14 ms·

How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman? This whole doxxing your opponents movement scares me. I will grant you that allowing police to use tap

by rmason 6y ago

How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman? This whole doxxing your opponents movement scares me. I will grant you that allowing police to use tape to cover their name tags is wrong on many levels. But if protesters use this technology to target policemen's families, why would anyone in their right mind take the job?

sieabahlpark 6y ago
It's almost like acting like a domestic terrorist group should have consequences or something...
dragonwriter 6y ago
> How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman? Ideally, you aren't; you are going to disband the centralized, omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement entities known as "police departments", redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities that for the most part are not exclusively, or even centrally, law enforcement, and not violate the public trust the way police departments have broadly and systematically done over an extended period of time.
- jacob2484 6y ago
  Key part is "ideally". In Minneapolis, council is already backtracking on defund the police movement as crime has spiked, mostly affecting the poor. Is there an example of a country where there is no police?
  - rbjorklin 6y ago
    None that I know of but my understanding was that people take issue with the police using military equipment and tactics. Most western police forces are trained to deescalate which doesn’t seem to be the case in most(all?) US states.
    - alehul 6y ago
      One of the most interesting points here is that people are looking at the United States, comparing it to Western Europe, and saying "we need to defund police" or "we need to disarm police." The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime. If you look at intentional homicide rates among large countries (>1m population), the U.S. is comparable to countries like Ecuador, Argentina, Kenya, and Pakistan [1]. The U.S. intentional homicide rate is bigger than Western European countries by a factor of 4 or 5. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime. A major contention of the defund/dismantle movement is that the US prioritization of paramilitary law enforcement for local funding exacerbates the social problems that create crime, even if you don't count crime-by-police.
        alehul 6y ago
        Total U.S. police spending is around $100 billion, which is around $285/person/year. Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year, at a surface level this feels extremely efficient — certainly more so than other parts of our bureaucracy. Crime occurs for social, cultural, and/or financial reasons — focusing on the financial, we have a giant bureaucratic and inefficient government, an incredibly large population, and a lot of waste. I don't think one could argue the $24/person/month we pay for police would make a substantial difference / stop a ton of crime.
        zimpenfish 6y ago
        https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/police-and-corrections-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... has it at $115B for 2017 with another $79B for "corrections" (which you can debate whether it's "police spending".) I should imagine it's gone up since then? > Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year But if you cut the police spending by, say, 50% and used that money instead to providing social services, mental health services, etc., how many of those 911 calls go away?
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    The path from the George Floyd protests to the current position of the Minneapolis City Council is not linear in the way you're suggesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-d...
  - mythrwy 6y ago
    Mizar 5. (but pretty sure that was fictional)
- birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
  Seems like the Medieval Times want their knights back. What will happen if domain-specific entities protect their specific regions and there are issues with other entities near-by? What have the Romans ever done for us? There has been local law enforcement for ages until empires started. Civilization happens because somebody unites a region under one law enforcement. It's not pretty for everybody, but by which force should domain specific forces not fight each other if central authority is disbanded?
  - shoreofwonder 6y ago
    The fire department and police department are separate entities. Subdividing the police department could work.
    - stretchwithme 6y ago
      So could cross training police and firefighters. That's what they do in Sunnyvale CA.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    The idea is to reduce the central militarized force with a plurality of nonviolent support services and unarmed law enforcement in addition to a significantly smaller force, trained and responsible for handling rampages, well-organized bank heists etc. If these domains intend to fight one another, let it happen in court.
    - alacombe 6y ago
      > The idea is to reduce the central militarized force with a plurality of nonviolent support services and unarmed law enforcement New-York inhabitant already thank you, especially given the radical upspike in violence since the NYPD defunding ! You can't have unarmed law enforcement against armed gang-bangers...
  - outsidetheparty 6y ago
    "Domain specific entities" means splitting up the many tasks currently handled by police into separate organizations specialized in those tasks -- public safety has different needs from traffic enforcement which has different needs from domestic disputes or mental health issues. They don't mean regional fiefdoms.
- Memosyne 6y ago
