Be very careful to consider the possibility of selection bias at work. More interactions with police than ever gain media attention, social media virality and t

Be very careful to consider the possibility of selection bias at work. More interactions with police than ever gain media attention, social media virality and this especially applies to the cases where the encounter is recorded on video (increasingly common due to body and phone cams too). It's become more easy than ever to do such a thing and Of these, guess which ones get the most media exposure. The dramatic ones, either with police aggression or aggression from the civilian in the encounter. But even all of these that emerge in a given year taken together amount to only a minuscule fraction of the likely millions of times per year in which police talk to people or question them with nothing but boring civility all around. Even if we account for a certain percentage of police encounters with unwarranted police aggression not being reported or going viral, it would still be a tiny minority compared to the vast majority that go the other way. I mention this because just the other day in a YT documentary I saw about a woman who disappeared under an air of mystery (link below for the curious) and it incidentally showed body cam footage of her own interaction under unusual circumstances with a police officer who could have easily been much more suspicious considering how he found her shortly before she disappeared, for reasons unrelated to that cop. It was the picture of politeness. Because the focus of the documentary wasn't highlighting police aggression, it gave a glimpse into how many recorded police encounters go in situations where they don't later become the focus of social media threads about bad cops. None of the above is to excuse cops acting badly, or excuse how often they get used for shitty, pseudo-authoritarian social control, or to claim that they don't have too much authority to get away with it when it does happen, but it's useful for perspective on how often these things happen and how likely they really are for most normal contexts (you not being someone doing something notably obnoxious, not being in situations where you're likely to interact with especially suspicious cops, etc) Also, i'm sort of excluding ICE from the above. At least lately, those guys seem to be pervasive dicks by wide mandate in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r8txP3aqmQ&t=4346s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r8txP3aqmQ&t=4346s