

There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average! Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1]. There are millions and millions of daily interactions between police and civilians every year. Sadly, there will be some mistakes, some of which will be caught on camera. It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is. [1] Johns Hopkins: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_suggests_medical_errors_now_third_leading_cause_of_death_in_the_us https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

jacobush 6y ago
Funny you should mention medical errors. The US is not exactly a shining beacon in that regard either.
SQueeeeeL 6y ago
>It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is. Oh cool, a guy on Hacker News cited a John's Hopkins article. Pack it up protestors, racism isn't real and cops aren't tear gasing reporters in the face!
- marcell 6y ago
  Huh? I didn't say racism isn't real, and I also didn't say cops aren't tear gassing reporters in the face. GP questioned how a profession can exist when it makes so many deadly mistakes. I pointed out that there is another profession, medicine, which also makes lots of deadly mistakes. Some are accidental oversights, but you can also do some searches and find some really bad medical errors. [1] but you can find lots more. Again, what the media draws attention to, and what is going on in society on a daily basis, are not the same thing. Racism and police misconduct existed before 2020, but it just in the last few weeks really popped onto the media's attention. And again, because of the sheer size of the United States, you have to look at statistics in addition to anecdotes when you think about policy. [1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/lfc-4251 https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...
  - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    Why the hell are you using academic citations in an online comment thread!? And "what about"ing medical errors to cops murdering people? Was one black classmate mean to you in elementary school and you've devoted your whole life to be able to smarm away racism on the internet
  - deathgrips 6y ago
    Statistics are useless because almost all police misconduct goes unreported. Police departments are designed to make oversight impossible.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Statistics are useless because almost all police misconduct goes unreported. This is true, and these videos help show that. There are more and more cases being uncovered where the police blatantly lied about their own misconduct in official reports. For instance, the police claimed the the Buffalo protester fell when video shows the police pushed him over, and the police report for the killing of George Floyd made no mention of holding him down by the neck. If there hadn't been video, I doubt either of those two incidents would have been counted in police misconduct statistics.
slg 6y ago
That medical error study is awful. It categorizes any treatment that is given but doesn't work as an error. That only makes sense in a world in which a correct treatment that could cure a patient always exists and that correct option should be known ahead of time by the people treating the patient. Reality doesn't work like that. Here[1] is a write up on the issues in that study. [1] - https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bmj/ https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bm...
- marcell 6y ago
  Sure, I think that's fair enough. I didn't mean to imply that there are 250,000 cases a year where a heart transplant is performed to cure pneumonia. But of those 250,000, some will be small mistake, and some will be epic fuck ups (see [1]). Similarly, the police shoot around 1,000 people per year. Of those, many are justified, some are are questionable, and a few are epic fuck ups. If you just look at the epic fuck ups, you may believe that policing is completely broken in America. If you look at it in context, you'd probably conclude that the system works well in some cases, not well in other cases, and that there are lots of tradeoffs and no easy answer. I'd recommend Peter Moskos's blog and podcast (www.copinthehood.com and www.qualitypolicing.com) to get a more even handed perspective than you'd find in the media. I'm not defending every single police shooting, but I think the recent shift in public opinion is not based on a good understanding of policing in America. [1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/lfc-4251 https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...
  - slg 6y ago
    >I didn't mean to imply that there are 250,000 cases a year where a heart transplant is performed to cure pneumonia. Then why link to that study and specifically cite that 250,000 number? One of the main differences with doctors is when they truly do have an epic fuck up they are personally sued and can potentially lose their medical license. How many of the epic fuck ups by police in the linked Google doc will lead to the officer being sued? How many will lead to them being forced to switch to a different profession? Why do we allow these police to epicly fuck up in ways that we don't allow other professions like doctors? Does tolerating these epic fuck ups among police make them more likely to epicly fuck up in the future?
blackrock 6y ago
