6 ms·

When you demonize an entire profession due to the unjust actions of 0.1% of its members, don't be surprised when the only police officers left are those that re

When you demonize an entire profession due to the unjust actions of 0.1% of its members, don't be surprised when the only police officers left are those that revel in the Us vs. Them mentality. I really don't think this is going to end well.

walls 5y ago
When the profession doesn't have any repercussions for bad actors, this is the inevitable result.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Far more people die from medical malpractice mistakes every year. I don't see anyone calling for dismantling the medical profession. Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them. It really isn't that complicated.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    >Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. Sure, but how many? How much is the right amount. I hear the same said about our military, but it's degrees. Should we double the amount of money we spend on police? Triple? What's enough? Do we have too much now? There are lots of indications to me that it's turned into a make-work program. >Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them. The unions are too powerful, the profession is too corrupt. Police "self regulate," and insiders who try to bring light to corruption typically get punished. It's too hard for the political process. All the while, the citizenry continues to get robbed, beaten and killed. Honestly the best thing to happen to the citizenry is phone cameras. >It really isn't that complicated. Maybe you should give it some more thought.
    - ashneo76 5y ago
      Why is this down voted?
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Look at the demographics of HN. What kind of calls do you think these demographics generate? Questioning staffing levels is not popular among the white collar crowd because "can you please come tell my neighbor to party more quietly" and "can someone write up a police report for my stolen property so I can get reimbursement from insurance" are the first type of calls to get a "haha we'll get to it when we get to it" from the dispatcher when you start reducing the department size. Harassing shitbox drivers for tail light out, telling loitering teenagers to knock it off, bothering the guy drinking while he walks his dog, all sorts of low priority things (the bulk of which can probably be described as "reducing the visibility of lower class behavior") that make up the bulk of the services HN demographics demand from the police are the first things police stop doing when they're spread thin. Killing people over bootleg cigs is the second thing they stop doing.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >Sure, but how many? Less per capita than pretty much any wealthy city or suburb has. More per capita than Detroit. We all see the kind of trouble people with no real pressing crap to do can cause with an HOA at their disposal. So I figure we should make sure the people with a badge and a gun are substantially more busy than that. Nobody wants to work in an overworked department but I don't see a way to keep police from harassing people unnecessarily other than making sure the department is small enough there's enough "real crime" to go around.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      From my point of view, the problem with the police is that the standards are not high enough. It's too easy to become an officer, it doesn't require much education, and so on. It needs to become a prestige position, something that is respectable and attracts applicants that genuinely want to do good. Right now, this doesn't happen, so you mostly get the corrupt tribalism stuff. But demonizing the police profession will guarantee that thousands of reasonable, well-meaning people will never become police officers. > Maybe you should give it some more thought. I have given it plenty of thought. I, along with pretty much anyone that actually has lived in crime-ridden areas, thinks that the idea of abolishing the police and demonizing officers is completely absurd. The worst part is that the people with the loudest voices won't face any of the repercussions. Instead, it'll be the poor, because they aren't rich and social media savvy. Actual working class people are too busy working to be tweeting all day long about politics.
  - saurik 5y ago
    But medical malpractice is a thing, with personal consequences to the doctor. They might have insurance, and maybe it can be hard to prove wrongdoing, but there absolutely is "repercussions for bad actors" with respect to medicine. With police the problem is that they might not even get fired, and any judgements against them tend to at best get paid by taxpayers: there is no incentive to not be horrible.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      > With police the problem is that they might not even get fired, and any judgements against them tend to at best get paid by taxpayers: there is no incentive to not be horrible. That's the problem. I don't think demonizing the other 99.9% of officers is the solution.
      - pjc50 5y ago
        There was sufficient evidence for any police officer in Minneapolis to arrest Derek Chauvin, and yet they protected him instead. They all chose to be complicit in his crime. Various forces have little internal secret rituals in which they all collude in murder. Above we have https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge-tips-to-mark-fatal-shootings/ https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge... ; there's another example from NYPD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525224 Doctors very rarely turn out politically to defend the malpractice of other doctors.
        ceilingcorner 5y ago
        Yes and all three of the other officers are facing various charges. That's how the legal system works. It's still unclear to me how a small town officer, hundreds of miles away, is guilty for the crimes of people he has nothing to do with.
        pjc50 5y ago
        > all three of the other officers are facing various charges None of them would have faced charges without months of national protests! That's why there's a problem! And I don't just mean the others that were there, all eight hundred Minneapolis PD officers are to some extent complicit.
  - raisedbyninjas 5y ago
    Is it common for "good" doctors cover-up or just remain silent for "bad" doctors? Is there an incentive for this behavior where "bad" doctors may endanger the lives of those that cross the doctor wall of silence?
  - thosakwe 5y ago
    > Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. Are you sure? Lots of causes for crime (i.e. poverty) can't be solved by arresting or shooting people. I am convinced that part of the reason police reform is so difficult in the United States is that most people have never questioned neither the history of American policing (which started as slave patrols in many states), nor the necessity for heavily-armed police at all. > If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them. This is not so easy, when both of the parties with political control in the U.S. receive donations from the prison industry... EDIT: Lastly, in reference to your original point, the argument that police officers are being simply "demonized" is missing the bigger picture. Police aren't individual actors - they protect each other, even when they have crossed a line. And it's all by choice.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      What modern country doesn't have a police force? If you actually look at the responses from people who live in high-crime areas, the data is clear. Virtually no one wants less police. Most want more. I trust that more than activists with explicit political messages written in their manifestos. > Police aren't individual actors - they protect each other, even when they have crossed a line. And it's all by choice. This is largely due to systemic problems with unions, etc. Still unclear to me how calling a beat cop obscene words or having an ACAB attitude is going to solve that issue.
