In places where the police have an active role in settling disputes, they also enjoy more respect from the community.
Defenders of police misconduct tend to cite the "it's just a few bad apples" line without noting the full adage is "a few bad apples spoils the barrel".
These guys are supposed to uphold the law, instead they prop up murderers and accuse the justice department of railroading “innocent” cops. See “Police union blasts ‘sham trial and shameful’ Van Dyke guilty verdict” [0]
0: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/10/5/18460941/police-union...
Contrast this with the principles of policing by consent [0] that define the ideals (though not necessarily the reality) of policing in the UK and many other countries.
The thing is is survivorship bias often shows in the media. most police encounters are not reported in the media because it's common and everyday. But the very few that turn into a big production get reported because it gets ratings. So through survivorship bias, confirmation bias, and availability bias, the problem seems bigger than it actually is.
Violent crime then decreased by about 50% to 2014, though that still of course leaves us at a level multiple times higher than where we started. And it's now back on the rise. Here are the raw numbers [1]. They're quite interesting to consider.
Something I'm quite curious about on Hacker News, preempting the downvotes can people explain what they find offensive about data?
Looking at the "data", one would conclude that Autism is on the rise. But we didn't even know what it was not too long ago. And we sure as hell didn't check for it. There are more diagnoses of Autism because we're actually looking now.
Today, domestic violence would be classified as a violent crime. In the fifties, it was called keeping your wife in line.
Lynching a black man was a way to keep him away from your pristine daughter in the fifties. Now. It's a crime.
Fortunately, there's a much simpler response. Just referencing the data from the provided link (starting in the 60s) [1], the increase in crime is for literally every single category of crime. And most saw very dramatic increases: robbery 400%, assault 500%, burgularly 300%, theft 300%, auto theft 300% increase, etc. You can cast uncertainty on some of the figures but the extremely high rate increases paired with the fact it was spread across literally every single crime leaves little 0 doubt that there was absolutely an exponentially increasing crime rate between 1960 and 1991.
As one aside, that 1991 date is really quite peculiar. Nearly every single crime hit its peak in that year. You'd expect different crimes to decline at different rates or even statistical noise to have played a role. Yet at a glance the only crime that didn't hit its peak in 1991 was forcible rape, which peaked in 1992. The 'Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act' [2] formalizing the increasing militarization of police (which would really go into overdrive after the North Hollywood shootout) was passed in 1981.
[1] - http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cooperation_with_Civi...
US law enforcement agencies have conducted joint training with Israeli experts for decades. So it should be no surprise that our police forces have taken on a callous "siege mentality".[1]
[1]https://theintercept.com/2017/09/15/police-israel-cops-train...
This sounds false to me outside of some Western European areas but I don’t have data to support it
https://i.ibb.co/gMtDhgQ/b.png
Full PDF: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Crime-stat...
Sadly I couldn't find the number of arrests made in any useful comparison, but US police have a policy of "taking people in" for almost any offense, so I'd expect it to roughly match that.
I mean comparing Baltimore to (say) Prague is a bit like comparing it to Malibu, I'm not sure we learn much. But compare it to districts of Rio, for instance, and then maybe we can learn something about how different policing approaches play out.
I'm not sure that it's true that "most other countries" police work the way you're saying. There's a good book on the problems of policing world-wide, " The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence by Gary A. Haugen,Victor Boutros".
Draconic punishment is not ideal especially because criminals return to society with less prospects and are likely to turn to crime once again. That is if they return at all.
Now imagine the TSA and Border patrol and many other government security institutions. So many cast offs.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
> It doesn't take much effort to find articles claiming to have the 'truth' about the relationship between immigrants or refugees and Swedish crime. Yet the real truth is that there is no up-to-date public data on the ethnic background of criminals in the country, with existing figures more than a decade old.
Do you have reputable citations for Oslo/Norway crime by ethnic background that demonstrate what you assert? Norway says overall rates are down, which would be weird if the influx of refugees was increasing crime: https://www.tnp.no/norway/panorama/crime-rates-decrease-norw...
Västasien (West Asia) 3.7
Nordafrika (North Africa) 4.6
Östafrika (East Africa) 3.5
Övriga Afrika (Rest of Africa) 5.2
(The numbers written in the study had native swedes at 0.8 so I multiplied these numbers by 1.25 to normalize it)
https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800012697/2...
Nothing since then has shown that the rates have changed, so you can assume that they are still valid. Everybody knows that these groups are over-represented and that accepting immigrants increases crime, that isn't really a part of the debate. You can argue why they are over-represented, such as poverty and discrimination, but not that there are more criminals among them.
Anyhow, wrt America, even the worst right wing propaganda doesn't show our African immigrants committing as much crime as African Americans, so the Swedish model seems to work at least somewhat.
You need to be able to show some compassion in this job and try to actually help people instead of just being a squad of gun wielding weirdos who show up to cart any suspicious people away, guns blazing.
In most other countries police has an active role in settling disputes using empathy and compassion, instead of just arresting people and locking them away.
The way US police tend to operate fits well within a justice system that is focused on draconic punishment instead of rehabilitation and reintegration though.
Some people need a guiding hand to find back into society. In the US you're liable to get kicked into the mud and danced upon instead.