You have completely bastardized the meaning of statistics. Statistics are meant to understand and bring meaning to chaotic events, like random car accidents, or randomly rolling a dice, or random mechanical failure of some complex system. Statistics doesn’t work so well, when human interactions become involved. And it doesn’t work well in this situation, when it comes to policing, where the officer is of the predominant ethnicity, and the victim is of a minority ethnicity. However, you can probably infer that if the policing is done where the ethnicity of the officer and the civilian, is of a primary vs. minority ethnicity, that there will be enhanced levels of violence involved. This can be one way to infer the statistics. At a fundamental level, there are human biases involved. There is no escaping this. It’s possible that if you and the police officer are of the same ethnicity, then you likely have a lower chance of being assaulted or harassed by the police officer. However, if you are a minority, or of a different ethnicity than the police officer which is of the primary ethnicity, then your probability of being assaulted or harassed by the officer goes up significantly. The police enforcement system, is really a reflection of society. Because it is the society that puts these police officers into positions of authority, and it is the same society that keeps them in authority. So if the police system is corrupt, then at a fundamental level, the society is corrupt. You can’t fix the problem, if you can’t even acknowledge that you have a problem. It’s like Trump’s administration that recently said: There is no systemic racism in American Law Enforcement. Thus, how can you fix something, if you can’t even acknowledge it.
charlieflowers 6y ago
Stop spouting general abstract resistance and go watch the videos and see with your own eyes that something is horribly wrong in your country.
onion2k 6y ago
There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average! I think the issue people are rioting about is that it's not a 1 in a billion chance for everyone. It's more like 1 in a quintillion for a rich white person, and 1 in a million for a person of color. That inequality stems from systemic racism in the police force. What you're saying is that it would be less of a problem if the deaths were evenly distributed across the population. That may be true, but I don't think many people would suggest it as a viable solution to the problem.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  This cannot be backed up by data. When I travel with a black friend in Europe, I actually get checked occasionally. That never happens when traveling alone. There seem to be issues with profiling here but I don't believe a diagnosis like systemic racism is in any way justified beyond populism.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    There seem to be issues with profiling here but I don't believe a diagnosis like systemic racism... Profiling is an aspect of systemic racism.
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      I profoundly disagree with that definition. Racism needs animosity and distrust doesn't qualify as that. You can make a case that this is the accepted academic nomenclature but I would add that the reasoning behind it is not very sophisticated. I would argue that it could even elevate racial tensions if applied to practical problems. Even beyond factoring in the common scholar diagnosing racism in everything.
      - onion2k 6y ago
        Racism needs animosity and distrust doesn't qualify as that. Systemic racism doesn't need animosity for it to happen. Systemic racism is a term for how a system discriminates against race - that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents. That's not "racist" in the sense that someone deliberately decided to give people of color get less resources, but the outcome of the decision is that people of color get less resources. That is systemic racism. There doesn't need to be any racist intent on the part of any individuals in that system for it to happen (though there often is.)
zimpenfish 6y ago
> Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average! Ok, the EU has 445M citizens[1] which means, by your logic, there should statistically be 40% more police "mistakes" than the US. Except there isn't. It is radically lower[2] (1536 for the USA in 2019 vs 51 for the EU in 2018/19). [1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/figures/living_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/figures/living_en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  You can also ignore cops in the US killing people and note the police have about 40 million black people in the US living in fear.
- marcell 6y ago
  That's an interesting and valid point. First, a disagreement. Your base assumption that police activity should scale linearly with population. This is just obviously not correct. There are huge, huge differences in countries and crime rates. You can look at differences in homicide rate, for example [1]. The united states has a pretty shockingly high homicide rate for a developed country (4.96 per 100k). This is 5x higher than France or Germany. On the other end you have Japan, which is about 5x lower than France or Germany (25x lower than United States). But that aside, the important question is: is crime driving police activity, or are the police widely malicious and corrupt? I'll admit that I'm not knowledgable enough to give a good answer to this question, but I'm very skeptical of jumping to a conclusion based on selective evidence on social media or recent news coverage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

jacobush 6y ago

Funny you should mention medical errors. The US is not exactly a shining beacon in that regard either.

