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Maybe it's like that in LA or something, but in my samllish town in rural America the police are pretty upstanding great guys. They help do crosswalk duty for t

Maybe it's like that in LA or something, but in my samllish town in rural America the police are pretty upstanding great guys. They help do crosswalk duty for the kids going to school, they help people out who need a tire changed. I'm not saying policing doesn't have problems, but going from LAPD bad -> All police everywhere bad. Seems like a bit of a leap.

don_neufeld 3y ago
The history of police departments in small towns would like a word.
- btilly 3y ago
  That's a fallacy. There are good and bad police departments in small towns. Most of what is notable enough to show up in that history are the bad ones. That doesn't mean that all departments are bad, or even most of them. It just means that there are bad ones, and they are newsworthy. Back when the Ferguson riots happened, I ran across a good article about this. In something like 10% of small towns, Ferguson included, police were seen as revenue generators. And, of course, the more fines that they handed out, the more money they made. For obvious political reasons the police prefer handing out questionable fines out to those with the least political power, which in Ferguson meant blacks. Which is why the local black population was ready to explode when FPD officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown. The problems that exploded into the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement were important. The incident was historic. But when you focus on them, you miss the fact that most small towns did not do that.
Racing0461 3y ago
It's more likely that small town police pulls over out of state license plate cars for speeding as revenue (those might even be doing the same thing) whilee acting properly for people that live there.
asfgiposnio 3y ago
Most people are pleasant most of the time, but all people are corruptible and most people are capable of great evil in the wrong circumstances. The LAPD would help you change a tire, and you might find your local police brutal if you were pulled over with out-of-state plates while black. They're just people.
wpietri 3y ago
I would like you to consider that a) the police may be nice to you, a local small town boy, in ways that they are not nice to others, and b) people who are nice to some can in fact do terrible things to others. For example, consider slavery in America before emancipation. Lots of apparently perfectly lovely people were slave owners. It wasn't a few bad apples or a sprinkling of the lower orders. It was a wide swathe of the society's best, many Founding Fathers included, whose lives were built on massive cruelty to a subset of people because they didn't see them as people. Many were surely nice to their own and to those they saw as peers. And it's not like that sort of doublethink died out. For example, I am a nice person and I eat meat pretty regularly. I do that by ignoring the cruelty and violence performed on my dime. And when I can't ignore it, I have clever justifications for it. On the rare occasions I meet a cow I find them as charming as I do dogs and cats. Intellectually, I recognize the contradiction. And yet, I'm sure I have many more cheeseburgers ahead of me yet.

don_neufeld 3y ago

The history of police departments in small towns would like a word.

btilly 3y ago
That's a fallacy. There are good and bad police departments in small towns. Most of what is notable enough to show up in that history are the bad ones. That doesn't mean that all departments are bad, or even most of them. It just means that there are bad ones, and they are newsworthy. Back when the Ferguson riots happened, I ran across a good article about this. In something like 10% of small towns, Ferguson included, police were seen as revenue generators. And, of course, the more fines that they handed out, the more money they made. For obvious political reasons the police prefer handing out questionable fines out to those with the least political power, which in Ferguson meant blacks. Which is why the local black population was ready to explode when FPD officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown. The problems that exploded into the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement were important. The incident was historic. But when you focus on them, you miss the fact that most small towns did not do that.

Racing0461 3y ago

It's more likely that small town police pulls over out of state license plate cars for speeding as revenue (those might even be doing the same thing) whilee acting properly for people that live there.

asfgiposnio 3y ago

Most people are pleasant most of the time, but all people are corruptible and most people are capable of great evil in the wrong circumstances. The LAPD would help you change a tire, and you might find your local police brutal if you were pulled over with out-of-state plates while black. They're just people.

wpietri 3y ago

I would like you to consider that a) the police may be nice to you, a local small town boy, in ways that they are not nice to others, and b) people who are nice to some can in fact do terrible things to others. For example, consider slavery in America before emancipation. Lots of apparently perfectly lovely people were slave owners. It wasn't a few bad apples or a sprinkling of the lower orders. It was a wide swathe of the society's best, many Founding Fathers included, whose lives were built on massive cruelty to a subset of people because they didn't see them as people. Many were surely nice to their own and to those they saw as peers. And it's not like that sort of doublethink died out. For example, I am a nice person and I eat meat pretty regularly. I do that by ignoring the cruelty and violence performed on my dime. And when I can't ignore it, I have clever justifications for it. On the rare occasions I meet a cow I find them as charming as I do dogs and cats. Intellectually, I recognize the contradiction. And yet, I'm sure I have many more cheeseburgers ahead of me yet.