      - thosakwe 5y ago
        I am not an activist, and this is not a manifesto. I don't understand why you brought that up. Anyways: The fact that most modern countries have police is not evidence that police departments are necessary. In addition, the article is about the American police, which are notorious for their history of racial profiling, cover-ups, and numbers of civilian shooting deaths every year. Does most modern countries having police mean this is justified behavior? If you could, please provide a link to a survey or study indicating that people who live in "high-crime" areas want more police. And even if they did, that doesn't change the reason for the widespread backlash against police in the United States. It's not simply people "demonizing" a profession (which again, people choose to work in).
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dragontamer 5y ago
  If a quack doctor in the India performa a malicious surgery and kills a patient, do we blame doctors in the USA? If not, why does a bad cop from some backwater town speak for all college educated cops from an arbitrary suburbia? The first problem is that the USA has over 10,000 police departments. This means that one cop from Kentucky has absolutely no connection to one from Boston. And yet, the current culture blames the Boston cop for the actions that the Kentucky cop does.
  - ebiester 5y ago
    Boston may be a bad example. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-state-drug-lab-where-chemist-faked-tests-n30746 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-... https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      I've never heard of asset forfeiture being abused in the bigger cities. And the small town cops in my area are known for harassing African Americans more than the city cops (the city cops have significant numbers of African Americans: less than the proportion of the population but way better than the town-cops) ------------ > https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description Uhhhhh. That's... not really a problem on my scale. I mean, yeah, that's a hassle but... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOZwRBXfFmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOZwRBXfFmU This here is small town cop harassing an African American. And we only know about it because he's an Army Officer (a low ranking one, but still, the Army sticks up for their members). Who knows how many African Americans did those small town cops harassed before they messed with the wrong man? Don't get me wrong here: any kind of stop is a big hassle. But... my bar for "serious police misbehavior" is set at a certain level based on what's going on in my area. The blogpost, while a hassle, is not anywhere close to some of the stories I'm hearing just in the past couple of months. > https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-state-drug-lab-where-chemist-faked-tests-n30746 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-... Sounds to me that someone was double-checking the results and caught the problem. We don't have those assurances in other locations. In a city, you have a citizen's board, good defense lawyers, and other "defenses" who can stand up to injustice from the police departments. That's WHY a city-cop can get their ass busted if they make these kinds of mistakes. I mean yeah, it sucks that they're still finding injustices, but at least people are tasked with finding abuse. In a small town cop where the Sheriff is elected every 4 years by a population who just doesn't give a care, no one has any recourse or defense system against the Sheriff or their deputies. None at all. Its "Wild West" mode, where Sheriff can do whatever the heck they want, and the citizens are ignorant of the injustices their Sheriff does (so they keep electing them over and over again). I have more faith in Police Commissioner systems, or straight up adversarial systems like NYPC (which has an adversarial Citizen's Review Board to represent citizens: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/ccrb/index.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/ccrb/index.page).
- gedy 5y ago
  It just feels like many people show this biases when they lump people together based on some actions by bad apples, but then vilify doing the same with others. Police, race, mostly peaceful protestors, etc, name your pick.
tekromancr 5y ago
But through police unions, 100% of them fight against accountability for the bad actors.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  But through the Constitution, 100% of criminals are allowed attorneys that fight against accountability for the bad actors.
  - Clubber 5y ago
    Qualified Immunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity It also doesn't help that in many places, the judges, prosecutors and police all frequent and work in the same buildings.
  - marvindanig 5y ago
    Not if they are black though, isn't it?! Then the execution is summary and pretty much live on-street.
mywittyname 5y ago
Police actions are dictated by the process, procedures, and training that departments put into place. This is why so many police get away with murder: they are only removed if they violate department policy, and department policies have lots of situations where the "appropriate* response is to fire a weapon at the person.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jordigh 5y ago
It is not 0.1%, it's institutional. Try it yourself. Go to your nearest police station. Ask for the procedure about how to report a negative encounter you had with the police. They will not give you an answer. See if you get better results than the radical left antifa lamestream fake news media and report back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJ5f1JMKns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJ5f1JMKns
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Anecdotes are not a way to prove an institutional problem.
  - jordigh 5y ago
    So, prove them wrong, go to your nearest station and do ask about this. See how non-institutional it is. You have a really good chance of getting a better result than this cherry-picked sequence of anecdotes, right?
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      I'm not the one making the claim...? Clearly there are some issues with particular police departments. Saying "watch this video and do it yourself" is not a viable way of proving this is a universal phenomenon. This is basic logic.
      - jordigh 5y ago
        I just want to change your mind. Personal experiences are the best way to do that. This is a very safe way to try to change your mind. Actually interact with the police. If you are right, then 99.9% of your interactions with the police should be positive. That means if you go into one thousand police stations and ask about the procedure to file a complaint, you should only get a negative interaction at one of them. You are confident that this is the case. So it should be really really easy for you to go to a police station, ask about how to file a complaint against the cops, and reassure yourself and everyone else that cops are for the most part good and helpful.