  See: "violence interrupters" > Despite the uptick of crime in his ward, Cunningham, who supports the creation of a new community safety agency to replace the police department, said it’s particularly important now to start instituting some of those public health-based approaches to violence prevention. Recently, the council took more than $1 million from the police budget to hire “violence interrupters” to intervene and defuse potentially violent confrontations. [1] > “If we have these systems in place we are getting ahead of the violence,” said Cunningham. “That’s why I have advocated so strongly for the violence interrupters, because if they are interrupting the violence before the guns are being fired, then the MPD doesn’t have to respond to that violence.” > “What I am sort of flabbergasted by right now is colleagues, who a very short time ago were calling for abolition, are now suggesting we should be putting more resources and funding into MPD,” Cunningham said. I'm questioning the general competence of politicians when the best solution they have is hiring unarmed citizens to... interrupt potentially armed and unhinged aggressors? 1 - https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/09/15/with-violent-crime-on-the-rise-in-mpls-city-council-asks-where-are-the-police https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/09/15/with-violent-crime-...
- roenxi 6y ago
  That is a bit of a non-sequiter. How will you get people to sign up for these domain-specific entities? Activists are going to decide they don't like them and start stalking them as well.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    If they do nothing wrong, they will have nothing to fear!
    - alacombe 6y ago
      Define "nothing wrong" ? Also, there is now a watchman watching the watchman, but who's watching the watchman watching the watchman ?
      - neltnerb 6y ago
        Literally everyone else in this particular example, instead of the DOJ exclusively and secretly?
        alacombe 6y ago
        So everyone carry their own justice ? I'm down for that (CCW holder in a Stand-Your-Ground state), are you ?
        neltnerb 6y ago
        You think that monitoring armed employees of the state to identify abuses using technology as threatening as a camera is... equivalent to right-wing anarchy? You seriously think that it will be impossible to recruit officers if they might have people monitor their on the job behavior and call them out for doing things that are illegal. The military seems to do alright... I do not condone violence and at the moment the police seem to be doing most of it. There needs to be a check on that.
        6y ago
- alehul 6y ago
  > omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement U.S. civilians own nearly 400 million firearms, which is larger than the country's population. The intentional homicide rate is comparable to Kenya, Pakistan, Ecuador, or Argentina (5x higher than Western Europe). Are you sure that police will be able to operate effectively without being armed in a somewhat militaristic manner? > redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities What will happen if I call 911 and report someone stole from me at gunpoint? What if I report that someone violated my restraining order against them? What if I report that someone is yelling threateningly at waitstaff at a restaurant? > not violate the public trust While we absolutely need more oversight, there are over ~55,000,000 documented police-public encounters in a given year, and ~1,000 cases of lethal force used by police (vast majority were people attempting to harm the officers). The rate of lethal force as a percent of interactions: 0.0000206473%. The rate of lethal force against the total U.S. population: 0.00000343477%.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    I don't have a problem with the existence of paramilitary local law enforcement agencies. I have a problem with centralized, all-purpose paramilitary law enforcement agencies. If you ignore half the words of a description, it can change the meaning significantly.
    - alehul 6y ago
      It's a good distinction, so I asked what would happen in each of the three cases. I think that's one of the trickiest parts of this concept. In a country as armed and violent as the United States, escalation happens quickly and dangerously. We've all seen videos of officers pulling a car over for speeding and being executed the moment they look away, there's been more than a few in the past couple months alone [1] [2] [3]. Nearly any situation can become lethal for the officer and civilians [4], so I think it's fair to ask in what situations there would be an armed responder. Edited with sources as it was downvoted: [1] https://nypost.com/2020/09/15/police-release-footage-of-fatal-shooting-of-tulsa-police-officer/ https://nypost.com/2020/09/15/police-release-footage-of-fata... [2] https://apnews.com/article/808248ed232ca2a83dad8780359bf69b https://apnews.com/article/808248ed232ca2a83dad8780359bf69b [3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/us/south-carolina-deputy-killed/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/us/south-carolina-deputy-kill... [4] https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/16-1532-BIO-USDOJ.pdf https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/16-153...
- alacombe 6y ago
  > you are going to disband the centralized, omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement entities known as "police departments", redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities that for the most part are not exclusively, or even centrally, law enforcement, and not violate the public trust the way police departments In other words, disband PD to create... another PD.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
Why is it acceptable that police use facial recognition to target protestors, but "doxxing" when activists use that same technology to hold police accountable?
