8 ms·

Yeah, agreed. Having spent half my life in one and half in the other it is very interesting to compare the different ways in which attitudes to privacy and per

• jamespo 11y ago
  Do you break speed limits a lot then?
  • cdent 11y ago
    Uh... No sir, not me, not these days. When I was younger, and in the US, and frequently traveling between states I did manage to rack up a significant number of speeding tickets. There were all, to use a UK term, a fair cop: I was speeding and I was caught by an officer of the law patrolling the roads who stopped me and gave me a ticket in person. Getting them in the mail several days after the fact, without ever knowing you were speeding in the first place is a) confusing, b) not great for immediate enforcement and safety concerns.
    • themartorana 11y ago
      But let's be fair, traffic tickets are rarely about safety.
      • cdent 11y ago
        Disagree. The one UK speeding ticket I have was for being over 30mph in a 30 zone. The limit is set to 30 in those zones because of Science™ about braking distance and impact with human bodies that appear suddenly. If I'm being careless and/or distracted in one of those zones, I want to know about it immediately, not up to 14 days later after I've already plowed through a bunch of schoolchildren.
        • nitrogen 11y ago
          Speeding tickets on freeways are rarely about safety. One should never speed in a school zone or neighborhood street.
    • jhallenworld 11y ago
      I got a ticket for not making a full stop before turning at a red light (this was in Long Island). The mail came with URL to a video of my infraction. It was fun giving to other people to watch.. Well here they all are: http://www.longislandredlightcameras.com/ http://www.longislandredlightcameras.com/
  • maccard 11y ago
    In my experience driving in the U.K, most of the major roads (motorways/dual carraigeways)have average speed cameras liberally placed on the road. I don't know what the threshold for a ticket is on the road, but I would guess you're more likely to be noticed doing 75MPH over a 5 mile stretch of road than by a cop in a bush with a speed camera.
    • tomtoise 11y ago
      The threshold is generally accepted as 10% over, so 77mph on a motorway. However, I only know that from hearsay, so take it with a pinch of salt.
      • richmarr 11y ago
        My understanding was that the 10% margin is to defend a fine or prosecution bearing in mind the error bars of the camera and the vehicle speedometer. Again, no credible source. Dad, if you read this I didn't mean it, you are very credible.
      • maccard 11y ago
        That's what I'm lead to believe too, although I have no facts to back it up.
      • dazc 11y ago
        I think it's 10% + 2mph? So on a motorway or dual carriageway the limit is really 79. It used to be generally accepted that you were safe doing 80 mph but with the proliferation of average speed cameras people are a bit more conservative. 10 years ago it wasn't unusual to see people doing 90 - 100 on a motorway - now it's rare.
        • jon-wood 11y ago
          > So on a motorway or dual carriageway the limit is really 79. Nope. The limit is really 70, however to take into account possible inaccuracy in your speedometer or the traffic camera, there's some leeway in place. If you start assuming the limit is 79 then if nothing else, you no longer have the benefit of that leeway. How sure are you that both your speedometer and the camera are 100% accurate?
• pjc50 11y ago
  On the other hand, the UK is IIRC the last European country and one of the few globally to not have a formal identity card. Partly due to some dedicated campaigners and partly due to history. The mostly unarmed police are another historical accident to be defended. The UK certainly does look too readily across the Atlantic for bad ideas. But most of the home grown ones come out of a sort of domestic colonialism and shrinking empire. British police and (para)military forces were quite capable of street violence in Kenya in the 50s & Northern Ireland in the 70s & 80s. The frontier shrinks slowly; Scottish independence comes slowly closer, seemingly with almost no violence. Newspapers dispatch foreign correspondents from London to cover Manchester and Birmingham. People in the coastal towns complain of distant government that's only an hour away by train. It's more inattentional blindness that's the problem than physical distance. The Met's antiterrorist role has let it take on the hard edge. But there is also a public demand for aggression against those percieved as "bad". People demand that "something must be done" while being vague about what that involves and who might suffer.
