I'm so sorry that happened to you. I think some police officers don't even realize the extent to which they can totally fuck up your life. Then there are the ones that know it well and enjoy it. Or the ones that think they are planting that evidence in order to get the bad guy and the ends justify the means. Since there's historically been no check and balance behind the Blue Wall absolute power has corrupted absolutely.

Police are like the proverbial bull in a china shop. There may be a need one day to call on that bull, but they'll probably leave one hell of a mess, and hope you don't get trampled in the process.

There was a great post a couple weeks on the front page about a guy traveling through Germany I think it was, for a contracting software gig. He got detained on the bus because a cop "smelled pot" and you can imagine how the story went from there. His biggest personal takeaway was exactly as you say, treating people like this must be creating an awful lot of criminals.

There may be cops out there who still believe they are civil servants, and stewards of our constitutional rights. Who understand the terrible power they wield, and insist on always operating within the law. Who arrest civilians as a last resort. Eh, who am I kidding? 'Protect and Serve' changed to 'Shoot to Kill' a long time ago.

BTW, if that's your #1, I'm almost afraid to read your #2 and #3!

I usually say police have moved from Serve and Protect to Seek and Destroy. But shoot to kill sounds reasonably like police too.

A lot of police are corrupt, and there is an absolute ton of racism in this country so we believe it when the cop tells a lie that implicates a black guy.

Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend, and it's definitely not like we're consciously choosing to be racist--this is just lifetimes of unexamined biases, media information, etc. We have these little biases that tell us not to trust the black guy's word and that adds up over time.

Overcoming that shit is hard.

Personally, I don't believe a single damn word out of a police officer's mouth. Particularly so if they are under oath. It has nothing to do with race, I don't care who the defendant is.

They say the least reliable form of testimony is eyewitness accounts. Actually, I think the police have the eyewitness beat on this account. Too bad I've never had jury duty, and even if I did I'd probably be dismissed, so unfortunately I'll never get my chance as one of the 12 angry jurists to apply this in practice.

It seems like there are more and more like-minded people who will outright dismiss the grand-standing Detective and insist on just the facts please. Show me actual proof because your word is truly worthless.

Did you read the articles? Police officers were the first ones to report on their fellow officers for their misconduct (i.e. planting evidence) triggering the investigations of Internal Affairs. I suppose the irony here is under your logic you would not believe the whistle blowing officers because they only had eyewitness accounts - and you don't believe a single damn word out of a police officer's mouth - rather you would have sided with the defending officers as you don't care who the defendant is.

I'm sorry, I forgot the most important part, which is why I don't believe a word... it's because it's self-serving. Any time a witness is testifying, the job on cross-examination is to expose the bias or self-serving interest that the witness may have in offering their testimony. When arresting officers testify against a defendant, they are of course just backing up their prior actions. Pretty damn rare is the officer who will admit on the stand that they bungled XYZ component of the arrest, or that they didn't actually have probable cause, etc. Because it's their arrest, it's their own record on the line, they have too great a self-interest in supporting their own arrest, and therefore their testimony should be discounted.

When an IA officer testifies against one of their own fabricating evidence, I can be sure it is testimony that they are thoroughly unhappy about giving and not particularly self-serving. Therefore, more trustworthy. Somehow I doubt, for example, that the IA department operates under quotas and driven by officer-arrest stats.

>Did you read the articles? Police officers were the first ones to report on their fellow officers for their misconduct

In those cases. Not in tons of others, where it took a lawsuit or some investigation started from an independent organization (NGO etc), or even pure chance, to bring misconducts to light. "Internal Affairs" people are notoriously not popular with regular police.

I'm sure that's true, but responding to an article in which honest cops bring to book their dishonest colleagues by saying all cops are bad and can't be trusted is hard to swallow.

Yes, and the honest officers were driven out of the police force while the ones involved in planting evidence got promotions. That seems like a pretty good additional reason not to trust police officers most of the time - anyone who's honest probably isn't police anymore.

>anyone who's honest probably isn't police anymore.

The only reason anyone is aware of this story is because it was officers who took it upon themselves to leak the record and are agreeing to testify.