- ekanes 6y ago
  The difference would be that police are privately identifying people.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    How would you have activists hold law enforcement accountable? Publishing the information is literally the only tool in their toolbox.
    - ekanes 6y ago
      You're interpreting from my comment a viewpoint, but I'm really just answering the exact question. The police do need to be held to a higher standard than civilians.
      - jakelazaroff 6y ago
        Sorry if I was unclear. I'm not asking what the difference is; I'm asking (semi-rhetorically) why the former is acceptable and the latter not.
- stretchwithme 6y ago
  Because some protesters will use that information to go to the homes of police officers and continue their vandalism there.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    Just like police will use that information to go to the homes of protestors and continue their brutality there.
klyrs 6y ago
> How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman? If the police have lost consent of the governed, then the problem is with the government.
- stretchwithme 6y ago
  Consent of the governed is not the same as consent of the criminal element.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Or seems like non-criminals in areas with a lot of police activity disprove their behavior. Which is issue.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Weird thing how the US was once a penal colony, isn't it? Defining "the criminal element" is always a relative matter, and varies over time. The very people who coined that phrase were considered criminals by the government whose rule they contested.
Dahoon 6y ago
Try turning it on its head. Does the police/state not do the same thing daily all over the world? Just look at any news channel and you'll see lots of names thrown around. Only not the police as they are "protected".
ben_w 6y ago
In a perfect world, that’s something which only bad cops have anything to worry about. We’re not in a perfect world, and — as all humans are imperfect — evidence of badness will accumulate in even the best of us. I wish I knew how to fix that, because it also applies to literally all online activity, and isn’t just a cops thing.
- Hithredin 6y ago
  Funny enough, this is the exact same argument we use against state mass surveillance: " If you have nothing to hide, why refusing surveillance?" So police should be exempted from mass surveillance ban ?!?
  - avmich 6y ago
    Police is here to serve the public, so naturally public may want to impose rules on police which it doesn't want to impose on itself. It all depends on who wants what (and for what).
  - ben_w 6y ago
    > So police should be exempted from mass surveillance ban ?!? Whatever the solution ends up being, I want the police to be the same as everyone else with regard to that solution. I don’t really get normal human psychology, so I don’t know if everybody or nobody should have facial recognition software in public places, but I do think it should be a choice of “everybody or nobody”.
mcguire 6y ago
"I will grant you that allowing police to use tape to cover their name tags is wrong on many levels." How much "wrong" does an organization have to commit before it becomes a net liability? "But if protesters use this technology to target policemen's families, why would anyone in their right mind take the job?" Why would anyone in their right mind take a job where they covered their name tag to protect their identity? Sunshine is a disinfectant.
itronitron 6y ago
Police don't need to worry about protesters as they are already up against career criminals, gangs, and cartels who have more resources.
- bruceb 6y ago
  If career criminals and gangs had vast resources it’s unlikely they would be career criminals (at least at a street crime level).
bigbubba 6y ago
> why would anyone in their right mind take the job Nutjobs who want power over others and are willing to imperil themselves to pursue it will continue to become cops. By discouraging people in their right mind from joining the police, the police will become more dangerous. 'All Cops Are Bad' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Technically, I know many 'good' cops who've left policing because of the bad cops. So, I guess maybe in 2005, this would've been true in the context that our current reality is that we've already arrived at the 'All Cops are Bad' era. That's also about the time the FBI first put out warnings about White Supremacists taking over the police...
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    I think there is a snowball effect; the more bad cops there are, the more good cops quit. A terrible feedback cycle. Unfortunately I think some police reform/abolition activists have decided to accelerate this feedback loop under the theory that making things much worse is the only way to make things better. 'ACAB' makes bad cops think they're in good company while probably making good cops want to quit (and similarly filters new police recruits.) The premise is presumably that when cops get worse, more of the public will support reform. 'Accelerationist' approaches like thus might be well intentioned, but I think the consequences are more likely to be disastrous.
Nasrudith 6y ago
How will you get anybody to work at an abortion clinic, slaughterhouse, or publisher of pornography given there is some nutjob who would be angry with them for it? The same way - they get paid money for it and have benefits, duh. Escalate appropriately to targetting family - you know the same way they would if crazed vegans attacked a meat packing worker. Anyone so cowardly they cannot accept working for a living for an entity /with a legal monopoly on use of force/ has no business being a police officer. If they cannot accept being protected like everybody else we don't want the cravens.