walls 5y ago

When the profession doesn't have any repercussions for bad actors, this is the inevitable result.

ceilingcorner 5y ago
Far more people die from medical malpractice mistakes every year. I don't see anyone calling for dismantling the medical profession. Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them. It really isn't that complicated.
- Clubber 5y ago
  >Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. Sure, but how many? How much is the right amount. I hear the same said about our military, but it's degrees. Should we double the amount of money we spend on police? Triple? What's enough? Do we have too much now? There are lots of indications to me that it's turned into a make-work program. >Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them. The unions are too powerful, the profession is too corrupt. Police "self regulate," and insiders who try to bring light to corruption typically get punished. It's too hard for the political process. All the while, the citizenry continues to get robbed, beaten and killed. Honestly the best thing to happen to the citizenry is phone cameras. >It really isn't that complicated. Maybe you should give it some more thought.
  - ashneo76 5y ago
    Why is this down voted?
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Look at the demographics of HN. What kind of calls do you think these demographics generate? Questioning staffing levels is not popular among the white collar crowd because "can you please come tell my neighbor to party more quietly" and "can someone write up a police report for my stolen property so I can get reimbursement from insurance" are the first type of calls to get a "haha we'll get to it when we get to it" from the dispatcher when you start reducing the department size. Harassing shitbox drivers for tail light out, telling loitering teenagers to knock it off, bothering the guy drinking while he walks his dog, all sorts of low priority things (the bulk of which can probably be described as "reducing the visibility of lower class behavior") that make up the bulk of the services HN demographics demand from the police are the first things police stop doing when they're spread thin. Killing people over bootleg cigs is the second thing they stop doing.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >Sure, but how many? Less per capita than pretty much any wealthy city or suburb has. More per capita than Detroit. We all see the kind of trouble people with no real pressing crap to do can cause with an HOA at their disposal. So I figure we should make sure the people with a badge and a gun are substantially more busy than that. Nobody wants to work in an overworked department but I don't see a way to keep police from harassing people unnecessarily other than making sure the department is small enough there's enough "real crime" to go around.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    From my point of view, the problem with the police is that the standards are not high enough. It's too easy to become an officer, it doesn't require much education, and so on. It needs to become a prestige position, something that is respectable and attracts applicants that genuinely want to do good. Right now, this doesn't happen, so you mostly get the corrupt tribalism stuff. But demonizing the police profession will guarantee that thousands of reasonable, well-meaning people will never become police officers. > Maybe you should give it some more thought. I have given it plenty of thought. I, along with pretty much anyone that actually has lived in crime-ridden areas, thinks that the idea of abolishing the police and demonizing officers is completely absurd. The worst part is that the people with the loudest voices won't face any of the repercussions. Instead, it'll be the poor, because they aren't rich and social media savvy. Actual working class people are too busy working to be tweeting all day long about politics.
- saurik 5y ago
  But medical malpractice is a thing, with personal consequences to the doctor. They might have insurance, and maybe it can be hard to prove wrongdoing, but there absolutely is "repercussions for bad actors" with respect to medicine. With police the problem is that they might not even get fired, and any judgements against them tend to at best get paid by taxpayers: there is no incentive to not be horrible.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    > With police the problem is that they might not even get fired, and any judgements against them tend to at best get paid by taxpayers: there is no incentive to not be horrible. That's the problem. I don't think demonizing the other 99.9% of officers is the solution.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      There was sufficient evidence for any police officer in Minneapolis to arrest Derek Chauvin, and yet they protected him instead. They all chose to be complicit in his crime. Various forces have little internal secret rituals in which they all collude in murder. Above we have https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge-tips-to-mark-fatal-shootings/ https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge... ; there's another example from NYPD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23525224 Doctors very rarely turn out politically to defend the malpractice of other doctors.
      - ceilingcorner 5y ago
        Yes and all three of the other officers are facing various charges. That's how the legal system works. It's still unclear to me how a small town officer, hundreds of miles away, is guilty for the crimes of people he has nothing to do with.
        pjc50 5y ago
        > all three of the other officers are facing various charges None of them would have faced charges without months of national protests! That's why there's a problem! And I don't just mean the others that were there, all eight hundred Minneapolis PD officers are to some extent complicit.
- raisedbyninjas 5y ago
  Is it common for "good" doctors cover-up or just remain silent for "bad" doctors? Is there an incentive for this behavior where "bad" doctors may endanger the lives of those that cross the doctor wall of silence?