SQueeeeeL 6y ago

>It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is. Oh cool, a guy on Hacker News cited a John's Hopkins article. Pack it up protestors, racism isn't real and cops aren't tear gasing reporters in the face!

marcell 6y ago
Huh? I didn't say racism isn't real, and I also didn't say cops aren't tear gassing reporters in the face. GP questioned how a profession can exist when it makes so many deadly mistakes. I pointed out that there is another profession, medicine, which also makes lots of deadly mistakes. Some are accidental oversights, but you can also do some searches and find some really bad medical errors. [1] but you can find lots more. Again, what the media draws attention to, and what is going on in society on a daily basis, are not the same thing. Racism and police misconduct existed before 2020, but it just in the last few weeks really popped onto the media's attention. And again, because of the sheer size of the United States, you have to look at statistics in addition to anecdotes when you think about policy. [1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/lfc-4251 https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  Why the hell are you using academic citations in an online comment thread!? And "what about"ing medical errors to cops murdering people? Was one black classmate mean to you in elementary school and you've devoted your whole life to be able to smarm away racism on the internet
- deathgrips 6y ago
  Statistics are useless because almost all police misconduct goes unreported. Police departments are designed to make oversight impossible.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Statistics are useless because almost all police misconduct goes unreported. This is true, and these videos help show that. There are more and more cases being uncovered where the police blatantly lied about their own misconduct in official reports. For instance, the police claimed the the Buffalo protester fell when video shows the police pushed him over, and the police report for the killing of George Floyd made no mention of holding him down by the neck. If there hadn't been video, I doubt either of those two incidents would have been counted in police misconduct statistics.

slg 6y ago

That medical error study is awful. It categorizes any treatment that is given but doesn't work as an error. That only makes sense in a world in which a correct treatment that could cure a patient always exists and that correct option should be known ahead of time by the people treating the patient. Reality doesn't work like that. Here[1] is a write up on the issues in that study. [1] - https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bmj/ https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bm...

marcell 6y ago
Sure, I think that's fair enough. I didn't mean to imply that there are 250,000 cases a year where a heart transplant is performed to cure pneumonia. But of those 250,000, some will be small mistake, and some will be epic fuck ups (see [1]). Similarly, the police shoot around 1,000 people per year. Of those, many are justified, some are are questionable, and a few are epic fuck ups. If you just look at the epic fuck ups, you may believe that policing is completely broken in America. If you look at it in context, you'd probably conclude that the system works well in some cases, not well in other cases, and that there are lots of tradeoffs and no easy answer. I'd recommend Peter Moskos's blog and podcast (www.copinthehood.com and www.qualitypolicing.com) to get a more even handed perspective than you'd find in the media. I'm not defending every single police shooting, but I think the recent shift in public opinion is not based on a good understanding of policing in America. [1] https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/lfc-4251 https://www.mdlinx.com/article/jaw-dropping-medical-mix-ups/...
- slg 6y ago
  >I didn't mean to imply that there are 250,000 cases a year where a heart transplant is performed to cure pneumonia. Then why link to that study and specifically cite that 250,000 number? One of the main differences with doctors is when they truly do have an epic fuck up they are personally sued and can potentially lose their medical license. How many of the epic fuck ups by police in the linked Google doc will lead to the officer being sued? How many will lead to them being forced to switch to a different profession? Why do we allow these police to epicly fuck up in ways that we don't allow other professions like doctors? Does tolerating these epic fuck ups among police make them more likely to epicly fuck up in the future?