by rmason 6y ago

sieabahlpark 6y ago

It's almost like acting like a domestic terrorist group should have consequences or something...

dragonwriter 6y ago

> How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman? Ideally, you aren't; you are going to disband the centralized, omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement entities known as "police departments", redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities that for the most part are not exclusively, or even centrally, law enforcement, and not violate the public trust the way police departments have broadly and systematically done over an extended period of time.

jacob2484 6y ago
Key part is "ideally". In Minneapolis, council is already backtracking on defund the police movement as crime has spiked, mostly affecting the poor. Is there an example of a country where there is no police?
- rbjorklin 6y ago
  None that I know of but my understanding was that people take issue with the police using military equipment and tactics. Most western police forces are trained to deescalate which doesn’t seem to be the case in most(all?) US states.
  - alehul 6y ago
    One of the most interesting points here is that people are looking at the United States, comparing it to Western Europe, and saying "we need to defund police" or "we need to disarm police." The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime. If you look at intentional homicide rates among large countries (>1m population), the U.S. is comparable to countries like Ecuador, Argentina, Kenya, and Pakistan [1]. The U.S. intentional homicide rate is bigger than Western European countries by a factor of 4 or 5. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime. A major contention of the defund/dismantle movement is that the US prioritization of paramilitary law enforcement for local funding exacerbates the social problems that create crime, even if you don't count crime-by-police.
      - alehul 6y ago
        Total U.S. police spending is around $100 billion, which is around $285/person/year. Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year, at a surface level this feels extremely efficient — certainly more so than other parts of our bureaucracy. Crime occurs for social, cultural, and/or financial reasons — focusing on the financial, we have a giant bureaucratic and inefficient government, an incredibly large population, and a lot of waste. I don't think one could argue the $24/person/month we pay for police would make a substantial difference / stop a ton of crime.
        zimpenfish 6y ago
        https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/police-and-corrections-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... has it at $115B for 2017 with another $79B for "corrections" (which you can debate whether it's "police spending".) I should imagine it's gone up since then? > Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year But if you cut the police spending by, say, 50% and used that money instead to providing social services, mental health services, etc., how many of those 911 calls go away?
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  The path from the George Floyd protests to the current position of the Minneapolis City Council is not linear in the way you're suggesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-d...
- mythrwy 6y ago
  Mizar 5. (but pretty sure that was fictional)
birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
Seems like the Medieval Times want their knights back. What will happen if domain-specific entities protect their specific regions and there are issues with other entities near-by? What have the Romans ever done for us? There has been local law enforcement for ages until empires started. Civilization happens because somebody unites a region under one law enforcement. It's not pretty for everybody, but by which force should domain specific forces not fight each other if central authority is disbanded?
- shoreofwonder 6y ago
  The fire department and police department are separate entities. Subdividing the police department could work.
  - stretchwithme 6y ago
    So could cross training police and firefighters. That's what they do in Sunnyvale CA.
- klyrs 6y ago
  The idea is to reduce the central militarized force with a plurality of nonviolent support services and unarmed law enforcement in addition to a significantly smaller force, trained and responsible for handling rampages, well-organized bank heists etc. If these domains intend to fight one another, let it happen in court.
  - alacombe 6y ago
    > The idea is to reduce the central militarized force with a plurality of nonviolent support services and unarmed law enforcement New-York inhabitant already thank you, especially given the radical upspike in violence since the NYPD defunding ! You can't have unarmed law enforcement against armed gang-bangers...
- outsidetheparty 6y ago
  "Domain specific entities" means splitting up the many tasks currently handled by police into separate organizations specialized in those tasks -- public safety has different needs from traffic enforcement which has different needs from domestic disputes or mental health issues. They don't mean regional fiefdoms.
Memosyne 6y ago
