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Terrible metric. If you want to measure that the "police generally are a net good", then you should be measuring how many crimes are committed on a daily basis
by res0nat0r 12y ago
Terrible metric. If you want to measure that the "police generally are a net good", then you should be measuring how many crimes are committed on a daily basis by the cops vs. good deeds.
The outcome is not what you think, if you are just consuming your police news via /r/politics, HN (and MSNBC the last two weeks).
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoThat's ignoring the very fact of their existence - it provides a civilizing effect on cities and communities. If crime ran rampant and unopposed, it would be a very different world. Don't imagine for a millisecond that we could somehow do without police.
- baddox 12y ago> Don't imagine for a millisecond that we could somehow do without police. What about civilizations in the past that did do it without anything we would recognize as modern police?
- res0nat0r 12y agoOr a current country like Somalia which has barely any functioning government or law, look how great of a place that is!
- Zigurd 12y agoImagine a world without the Drug War. We could do without that many fewer police, prosecutors, courts, and prisons.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- baddox 12y ago> then you should be measuring how many crimes are committed on a daily basis by the cops vs. good deeds. I don't think that's a very good metric. You wouldn't measure "how good of a person" a murderer is by counting how many minutes of his life he spent murdering versus how many minutes he spent not murdering. And you wouldn't measure "how good of a disease" cancer is by counting how many people it kills versus how many people it does not kill.
- res0nat0r 12y agoI guess the only answer is if you think there are more bad cops in the USA than good you have just been believing too much of the echo chamber. Sounds like the phrase "everyone hates the cops until they need one" applies.