Canadian police have their fair share of psychopathic bullies and systemic racist murder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon_freezing_deaths

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2014/03/30/football_player_...

https://globalnews.ca/news/1608030/new-video-shows-another-c...

https://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2014/07/30/toronto_cop_ch...

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, though. There will always be something wrong. The point is to address it and reduce how often it goes wrong.

I'm not denying these incidents are terrible; they are. And even if you do address them and punish the perpetrators, you'll still occasionally have police officers that do the wrong thing. But that doesn't mean it's pointless to hold police accountable, or to train them better.

'We should hold police accountable and train them better' is orthogonal to 'you shouldn't talk to or interact with the police if you can help it'. You do the first to reduce the probable number of- let's say 'possibly evil police'. You do the second to reduce the probability of being damaged by 'possibly evil police'. Being for the first idea doesn't give a reason to be against the second idea. In fact, if your goal is to minimise the chance of getting fucked by police, you want to take both measures.

You're right. Still, I think it's terrible that 'you shouldn't talk to the police'. Talking to the police should be a safe thing to do. There should be trust between the people and the police. Police need to be able to talk to people in order to understand the real problems that need to be solved.

My goal is not merely to not get fucked by the police, my goal is a better, safer society.

It doesn't matter how safe the police are comparatively, they'll never be safe. You can make the mechanisms on guns more and more reliable, and that's good, but not engaging in trigger/gun discipline is still always the wrong move.

Police have power. You can't have functional police that don't have power, so fundamentally police are dangerous.

I don't. I'm just saying that if a group of uniformed men showed up at my front door with guns the fact they're Canadian would not be especially comforting.

Police in Canada may be better but there are still a ton of problems especially with indigenous populations.[1][2] Ontario has the SIU for police oversight but the new provincial government is meddling with it[3].

[1]https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/19/canada-police-fail-indig...

[2]https://aptnnews.ca/2019/05/13/were-you-turned-on-by-this-at...

[3]http://www.mondaq.com/canada/x/808540/Constitutional+Adminis...

I can say, at least from what I’ve heard, the OPP is not happy about the meddling at all. They have had enough bad press the past ten years they’ve been trying to fix that.

My brothers an OPP constable in rural Ontario (and incidentally married to a teacher). They were not happy with the messing about, especially the Taverner case. From what I understand Blair was a highly respected officer as well and is generally considered to have fallen on his sword to prevent the insertion of a corrupt top official.

Anyway I forgot about the SIU stuff. I’m going to have to pick his brain about it.

They are about 6X less likely to kill you so that helps! [1]

[1] https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/why-canadian-police-are...