See: "violence interrupters" > Despite the uptick of crime in his ward, Cunningham, who supports the creation of a new community safety agency to replace the police department, said it’s particularly important now to start instituting some of those public health-based approaches to violence prevention. Recently, the council took more than $1 million from the police budget to hire “violence interrupters” to intervene and defuse potentially violent confrontations. [1] > “If we have these systems in place we are getting ahead of the violence,” said Cunningham. “That’s why I have advocated so strongly for the violence interrupters, because if they are interrupting the violence before the guns are being fired, then the MPD doesn’t have to respond to that violence.” > “What I am sort of flabbergasted by right now is colleagues, who a very short time ago were calling for abolition, are now suggesting we should be putting more resources and funding into MPD,” Cunningham said. I'm questioning the general competence of politicians when the best solution they have is hiring unarmed citizens to... interrupt potentially armed and unhinged aggressors? 1 - https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/09/15/with-violent-crime-on-the-rise-in-mpls-city-council-asks-where-are-the-police https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/09/15/with-violent-crime-...
roenxi 6y ago
That is a bit of a non-sequiter. How will you get people to sign up for these domain-specific entities? Activists are going to decide they don't like them and start stalking them as well.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  If they do nothing wrong, they will have nothing to fear!
  - alacombe 6y ago
    Define "nothing wrong" ? Also, there is now a watchman watching the watchman, but who's watching the watchman watching the watchman ?
    - neltnerb 6y ago
      Literally everyone else in this particular example, instead of the DOJ exclusively and secretly?
      - alacombe 6y ago
        So everyone carry their own justice ? I'm down for that (CCW holder in a Stand-Your-Ground state), are you ?
        neltnerb 6y ago
        You think that monitoring armed employees of the state to identify abuses using technology as threatening as a camera is... equivalent to right-wing anarchy? You seriously think that it will be impossible to recruit officers if they might have people monitor their on the job behavior and call them out for doing things that are illegal. The military seems to do alright... I do not condone violence and at the moment the police seem to be doing most of it. There needs to be a check on that.
        6y ago
alehul 6y ago
> omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement U.S. civilians own nearly 400 million firearms, which is larger than the country's population. The intentional homicide rate is comparable to Kenya, Pakistan, Ecuador, or Argentina (5x higher than Western Europe). Are you sure that police will be able to operate effectively without being armed in a somewhat militaristic manner? > redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities What will happen if I call 911 and report someone stole from me at gunpoint? What if I report that someone violated my restraining order against them? What if I report that someone is yelling threateningly at waitstaff at a restaurant? > not violate the public trust While we absolutely need more oversight, there are over ~55,000,000 documented police-public encounters in a given year, and ~1,000 cases of lethal force used by police (vast majority were people attempting to harm the officers). The rate of lethal force as a percent of interactions: 0.0000206473%. The rate of lethal force against the total U.S. population: 0.00000343477%.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  I don't have a problem with the existence of paramilitary local law enforcement agencies. I have a problem with centralized, all-purpose paramilitary law enforcement agencies. If you ignore half the words of a description, it can change the meaning significantly.
  - alehul 6y ago
    It's a good distinction, so I asked what would happen in each of the three cases. I think that's one of the trickiest parts of this concept. In a country as armed and violent as the United States, escalation happens quickly and dangerously. We've all seen videos of officers pulling a car over for speeding and being executed the moment they look away, there's been more than a few in the past couple months alone [1] [2] [3]. Nearly any situation can become lethal for the officer and civilians [4], so I think it's fair to ask in what situations there would be an armed responder. Edited with sources as it was downvoted: [1] https://nypost.com/2020/09/15/police-release-footage-of-fatal-shooting-of-tulsa-police-officer/ https://nypost.com/2020/09/15/police-release-footage-of-fata... [2] https://apnews.com/article/808248ed232ca2a83dad8780359bf69b https://apnews.com/article/808248ed232ca2a83dad8780359bf69b [3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/us/south-carolina-deputy-killed/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/us/south-carolina-deputy-kill... [4] https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/16-1532-BIO-USDOJ.pdf https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/16-153...
alacombe 6y ago
> you are going to disband the centralized, omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement entities known as "police departments", redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities that for the most part are not exclusively, or even centrally, law enforcement, and not violate the public trust the way police departments In other words, disband PD to create... another PD.

jakelazaroff 6y ago

Why is it acceptable that police use facial recognition to target protestors, but "doxxing" when activists use that same technology to hold police accountable?