- thosakwe 5y ago
  > Police are a necessary part of modern civilization. Full stop. Are you sure? Lots of causes for crime (i.e. poverty) can't be solved by arresting or shooting people. I am convinced that part of the reason police reform is so difficult in the United States is that most people have never questioned neither the history of American policing (which started as slave patrols in many states), nor the necessity for heavily-armed police at all. > If they have no repercussions for bad actions, then implement them. This is not so easy, when both of the parties with political control in the U.S. receive donations from the prison industry... EDIT: Lastly, in reference to your original point, the argument that police officers are being simply "demonized" is missing the bigger picture. Police aren't individual actors - they protect each other, even when they have crossed a line. And it's all by choice.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    What modern country doesn't have a police force? If you actually look at the responses from people who live in high-crime areas, the data is clear. Virtually no one wants less police. Most want more. I trust that more than activists with explicit political messages written in their manifestos. > Police aren't individual actors - they protect each other, even when they have crossed a line. And it's all by choice. This is largely due to systemic problems with unions, etc. Still unclear to me how calling a beat cop obscene words or having an ACAB attitude is going to solve that issue.
    - thosakwe 5y ago
      I am not an activist, and this is not a manifesto. I don't understand why you brought that up. Anyways: The fact that most modern countries have police is not evidence that police departments are necessary. In addition, the article is about the American police, which are notorious for their history of racial profiling, cover-ups, and numbers of civilian shooting deaths every year. Does most modern countries having police mean this is justified behavior? If you could, please provide a link to a survey or study indicating that people who live in "high-crime" areas want more police. And even if they did, that doesn't change the reason for the widespread backlash against police in the United States. It's not simply people "demonizing" a profession (which again, people choose to work in).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dragontamer 5y ago
If a quack doctor in the India performa a malicious surgery and kills a patient, do we blame doctors in the USA? If not, why does a bad cop from some backwater town speak for all college educated cops from an arbitrary suburbia? The first problem is that the USA has over 10,000 police departments. This means that one cop from Kentucky has absolutely no connection to one from Boston. And yet, the current culture blames the Boston cop for the actions that the Kentucky cop does.
- ebiester 5y ago
  Boston may be a bad example. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-state-drug-lab-where-chemist-faked-tests-n30746 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-... https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    I've never heard of asset forfeiture being abused in the bigger cities. And the small town cops in my area are known for harassing African Americans more than the city cops (the city cops have significant numbers of African Americans: less than the proportion of the population but way better than the town-cops) ------------ > https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description https://www.stevelocke.com/blog/i-fit-the-description Uhhhhh. That's... not really a problem on my scale. I mean, yeah, that's a hassle but... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOZwRBXfFmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOZwRBXfFmU This here is small town cop harassing an African American. And we only know about it because he's an Army Officer (a low ranking one, but still, the Army sticks up for their members). Who knows how many African Americans did those small town cops harassed before they messed with the wrong man? Don't get me wrong here: any kind of stop is a big hassle. But... my bar for "serious police misbehavior" is set at a certain level based on what's going on in my area. The blogpost, while a hassle, is not anywhere close to some of the stories I'm hearing just in the past couple of months. > https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-state-drug-lab-where-chemist-faked-tests-n30746 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/report-problems-... Sounds to me that someone was double-checking the results and caught the problem. We don't have those assurances in other locations. In a city, you have a citizen's board, good defense lawyers, and other "defenses" who can stand up to injustice from the police departments. That's WHY a city-cop can get their ass busted if they make these kinds of mistakes. I mean yeah, it sucks that they're still finding injustices, but at least people are tasked with finding abuse. In a small town cop where the Sheriff is elected every 4 years by a population who just doesn't give a care, no one has any recourse or defense system against the Sheriff or their deputies. None at all. Its "Wild West" mode, where Sheriff can do whatever the heck they want, and the citizens are ignorant of the injustices their Sheriff does (so they keep electing them over and over again). I have more faith in Police Commissioner systems, or straight up adversarial systems like NYPC (which has an adversarial Citizen's Review Board to represent citizens: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/ccrb/index.page https://www1.nyc.gov/site/ccrb/index.page).
gedy 5y ago
It just feels like many people show this biases when they lump people together based on some actions by bad apples, but then vilify doing the same with others. Police, race, mostly peaceful protestors, etc, name your pick.

