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> If the police Not just the police: if your data or the data of the organization you work for is considered valuable enough[0], you also have to worry about t
by gary_0 2y ago
> If the police
Not just the police: if your data or the data of the organization you work for is considered valuable enough[0], you also have to worry about thieves, foreign spies/saboteurs, corporate espionage, a wayward relative looking for banking passwords or Bitcoin to fund their drug/gambling habit, or a particularly obsessive ex.
[0] Mine isn't, and paranoia isn't one of my vices, so this is all academic to me.
- immibis 2y agobut for most of us, it's the police (who are corrupt)
- lolinder 2y agoRealistically, for most of us on this forum it's not even the police. For most of us the police where we live aren't that corrupt (though it's par for the course of internet discourse to pretend there's one monolithic "the police"), and most of us statistically speaking aren't in the minority groups that get disproportionately targeted. If that isn't you—if police where you live and travel are corrupt or if you're a minority who gets disproportionate enforcement—then sure, it's the police.
- immibis 2y agoI live in Germany, where it's illegal to not support Israel, and police have raided the homes of non-Israel-supporters. It's not likely - it only happened a few times - but it's possible, and protecting yourself is only moderately paranoid.
- barbazoo 2y ago> Germany, where it's illegal to not support Israel *citation needed*
- fao_ 2y agoI live in South Wales -- a few years back police officers responded to a call about a black man having a mental health crisis and choked- err, sorry, "restrained" him to death. The police in the UK (even in my specific county) have a non-zero number of tasers deployed against children under the age of 10. The state has arrested people for speaking against Israel. If our police are corrupt (they most certainly are), then it is entirely certain that the police in America, with a much worse record of abuses, is corrupt too.
- lolinder 2y ago> entirely certain that the police in America, with a much worse record of abuses The fundamental misunderstanding that is unfortunately quite the norm in internet discourse is the idea that America has a police force. It does not. The US has a bewildering array of about 18000 federal, state, county, and local police forces that operate independently, have varying degrees of accountability to entirely different governments, and can't really be spoken about in aggregate without severely oversimplifying things. Of course, that doesn't stop people from trying to do so anyway, which is how you get comments like this where people generalize their own experience with a different country's police force on a different continent and then assume from media coverage alone that "America's" is obviously worse.
- nxobject 2y agoI think you’re parsing “the” too literally - plenty of Americans would say the same thing verbatim, too, without literally assuming the existence of one police force. Broad generalizations about American policing are reasonable - that’s why we can talk about “police reform”, and why the Fraternal Order of Police exists as an American organization. (I say this as a resident of a bright blue city with a police department under a federal consent decree, and with a police union founded by a card carrying white supremacist… who is perfectly capable of distinguishing that from ICE and BORTAC.)
- lolinder 2y ago> plenty of Americans would say the same thing verbatim, too, without literally assuming the existence of one police force They're also wrong to do so, because police forces vary widely by jurisdiction and cannot be generalized. I don't only object to people from other countries doing it, it's just particularly uninformed when they do. I say this as a resident of a small city with a police force that has never had any controversy whatsoever, but whose officers feel acutely the generalized hatred directed at everyone in blue that has become vogue in a large segment of the country. Just because your police forces are awful doesn't mean they all are.
- kube-system 2y agoNo, thieves are still way more common than corrupt police, particularly in high-income western countries.