ekanes 6y ago
The difference would be that police are privately identifying people.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  How would you have activists hold law enforcement accountable? Publishing the information is literally the only tool in their toolbox.
  - ekanes 6y ago
    You're interpreting from my comment a viewpoint, but I'm really just answering the exact question. The police do need to be held to a higher standard than civilians.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      Sorry if I was unclear. I'm not asking what the difference is; I'm asking (semi-rhetorically) why the former is acceptable and the latter not.
stretchwithme 6y ago
Because some protesters will use that information to go to the homes of police officers and continue their vandalism there.
- jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Just like police will use that information to go to the homes of protestors and continue their brutality there.

klyrs 6y ago

> How are you going to get anyone to become a policeman? If the police have lost consent of the governed, then the problem is with the government.

stretchwithme 6y ago
Consent of the governed is not the same as consent of the criminal element.
- watwut 6y ago
  Or seems like non-criminals in areas with a lot of police activity disprove their behavior. Which is issue.
- klyrs 6y ago
  Weird thing how the US was once a penal colony, isn't it? Defining "the criminal element" is always a relative matter, and varies over time. The very people who coined that phrase were considered criminals by the government whose rule they contested.

Dahoon 6y ago

Try turning it on its head. Does the police/state not do the same thing daily all over the world? Just look at any news channel and you'll see lots of names thrown around. Only not the police as they are "protected".

ben_w 6y ago

In a perfect world, that’s something which only bad cops have anything to worry about. We’re not in a perfect world, and — as all humans are imperfect — evidence of badness will accumulate in even the best of us. I wish I knew how to fix that, because it also applies to literally all online activity, and isn’t just a cops thing.

Hithredin 6y ago
Funny enough, this is the exact same argument we use against state mass surveillance: " If you have nothing to hide, why refusing surveillance?" So police should be exempted from mass surveillance ban ?!?
- avmich 6y ago
  Police is here to serve the public, so naturally public may want to impose rules on police which it doesn't want to impose on itself. It all depends on who wants what (and for what).
- ben_w 6y ago
  > So police should be exempted from mass surveillance ban ?!? Whatever the solution ends up being, I want the police to be the same as everyone else with regard to that solution. I don’t really get normal human psychology, so I don’t know if everybody or nobody should have facial recognition software in public places, but I do think it should be a choice of “everybody or nobody”.

mcguire 6y ago

"I will grant you that allowing police to use tape to cover their name tags is wrong on many levels." How much "wrong" does an organization have to commit before it becomes a net liability? "But if protesters use this technology to target policemen's families, why would anyone in their right mind take the job?" Why would anyone in their right mind take a job where they covered their name tag to protect their identity? Sunshine is a disinfectant.

itronitron 6y ago

Police don't need to worry about protesters as they are already up against career criminals, gangs, and cartels who have more resources.

bruceb 6y ago
If career criminals and gangs had vast resources it’s unlikely they would be career criminals (at least at a street crime level).

bigbubba 6y ago

> why would anyone in their right mind take the job Nutjobs who want power over others and are willing to imperil themselves to pursue it will continue to become cops. By discouraging people in their right mind from joining the police, the police will become more dangerous. 'All Cops Are Bad' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

gremlinsinc 6y ago
Technically, I know many 'good' cops who've left policing because of the bad cops. So, I guess maybe in 2005, this would've been true in the context that our current reality is that we've already arrived at the 'All Cops are Bad' era. That's also about the time the FBI first put out warnings about White Supremacists taking over the police...
- bigbubba 6y ago
  I think there is a snowball effect; the more bad cops there are, the more good cops quit. A terrible feedback cycle. Unfortunately I think some police reform/abolition activists have decided to accelerate this feedback loop under the theory that making things much worse is the only way to make things better. 'ACAB' makes bad cops think they're in good company while probably making good cops want to quit (and similarly filters new police recruits.) The premise is presumably that when cops get worse, more of the public will support reform. 'Accelerationist' approaches like thus might be well intentioned, but I think the consequences are more likely to be disastrous.

Nasrudith 6y ago

How will you get anybody to work at an abortion clinic, slaughterhouse, or publisher of pornography given there is some nutjob who would be angry with them for it? The same way - they get paid money for it and have benefits, duh. Escalate appropriately to targetting family - you know the same way they would if crazed vegans attacked a meat packing worker. Anyone so cowardly they cannot accept working for a living for an entity /with a legal monopoly on use of force/ has no business being a police officer. If they cannot accept being protected like everybody else we don't want the cravens.