4 ms·

I 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, "restraine

by fao_ 2y ago

I 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 ago
  I 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.
    - fao_ 2y ago
      > Just because your police forces are awful doesn't mean they all are. And the corollary is "Just because your police force is good, doesn't mean they all are", surely?
      - lolinder 2y ago
        Most definitely! I'm making no claims about the quality of any police force in particular other than the one in my city. I'm only arguing that you can't generize from one to all and that the widespread criticism of "the police" without specifying which department or agency you're talking about is both imprecise and harmful.
XorNot 2y ago
What this all has in common is no one is engaging in a complex personal surveillance enterprise to target you, because they don't need to. It's not even a $5 wrench scenario, because they don't care: the point of jack booted thugs is you simply apply force to every problem and potential problem, and dare anyone to stop you.
- gary_0 2y ago
  Yeah. If you've drawn the unfavorable attention of the police (which I'm aware isn't difficult in many cases), it's extremely unlikely any of them are thinking "let's painstakingly disassemble and reassemble this guy's laptop!" But like I said upthread, there are still several plausible reasons why you might want to secure your hardware (and the threat of arbitrary police surveillance still isn't zero). But on another note, in many countries (where digital privacy isn't already illegal) law enforcement is pushing for encryption backdoors and the like, so that kind of wiretapping will be their go-to, and in the police's ideal world they will simply be able to remotely log in to any phone, operating system, or CPU firmware and rummage around to their heart's content. Until that comes to pass (heaven forbid), I doubt they will usually make the effort to check anyone's screws for nail polish. They're all about the brute force. > It's not even a $5 wrench scenario It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    > It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario. Missing the point: the point is - they're not listening at all. They don't care. You're not a problem to be taken seriously and carefully investigated. You're going to be stuck in the cell and forgotten about anyway. Your equipment will be destroyed. No one is looking.
    - gary_0 2y ago
      Corrupt police are often motivated by money, so the scenario could be: "we overheard you talking about transferring money/cryptocurrency/whatever and we are confiscating it, gives us access or else". My point in starting this thread wasn't that the police are evil/misunderstood/chaotic-neutral, it was that the threat model here shouldn't be solely about one kind of adversary.
10u152 2y ago
None of the above are examples of corruption? Corruption means being dishonest for personal gain. Do you think they're being paid to taser kids? The above just sound like outlying bad examples of millions of humans in stressful situations, many times every day.

by fao_ 2y ago

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 ago
I 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.
  - fao_ 2y ago
    > Just because your police forces are awful doesn't mean they all are. And the corollary is "Just because your police force is good, doesn't mean they all are", surely?
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Most definitely! I'm making no claims about the quality of any police force in particular other than the one in my city. I'm only arguing that you can't generize from one to all and that the widespread criticism of "the police" without specifying which department or agency you're talking about is both imprecise and harmful.

XorNot 2y ago

What this all has in common is no one is engaging in a complex personal surveillance enterprise to target you, because they don't need to. It's not even a $5 wrench scenario, because they don't care: the point of jack booted thugs is you simply apply force to every problem and potential problem, and dare anyone to stop you.

gary_0 2y ago
Yeah. If you've drawn the unfavorable attention of the police (which I'm aware isn't difficult in many cases), it's extremely unlikely any of them are thinking "let's painstakingly disassemble and reassemble this guy's laptop!" But like I said upthread, there are still several plausible reasons why you might want to secure your hardware (and the threat of arbitrary police surveillance still isn't zero). But on another note, in many countries (where digital privacy isn't already illegal) law enforcement is pushing for encryption backdoors and the like, so that kind of wiretapping will be their go-to, and in the police's ideal world they will simply be able to remotely log in to any phone, operating system, or CPU firmware and rummage around to their heart's content. Until that comes to pass (heaven forbid), I doubt they will usually make the effort to check anyone's screws for nail polish. They're all about the brute force. > It's not even a $5 wrench scenario It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario.
- XorNot 2y ago
  > It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario. Missing the point: the point is - they're not listening at all. They don't care. You're not a problem to be taken seriously and carefully investigated. You're going to be stuck in the cell and forgotten about anyway. Your equipment will be destroyed. No one is looking.
  - gary_0 2y ago
    Corrupt police are often motivated by money, so the scenario could be: "we overheard you talking about transferring money/cryptocurrency/whatever and we are confiscating it, gives us access or else". My point in starting this thread wasn't that the police are evil/misunderstood/chaotic-neutral, it was that the threat model here shouldn't be solely about one kind of adversary.

10u152 2y ago

None of the above are examples of corruption? Corruption means being dishonest for personal gain. Do you think they're being paid to taser kids? The above just sound like outlying bad examples of millions of humans in stressful situations, many times every day.