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Is there evidence that indicates police are more corrupt than anybody else?
by austincheney 6y ago
Is there evidence that indicates police are more corrupt than anybody else?
- Pfhreak 6y agoEven if they were equally corrupt to everyone else, they have much, much more authority to use violence and be shielded from the consequences. We should demand that they are significantly less corrupt than everyone else.
- austincheney 6y agoI completely agree, but the point still stands that insinuating corruption is a straw man when it’s not based on anything.
- uoaei 6y agoThis is a nonsensical question. How does one measure "corruption" and how do you quantify it? IMO these sorts of questions are kneejerk reactions without any significant fore- or after-thought. They only serve to disrupt the conversation.
- austincheney 6y agoCorruption is a provable violation of ethics which is measurable. In so many of these police related threads on HN lately people make absurd claims and then are upset when asked about data or objectivity, which suggests people are looking to complain about something and don’t want their complaint validated with data, which is strange.
- psychometry 6y agoConsidering we're not allowed to see officer disciplinary records, even though they work for us (the taxpayer), it's impossible to get the data you want.
- austincheney 6y agoYou can subpoena for that in the public interest otherwise that is an employer related privacy violation of an employee.
- uoaei 6y agoWhat ethics? And how can you prove anything if cops always defend their own? In an ideal world where we have an oracle telling us which cops are good and which are bad your comment makes sense. But the nature of corruption is to obfuscate its dealings. You can't just say "well we need independent oversight" then because there are so many institutional pivot points where cops can hide their abhorrent behavior before it gets to see the light of day.
- austincheney 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics In practical application ethics violations are knowable breaking of rules or demonstrable malicious intentions.
- uoaei 6y agoYou have an ultra-simplified view of what ethics can be and how it can be employed. This is evidenced in how you think "ethics" can be defined by a wikipedia page. The concept of ethics is very much different from its numerous instantiations.
- austincheney 6y agoThen please provide a better definition.
- justin66 6y ago> Corruption is a provable violation of ethics which is measurable. Police do everything they can to keep ethics violations from being measured. That is what the story is about. In light of that, your objection to psychometry's comment calling for oversight is quite absurd.
- austincheney 6y agoI am absolutely not objecting to oversight. I am not sure how you came to that. I am advocating for the opposite, for increased measurable data so that people don’t have to invent their own narratives.
- justin66 6y ago> invent their own narratives Your comments in this thread are recursively ridiculous and I'm not sure how far I want to unwind them, but people are "inventing their own narratives" (this is an astonishingly bad way of characterizing the problem here) in preference to siting hard numbers because the police are not holding themselves accountable, a phenomenon that includes the suppression of the hard data on how many abuses there are.
- austincheney 6y agoThen advocate for better data. You either want accountability or you just want to have something to complain about.
- justin66 6y agoLiterally every person who is advocating for greater police accountability is, by definition, advocating for better data. I don't think there's an argument here about that. The point of disagreement would seem to be, most people don't believe being unable to fully quantify the corruption of the police means it does not exist.
- 6y ago
- fzeroracer 6y agoHere you go [1]. This DB contains multiple provable violation of ethics in multiple measurable and easily digestible forms such as graphs and stats. I assume you will agree that this is close to objectivity and therefore police are indeed corrupt? [1] https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality
- austincheney 6y agoYes, qualified data is essential because the goal is accountability, but that still doesn’t answer my original question.
- fzeroracer 6y agoYour original question was 'where's the data'. I provided the data. How does that not answer it?
- austincheney 6y agoOriginal question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23616331
- fzeroracer 6y agoYes, and I provided you evidence. You claimed in an earlier post > In so many of these police related threads on HN lately people make absurd claims and then are upset when asked about data or objectivity And I provided you exactly what you wanted. Yet you seem to be dismissing said evidence out of...? Your feelings?
- charlesu 6y agoThis is a question without a purpose. Police officers carry guns, have qualified immunity, and can kill people. Are they using excessive -- and in some cases deadly -- force in situations that do not require it? That is the only question that matters. Evidence suggests that in some cases that they do use excessive force. It doesn't matter if in many cases they don't. It doesn't matter if the corruption ratio is 1:100 or 1:10. The people who's loved ones are being hurt or are being hurt themselves don't have time for intellectual exercises with no real implications. Police officers wield authority and are therefore are held to a far higher standard than other people.
- austincheney 6y agoAlmost everyone in southern states visibly carry guns. That is not an excuse to ignore or forgive an absence of data or accountability.
- krapp 6y ago>Almost everyone in southern states visibly carry guns. Umm... no they don't.
- austincheney 6y ago* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Texas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Texas * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Arizona https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Arizona As two quick examples check out the open carry laws in Texas and Arizona where registered personally owned firearms per capita is among the highest in the country.
- krapp 6y agoYes, open carry laws exist. Yes, people in the South own firearms. Nevertheless your statement that "almost everyone in southern states visibly carry guns" remains false. A more correct restatement of your claim might be that "many" Southerners openly carry, but that's still a minority of a minority given that, per capita, most Southerners don't even own a gun. "Almost everyone" is reaching into some kind of weird libertarian wild-west fantasy stereotype.
- glitcher 6y ago> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. The OP's comment may be poorly worded, but in the context of current events your contributions to this discussion show virtually no sign of attempting to make good faith arguments.
- austincheney 6y agoI am advocating for data and accountability over agreement and hysteria. It appears, to me, you are equating my lack of immediate agreement to bad faith.
- glitcher 6y agoAgreement is not the goal of discussions or debate. Perhaps if you articulated your advocacy for data and accountability with a little more substance earlier on we would be enjoying a more productive debate about the issue.
- austincheney 6y agoMy experience with social media is that the goal is purely social reinforcement, not discussion. Typically HN is better than that but purely political threads like this with absolutely no technology or business focus tend to draw out people not primarily focused on discussion. That is why I deleted my Reddit account. Here is an example from this thread where a commenter, in their own words, is distressed only that I don’t just agree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617015