1 defect in 10,000 is not arbitrarily 'good'. Picture a bridge that randomly drops 1 in every 50,000 cars.

Further, cops are not a single entity if state and local cops have different issues and different training then that might be a way to improve the system. But, we don't collect statistics nationally. So, how do we improve?

No, I'd argue it's pretty awful. The average person probably interacts with the police ~10 times during their life. If 1 in 10 000 cop interactions ended up with you getting killed, police brutality would be in the top 10 causes of death in the US (on par with suicide).

Phew, agreed -- my jaw dropped at grandparent's 'minor'.

> we don't collect statistics nationally. So, how do we improve?

I think there's plenty of open-loop approaches that could be considered (training on de-escalation, refresher on citizen's rights, praise/laud the interactions that result in no arrest or arrest without aggression). Waiting for national consensus is unnecessary: cities, counties and towns can recognize the crisis and establish best practices that are effective.

National consensus is likely useful to allocate funds that may be necessary to make these improvements, though.

My other concern is that you haven't bothered to research statistics on police brutality and harassment, yet you seem to express doubt that the numbers are significant. In your hypothetical "most people can go through their lives and never experience police behaving badly", yet almost no Black American will tell you this.

It's not (and shouldn't be) just a black youth thing.

The moral of the story: people have known the police are rotten for a very long time, but haven't discussed it until now.

I would be more likely to agree with you if the problem was actually random in nature. But instead I feel that bad policing in the US is based on personal biases of the individuals involved (conscious or subconscious) and institutional issues that affects certain demographics more than others.

But my point was about 'rrmm wrote - that "Getting everyone to admit a problem exists and getting our heads around how frequently it occurs is the first step towards resolving it.". It's true, but you have to be 100% totally damn sure that there is a problem in a first place and that you're not inventing it - because in both cases there will be a problem after media get involved.

Sounds a lot like a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy.

Everything from apartments to restaurants to taxi and semi drivers have ratings or a feedback system and it hasn't brought any of those systems to a grinding halt.

Ratings systems are not a silver bullet either - they're often easy to game (products) or measure wrong things (restaurants); users can be pressured into giving a good rating (employee interaction rating machines at border control, which you have to press while still in front of the officer) or bosses can use them to control employees (a known not-exactly-a-taxi, semi-illegal company I won't name). Particular failure modes depend on small details about the rating system - whether it's immediate or delayed, anonymous or not, relevant to the other side's career or not, etc. - but there are always some.

Ratings and feedback in general are a good concept, but you can't just take a "SELECT AVG(rate) FROM policeman WHERE rate < 3" an run to the nearest CNN office to talk about how things are very bad. You have to stop and consider all issues of a given implementation of a rating system, and there are quite many of those.

I do agree that ratings can be gamed and are not a silver bullet though, that is true. It's difficult to get right.

The current situation is that citizens and police are stuck in a feedback loop of growing fear and resent towards each other. A key step to solving our problem is to contain this loop before it grows too strong. 'rrmm wrote about giving more visibility to the transgressions of policemen, but I argue that going for maximum publicity isn't always a best approach. Taking into the account how blindly people consume the media, I fear it may only exacerbate the vicious circle of fear and resent.

That's true for everything, but let's not assume that we're at the point of diminished returns already.

US police brutality is so routine that it mostly goes un-reported, or gets minor attention on very local news media. That's changing now. Part of the problem is that US police don't even count how many people they shoot and kill.

I'd argue that the myth of "Vaccines causing autism" was not just manufactured by media, it was manufactured by a crook doctor who i) had developed his own single dose measles vaccine and needed people to stop using MMR and ii) was paid by lawyers to find a link to autism.

Of course most of the time media sources don't invent stuff like this - but tell me, without the widespread publicity, would anyone even hear about this guy?

Now one can say that it's only fringe outlets that go anti-vaxx nowadays. But mainstream sources do exactly the same type of reporting - omitting or not doing the math, blowing things out of proportion by literal orders of magnitude, etc. - when it comes to GMOs, or e-cigs, or immigrants, or terrorists, etc. The feedback loop between readers and publishers can turn just about absolutely anything into a nation-wide scandal.

So that's a different claim.

When he first appeared he was credible - he got published in a peer reviewed respectable journal after all, and he was actively trying to con people.

Once his paper had been debunked, well, yes you're right there. There's no excuse to keep pushing his theory once we know he's falsified his data, taken samples illegally from people without their permission, etc.

Those are pretty different objections. Only one of them detracts from the theory.

I've read that we have pretty good data on how long a human can float in water of various temperatures before tiring and drowning, because the Nazis systematically drowned Jews in water of various temperatures to get the data.

I also read that relevant bits of this data are posted near beaches with cold water as a public safety measure. So far so good.

...and then of course, that there was a movement to take those signs down because the source of the data is morally objectionable. Full credit for moral purity to the let's-take-down-the-drowning-warnings people. In their own small way, they are dedicated to making the world just that much slightly worse than it was.

Completely agree with this point, but it's irrelevant to the subject of unaccountable police (although it's quite relevant to the media's derailing the issue into racist tripe)

Any single case where police and prosecutors harm someone who is neither subsequently found guilty nor compensated for the harm suffered is an injustice. It doesn't matter if its 10% of cases, 0.01%, or a single innocent person who was detained for a mere 2 hours of their life. The relative frequency isn't important - these cases simply shouldn't exist, the same way a hypothetical mayor's brother not being investigated for murder shouldn't exist.

Better top-down policies and training won't fix the police or justice system - they need better incentives to change behavior at the lowest levels. The kind of incentives where they can no longer push the damage from their moral hazard onto unlucky victims, and are instead bound by the laws they purport to uphold.

Suppose a bank was robbed by one person described as 5'10", medium build, wearing a dark blue hoodie, running north on Main St. and two people were seen minutes later running north on Main from the bank matching that description.

It's perfectly reasonable and there's a societal interest for both to be stopped and contacted, even though it's CERTAIN that at least one of them is uninvolved.

You added maim or jail.

So coming and approaching is the right thing, but we need to work on reducing fear both sides have of each other first.

Doing otherwise is making it so the true cost of policing is funded by a reverse lottery.

(You've constructed the scenario to be quite benign, but even so the victim has been assaulted and is likely pumped full of adrenaline with nerves shot for a few hours. And that's basically the simplest thing that can occur)

I'm pretty sure that terrorizing innocents at gunpoint is, in fact, a crime in the US. It's not a thing you get for free with your carry license.

In the end it will be about trust. Previously the cops were given the benefit of the doubt; now that perception is changing. Police will have to do a better job of customer service to change that.

> In the end it will be about trust. Previously the cops were given the benefit of the doubt; now that perception is changing. Police will have to do a better job of customer service to change that.

I agree with that.