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often results in people getting assaulted on the street. These laws let the police do something about this Aren't there laws against assaulting people on the s
by yason 5y ago
often results in people getting assaulted on the street. These laws let the police do something about this
Aren't there laws against assaulting people on the street that the police could use, then?
- twodave 5y agoSure there are, but those require someone to be assaulted to enforce them. If they can short-circuit the process during the "drinking in public" preamble to the assault then one might say violence was prevented instead of punished. The perpetrator ends up with a lighter sentence (DIP not nearly as frowned upon as violent crimes) and the would-be-victims aren't even involved.
- banannaise 5y agoPre-crime! Just have the police harass the people most likely to commit crimes, then put them in jail for increasingly long times as their criminal record gets progressively longer. At least you understand that a lot of American policing is deliberately abusing poor people and minorities who aren't doing anything wrong, under the assumption that later they'll do something wrong.
- twodave 5y agoWhat I understand is that talk like this is unnecessary and inflammatory. I haven't seen evidence to suggest that "a lot" of American policing involves officers abusing their power. It definitely happens and, when it does, needs to be dealt with. I have known and worked alongside enough law enforcement and emergency workers to know they're too in fear for their own lives most days to be making unnecessary trouble. Their top priority is to de-escalate situations and make it home to their families. It literally takes one wrong assumption or letting down of the guard in a bad situation to end up dead, so while I do sympathize with _anyone_ who has been wronged by authority, I can't support blanket statements like the above.
- tastyfreeze 5y agoThere are many laws like this that attempt to prevent an uncommon Bad Thing™ from happening at the expense of individual freedom. Some are created as a response to some event. Some are the result of some group pushing their moral values in law. I think we have seen that in most cases these types of laws that conflate correlation and causation are harmful and often abused to the detriment of specific groups.
- tekknik 5y agoLike gun control! Chicago, with its restrictive gun control, hasn’t fixed gun crime at all, just continued to restrict law abiding citizens rights.
- slickfoxx 5y agoChicago gun laws aren’t the problem. 60% of the crimes in Chicago involving firearms are committed with a gun purchased out of state, specifically Indiana, which has some of the laxest gun legislation in the country. Downtown Chicago is closer to the Indiana state line than the suburbs of Chicago.
- tekknik 5y agoAre you missing the point where there’s a law on the books but some people don’t care? Say you get rid of the Indiana, then they’ll get there guns elsewhere. The problem is not the guns
- darkarmani 5y ago> then they’ll get there guns elsewhere. The problem is not the guns The harder it is to get guns, the less people that will get them. Are you really saying that if you make people drive 500 more miles to acquire guns, gun crimes levels will stay exactly the same?
- SilverRed 5y agoThis is a totally solved problem in Australia and NZ. It's just that in the US it would require either country wide action or very strict border patrol/checks.