5 ms·
Progress requires transforming it into a discussion of police efficacy. The problem is, once you look at it as a problem of efficacy, it becomes pretty obvious
by lacker 5y ago
Progress requires transforming it into a discussion of police efficacy.
The problem is, once you look at it as a problem of efficacy, it becomes pretty obvious that police killings are already quite rare compared to other failures of policing. There are around 15,000 murders a year in the US, and around 50 cases where a police officer kills an unarmed person. If you are purely concerned with the statistical impact of the police, it makes a lot more sense to focus on how the police can prevent more crimes, rather than focusing on how the police can kill fewer people.
There is an argument that hiring more police will reduce crime. But hiring more police is expensive. Perhaps we could save money by training police officers less, and use the money saved to hire more police officers. One cost of that could be an increased rate of police mistakenly killing people. But if it reduces crime, perhaps that is worth it. Or perhaps not, perhaps the answer simply is better police training.
As you say, this topic almost always turns into a culture war. I don't think many people on either side are willing to take a neutral view, like one life equals one life whether it's someone shot by the police, or someone shot by a random civilian, or someone dying of the flu. I believe once people do take a neutral view they will realize that police killings should be deprioritized as an issue because they are not very frequent.
- jjk166 5y agoKilling fewer people than literal murderers is not an accomplishment worth celebrating. Similarly the odds of dying from a poorly performed surgery are much lower than the odds of dying from an untreated condition, but that doesn't mean we should ignore medical malpractice. Plane crashes may be rare but that does not make plane crashes acceptable, and likewise for police killings. Speaking in vague generalities about numbers of police and budgets and training is exactly the problem. Planes don't crash because maintaining planes is expensive, they crash because someone made a mistake, and corrective action should ensure that mistake can not be repeated. If you notice that bolts aren't tight enough, you don't have the mechanics promise to tighten them better, you make them use a torque wrench. Likewise if a veteran officer can grab a pistol and not immediately realize it's not a taser, you can talk all day about training and de-escalation and heat of the moment but the fact is some idiot thought buying tasers with pistol grips that felt the same as the department's guns was a good idea. That decision was not a judgement call made in the heat of the moment, there was no ethical calculus trading some lives for more, it was simply incompetence that killed a man. In any other industry there would be no one trying to make excuses to support the making of such a decision.
- CountDrewku 5y ago"Killing fewer people than literal murderers is not an accomplishment worth celebrating." You're straw-manning and you know it. This is exactly what the above commenter was referring to.
- jjk166 5y agoNo, trying to compare the murder rate to the police killing rate and thus misconstruing the original proposal as focusing on police killings instead of preventing murder (when I had made no such claim) is the the straw man. GP comment made the claim that since fewer people are killed by police than murderers that therefore actions that decrease murder rates increase efficacy even if they also increase police killings. My comment refutes that.
- CountDrewku 5y agoI don't see anywhere in the comment where the individual suggested less deaths were worth celebrating as you so eloquently put it. In fact, I don't think comment says anything that would make a person believe police shootings are a good thing. Alas, you're attacking his arguments like he supports killing innocent people....
- jjk166 5y agoI take it english isn't your first language. Celebrated in this context doesn't mean throwing a party or rejoicing, it is being used here as a synonym for praised or lauded. And specifically, saying something like this should not be celebrated is meant to convey that this ought to be considered normal as opposed to exceptionally good. Most people would consider fewer deaths to be good, but in this cases there hasn't been any reduction - these are just two different sources of deaths. No one at any point was saying police shootings are a good thing. The other poster is saying that dealing with police shootings should be a lower priority than dealing with murder, and that there is conflict between these goals. I on the other hand am saying that there is not conflict between the goals and that their priority is irrelevant. I believe his method to be ineffective, not ill-intentioned.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]