I guess you are correct that there is a lot of racism here and there. However, there is also a lot of rabid anti-racism. For example, you'll never read an article in the mainstream press about how blacks, on average, have lower IQs than white people, although this clearly is relevant in the whole crime debate. Why are blacks more likely to commit crimes than whites? The IQ explains a lot, but mentioning it is taboo, it seems. What happened here in Alabama is of course horrible, but it seems unlikely that corrupt and racist cops is the whole explanation for the high crime rate among blacks elsewhere in the US.

This shouldn't be necessary, but I probably need to point out that not every single black person has a lower intelligence than every single white person. It's just the average. Some black individuals have higher IQs than some white individuals, of course. Which means that solutions like segregation/apartheid are ham-fisted and totally unfair to these high IQ blacks.

For more info on the IQ and race thing, I recommend the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.

I have noticed a lot of this "scientific racism" junk creeping into HN lately. It's a little worrying to see it on a tech forum like this.

It used to be that extreme groups kept to themselves and were pretty quickly ostracized because of their extremism. Most people in San Diego wouldn't join Heaven's Gate, and the group wouldn't be able to spread very far because the further it reached, the more pushback it would see.

On the Internet, that isn't really true. There are always enough people who can be convinced of the merit of an idea, and so extreme groups continue to grow in size. As they do this, the overlap between any given extreme group and other groups grows, because the extreme group is growing. This means that their ideas metastasize out into the population as a whole.

Scientific racism, neo-reactionaryism, monarchism, even just defiant "political incorrectness" and "I'm no SWJ"-ness. The heightened availability of all of these ideas produces the same, as group polarization (a technical term in social psychology) happens on a scale never before seen. This is hardly limited to the right wing; liberal-identified Tumblr users are more behaviourally restrictive than most of the anarchist-communists I knew in college, even though the "safe-space" rhetoric of the current liberal milieu originates from more radical activist circles.

Expect to see more scientific racism on hacker news; hacker news is a fundamentally more friendly platform for racist and misogynistic viewpoints because women and people of color are so underrepresented and the focus on "objectivity" and "data" mean that a shoddy study that is the very essence of scientific racism can beat out the stories of however many women or PoC dare to speak out, only to be shouted down.

Most of the people making these comments would probably be fairly reasonable had you both been born 20 years earlier (or possibly later, if the world grows more sane) and met at a party. Few people set out to become a scientific racist, they just see an article linked (possibly by a Stormfront member, who knows) that "just makes sense to them"; they believe it and internalize it; when they see future statements they are more likely to remember those they agree with and forget those that disagree with their existing outlook; gradually, they become more and more "awakened" to the "racial reality" of the world until finally they're posting on Neoreactionary News about how they've finally realized democracy is degenerate and women should never have been allowed to vote.

And those people write your software.

Worried is the least you should be.

Wow. Well said.

I think there is another good book like that. It's called Mein Kampf or something. Can't remember who wrote it.

Another fun factoid. IQ isn't static and is a fairly useless measure of intelligence.

The lack of any conceivable confounding factors is what really makes this explanation so intuitively compelling.

  > Not racist like we're out in klan hoods on the weekend,

Don't worry, police have that covered too https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2015/09/01/police-chief-...

> Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that "police are corrupt" is true.

Usually I would never generalize the actions of a subset to the entire group, but in this case there is a key difference that justifies "(all/most) police are corrupt": the failure to clean their own house of the "bad apples". When a supposedly "good" policeman gives cover and protection to a criminal in their department instead of reporting the crime, they become an accomplice. in many cases, protecting the guilty may even be a crime in itself (misprision of felony[1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misprision_of_felony#United_St...

It's worth noting that it's not enough for police to passively not cover for each other's crimes. It's the job of police to actively investigate crimes. When corruption is so rampant, any police department which doesn't have a well-funded internal affairs bureau with extensive prosecutorial support is not doing its job.

> It's the job of police to actively investigate crimes.

In the US, this is not true. The police, at large, are there to control a situation and assign blame. Investigation is to those ends.

I've experienced this before at the federal level. They're corrupt. All of them either are themselves corrupt, or complicit in the knowledge of it.