blackrock 6y ago

You have completely bastardized the meaning of statistics. Statistics are meant to understand and bring meaning to chaotic events, like random car accidents, or randomly rolling a dice, or random mechanical failure of some complex system. Statistics doesn’t work so well, when human interactions become involved. And it doesn’t work well in this situation, when it comes to policing, where the officer is of the predominant ethnicity, and the victim is of a minority ethnicity. However, you can probably infer that if the policing is done where the ethnicity of the officer and the civilian, is of a primary vs. minority ethnicity, that there will be enhanced levels of violence involved. This can be one way to infer the statistics. At a fundamental level, there are human biases involved. There is no escaping this. It’s possible that if you and the police officer are of the same ethnicity, then you likely have a lower chance of being assaulted or harassed by the police officer. However, if you are a minority, or of a different ethnicity than the police officer which is of the primary ethnicity, then your probability of being assaulted or harassed by the officer goes up significantly. The police enforcement system, is really a reflection of society. Because it is the society that puts these police officers into positions of authority, and it is the same society that keeps them in authority. So if the police system is corrupt, then at a fundamental level, the society is corrupt. You can’t fix the problem, if you can’t even acknowledge that you have a problem. It’s like Trump’s administration that recently said: There is no systemic racism in American Law Enforcement. Thus, how can you fix something, if you can’t even acknowledge it.

charlieflowers 6y ago

Stop spouting general abstract resistance and go watch the videos and see with your own eyes that something is horribly wrong in your country.

onion2k 6y ago

There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average! I think the issue people are rioting about is that it's not a 1 in a billion chance for everyone. It's more like 1 in a quintillion for a rich white person, and 1 in a million for a person of color. That inequality stems from systemic racism in the police force. What you're saying is that it would be less of a problem if the deaths were evenly distributed across the population. That may be true, but I don't think many people would suggest it as a viable solution to the problem.

raxxorrax 6y ago
This cannot be backed up by data. When I travel with a black friend in Europe, I actually get checked occasionally. That never happens when traveling alone. There seem to be issues with profiling here but I don't believe a diagnosis like systemic racism is in any way justified beyond populism.
- onion2k 6y ago
  There seem to be issues with profiling here but I don't believe a diagnosis like systemic racism... Profiling is an aspect of systemic racism.
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I profoundly disagree with that definition. Racism needs animosity and distrust doesn't qualify as that. You can make a case that this is the accepted academic nomenclature but I would add that the reasoning behind it is not very sophisticated. I would argue that it could even elevate racial tensions if applied to practical problems. Even beyond factoring in the common scholar diagnosing racism in everything.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      Racism needs animosity and distrust doesn't qualify as that. Systemic racism doesn't need animosity for it to happen. Systemic racism is a term for how a system discriminates against race - that might be something like defining how much to spend on schools based on the taxable income of residents. That's not "racist" in the sense that someone deliberately decided to give people of color get less resources, but the outcome of the decision is that people of color get less resources. That is systemic racism. There doesn't need to be any racist intent on the part of any individuals in that system for it to happen (though there often is.)

zimpenfish 6y ago

> Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average! Ok, the EU has 445M citizens[1] which means, by your logic, there should statistically be 40% more police "mistakes" than the US. Except there isn't. It is radically lower[2] (1536 for the USA in 2019 vs 51 for the EU in 2018/19). [1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/figures/living_en https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/figures/living_en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

Gibbon1 6y ago
You can also ignore cops in the US killing people and note the police have about 40 million black people in the US living in fear.
marcell 6y ago
That's an interesting and valid point. First, a disagreement. Your base assumption that police activity should scale linearly with population. This is just obviously not correct. There are huge, huge differences in countries and crime rates. You can look at differences in homicide rate, for example [1]. The united states has a pretty shockingly high homicide rate for a developed country (4.96 per 100k). This is 5x higher than France or Germany. On the other end you have Japan, which is about 5x lower than France or Germany (25x lower than United States). But that aside, the important question is: is crime driving police activity, or are the police widely malicious and corrupt? I'll admit that I'm not knowledgable enough to give a good answer to this question, but I'm very skeptical of jumping to a conclusion based on selective evidence on social media or recent news coverage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...