tekromancr 5y ago

But through police unions, 100% of them fight against accountability for the bad actors.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
But through the Constitution, 100% of criminals are allowed attorneys that fight against accountability for the bad actors.
- Clubber 5y ago
  Qualified Immunity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity It also doesn't help that in many places, the judges, prosecutors and police all frequent and work in the same buildings.
- marvindanig 5y ago
  Not if they are black though, isn't it?! Then the execution is summary and pretty much live on-street.

mywittyname 5y ago

Police actions are dictated by the process, procedures, and training that departments put into place. This is why so many police get away with murder: they are only removed if they violate department policy, and department policies have lots of situations where the "appropriate* response is to fire a weapon at the person.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jordigh 5y ago

It is not 0.1%, it's institutional. Try it yourself. Go to your nearest police station. Ask for the procedure about how to report a negative encounter you had with the police. They will not give you an answer. See if you get better results than the radical left antifa lamestream fake news media and report back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJ5f1JMKns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJ5f1JMKns

ceilingcorner 5y ago
Anecdotes are not a way to prove an institutional problem.
- jordigh 5y ago
  So, prove them wrong, go to your nearest station and do ask about this. See how non-institutional it is. You have a really good chance of getting a better result than this cherry-picked sequence of anecdotes, right?
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    I'm not the one making the claim...? Clearly there are some issues with particular police departments. Saying "watch this video and do it yourself" is not a viable way of proving this is a universal phenomenon. This is basic logic.
    - jordigh 5y ago
      I just want to change your mind. Personal experiences are the best way to do that. This is a very safe way to try to change your mind. Actually interact with the police. If you are right, then 99.9% of your interactions with the police should be positive. That means if you go into one thousand police stations and ask about the procedure to file a complaint, you should only get a negative interaction at one of them. You are confident that this is the case. So it should be really really easy for you to go to a police station, ask about how to file a complaint against the cops, and reassure yourself and everyone else that cops are for the most part good and helpful.