  • crdb 11y ago
    If we're talking about ideas crossing over, Malaya and Kenya definitely inspired much of today's US focus on counter-insurgency, and Kitson's book on the subject [1] is still popular reading across the pond. He did talk about the necessity for the law to become occasionally "malleable"... [1] http://www.amazon.com/Low-Intensity-Operations-Subversion-Peacekeeping/dp/0571271022 http://www.amazon.com/Low-Intensity-Operations-Subversion-Pe...
  • cdent 11y ago
    > People demand that "something must be done" while being vague about what that involves and who might suffer. Yeah, excellent point. The British need for someone, anyone, to blame and be punished for everything ever is worthy of several dissertations.
    • richmarr 11y ago
      That's just the Daily Mail; and it's not "someone, anyone", it's immigrants.
• Dylan16807 11y ago
  > in the US it is rather normal for people in authority to kill someone when the target is running away or convicted of a crime Oh shove off.
  • mineshaftgap 11y ago
    Let them believe what they want. Europeans come to the US and are worried they will be carjacked. Seriously.
  • benjiweber 11y ago
    It seems to be quite a common perception of the US here in the UK. It's a shock seeing police with guns in the US and there's lots of articles like http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-p... "England/Wales: 55 fatal police shootings in the last 24 years" "US: 59 fatal police shootings in the first 24 days of 2015"
    • ecdavis 11y ago
      I've commented about this before[0] but figured I'd add: it's not the fact that police carry guns, it's the way that they use them. To paraphrase my other comment, Australian police also carry guns and yet the number of people shot dead by police is 0.25/million people/year compared to 1.25/million people/year in the USA. Perhaps this is driven by the large amount of gun ownership and gun crime in the US, but I suspect it also comes down to cultural differences between police in the two countries. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8890386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8890386
  • thisjepisje 11y ago
    How do most US citizens look upon the death penalty, then?
    • wavefunction 11y ago
      It's split like many social policies.[1] Many Americans are not in favor and nineteen states as well as all of the territories and possessions do not even have a death penalty as part of their statutory regime. Many other states have executed 1 person each since 1976 so they are almost non-executing states. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Abolition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unite...
• adventured 11y ago
  "Yet in the US it is rather normal for people in authority to kill someone when the target is running away or convicted of a crime." 330 million people; ~1,000 people die by cop shooting per year (~750,000 police officers in the US), a fraction of those are likely running away or similar. So no, it's not normal by any stretch of mathematical imagination.
  • themeek 11y ago
    This is a comparative statement. The US has an order of magnitude more of this activity than other countries (of similar wealth and government type).
    • alexqgb 11y ago
      When adjusting for population, the ratio of police shootings in America to those in Britain is about 70:1. (55 shootings in 24 years in a country w/ ~57 million people vs. 59 shootings in 24 days (Jan. 2015) in a country with ~318 million people). So yes, Americans are vastly more tolerant of police violence (to say nothing of stratospheric incarceration levels) than the British - mainly because black people are so disproportionally targeted in this country. Indeed, among America's more reactionary elements, the unrestrained use-of-force and incarceration policies behind these figures are vehemently defended, as they provide an effective way to enforce a racially-determined class structure, even in the absence of the Jim Crow laws that performed this role until the late 1960s. However, none of this would be acceptable if the police were equally harsh with everyone. Indiscriminate oppression is much harder sustain in the U.S. In that regard, we're quite different from the UK, where the "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to hide" attitude is far more prevalent (it's a fixture in comment sections of British news sites, whereas American sites see it crop up far less frequently). The fact that mass surveillance doesn't easily square with the more "acceptable" (read: racist) forms of police abuse in America is why Americans are far more unified in their opposition to it.
      • themeek 11y ago
        Thank you for the insightful comment. I found your thesis about the racist nature of police abuse interesting, especially how you tie it to mass surveillance. I think you are probably right that this plays a large role in which communities and majorities will support or excuse this behavior. I don't want to draw it too far, though. We should recognize that Muslim Americans get far more surveillance - more targeted surveillance - for merely being Muslim or having Muslim community respect. It's also true that people can and are fooled into believing and supporting principles, spurred by things like nationalism or political party identity, that actively harm or target their own minority groups. This caveat I don't think invalidates your misgivings, which I think are good. If mass incarcernation and police abuse were as widely practiced on the wealthy or the majority there would be far more outcry.