The police also stole more from people via asset forfeiture than actual burglars did last year. They are criminals.

While I agree that the police have a history of horrific abuse of asset forfeiture laws, this oft-quoted event doesn't tell the whole story. The 2104 numbers were skewed greatly based on a proper $1.7 Billion forfeiture from Bernie Madoff. Most of this money went back to his victims:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...

So the numbers for police and burglars are "really" about the same, rather than the police exceeding the burglars by over a billion? Whew! What a weight off the mind! TIL there's nothing to worry about with forfeiture...

The $1.7 billion was a settlement between the government and JP Morgan Chase, in relation to the Madoff scheme (apparently they ignored things that they should not have).

just curious, what race are you and what country do you live in?

That's one of the beautiful things about the Internet. You don't need to know (or even think about) the answer to those questions in order to have a civil discussion.

Country is pretty relevant. Experiences with French police mean little with regard to US police.

Maybe, but when we're discussing the real world and especially lived experiences, these details can help to provide context.

"Opinion: Blacks are corrupt. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them that "blacks are corrupt" is true. This will always be the case. Blacks don't fight crime, nor prevent it. They create it. If you think this isn't so you haven't had enough exposure to them. Maybe my opinion is coloured by my experience: they {put bad thing here}. If you see a black, cross the street."

Do you honestly think that this is a fair statement?

Being a cop is an optional choice people undertake as an adult.

Your analogy falls down when you apply that to race.

yes, downvote instead of answering the question.

While there are dozens of answers to your strawman, here is a simple one:

Black people are not responsible for the safety of the citizenry, black people are not defined by the need to protect and serve us, black people are in fact, just people.

Cops on the other hand are responsible for the safety of the citizenry, are given special powers due to the additional trust and responsibility we (all the other people) grant them.

The comparison is ridiculous.

>The comparison is ridiculous.

Indeed. It's very rare for people to call local gang/NCAAP/#BLM/ACORN/other black orgs when police breaks into their house. The opposite, though, happens all the time.

The NCAAP, BLM, ACORN, and "other black orgs" break into houses "all the time"? WTF.

BLM certainly does so do gangs. The point is though that police provides services that Blacks don't. Nobody has been comparing them and the GGP pointed out the bigotry of the statement "the police perpetuates crime".

Do you have evidence or are you just smearing people and groups for the sake of your argument?

"Gangs commit crime" is sort of a truism, but for the others... that's going to take some evidence.

Others represent Blacks in general or black criminals in case of #BLM. Do you require evidence to find that black criminals commit home invasions or you are just trolling?

I am asking you to provide evidence that "#BLM", if it can even really be considered a cohesive movement with a defined purpose, supports or performs home invasions. And, evidence that the NAACP openly supports or harbors criminals would be welcome, too.

I'll be waiting, but not holding my breath. At a minimum, your statement lacks nuance. At worst, and more likely, it is factually incorrect and smears groups with legitimate goals.

I don't think you are arguing in good faith judging by the size of strawman you have to build.

There is no strawman. This is the claim that you've made:

"The opposite, though, happens all the time."

The original claim is 'police break into houses and no one calls local gang/NCAAP/#BLM/ACORN/other black orgs.' The opposite claim is therefore that '"local gang/NCAAP/#BLM/ACORN/other black orgs" break into houses and people call the police'. I've conceded that local gangs may break into houses, and now I'm asking you to justify the assertion that "NCAAP/#BLM/ACORN/other black orgs" (it's NAACP, BTW) break into houses. Do you have sources that show that people operating under the NCAAP/#BLM banner actually break into houses? If you don't have information that suggests that, why do you make such an offhanded claim?

How is this trolling? How is this not a good faith argument? My distillation of your claims is that "blacks commit crimes, so black special interest groups must also be bastions of criminality." If that's not your point, then what is?

No, the opposite claim is "Blacks are breaking into houses and people are calling police". The organizations listed are ones that represent Blacks and since there is no number similar to 911 to call generic Blacks you'd need to call one of those to have an experience similar to calling police if we want to compare Blacks and police like the message I replied did.