I agree it's a severe problem, but I don't agree it's inescapable.

It's a job that attracts brutal people only because it's a job that lets them get away with brutality. If the cycle of allowing brutality and attracting brutes could be broken, there's a good chance it'd stay broken.

The police fraternity knows all about getting other cops to fall into line - just look at the "blue wall of silence" and police union "get out of jail free" cards. That same pressure couldn't be applied against brutality.

You have a very sick society and until you realize it is not all the fault of one group it will persist.

Is there a good reason to believe that it's true?

However, it implies antagonized population where even innocent people will avoid police contact, whether reporting of crime, informing to police or otherwise cooperating with them as much as possible. It implies that people dont see police as an institution to protect them and dont use them as such.

More aggressive may mean quotas for arrests - leading to arrests that have nothing to do with public safety. It is easier to arrest someone apparently poor for loitering or sorta kinda open bottle of alcohol then someone actually violent.

Same with fines. For example, if the masks are mandatory outside, cops can either issue warning or give you a find. In most cases, warning is enough to make people comply and take it seriously. Fine is used only when people refuse to comply. If cops were aggressive and issued fine immediately to everyone who had half nose out of mask, we would not be safer.

More aggressive means exactly that and nothing more.

At any rate, even if general society is more violent, that is not a justification for supposed police to add to the mayhem. When police officers are not bound by the law they purport to uphold, then they are actually just another gang.

> You have a very sick society

Yeah, but it's slowly getting better. Not this week, obviously, but the trend is there.

We are a nation built on genocide and psychotic slavery. Check out "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Indigenous_Peoples'_History...

So the reasoning that they act like this because of their dangerous job is a myth.

Source: https://www.ajc.com/business/employment/these-are-the-most-d...

When people say "being a police officer" is risky they obviously mean the part where you go around physically enforcing law and order, not the other parts that are actually the majority of many long-term police careers. But the fact that the current beat cop will in 5 years have a much safer job doesn't mean that the current job is not very risky.

I’m not sure if soldiers in war actually are given all that much latitude over murdering civilians; if caught they do tend to be punished.

At least part of the problem is cops themselves.

Racism is universal amongst humans. We are tribal primates, after all. We need to admit the biases exist and address them head-on.

It stands to reason that having a bias against out groups once increased an individuals chance of survival. Now it is actively harming society. If we can't rise above our primitive impulses, we are doomed.

We need to stop telling ourselves these lies about who we are and what we're capable of.

Let's say 1% of the population commits crimes.

Let's also, for the sake of argument, say all crimes are committed by black people.

Of the general population, 10% is black.

If you profile all black people, you will indeed profile the 1% of the population that commits crimes, but you will also profile 9% of the population that does not commit crimes.

And before you say "not the entirety of the 10% black population is profiled": maybe ask some black people about this. It's not 100% of the black population that gets profiled but certainly a very significant percentage.

And even if it's just half or even a quarter of the black population that you're profiling, you're still profiling a lot of innocent people.

This is the reason why profiling is bad.

(and note that in reality the figures are even worse).

If there are credible reports of a white man committing murders it doesn't make any sense to waste resources listing mainly female Asian suspects, for example. There are also other similar issues. For example, if a crime happens on my street I expect to be treated as more of a suspect based only on my proximity.

The issue of racism is (and needs to be) grounded in things other than rational resource allocation.

However, it's clear that the vast majority of resources are devoted to black areas and poor areas, and to responding to directly "violent" crime. A mugging is more sensational than white collar crime, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint, I'm not sure it's rational to devote more resources to catching the mugger when, for example, there is widespread wage theft depressing incomes in the mugger's city. Which causes more damage in the long run?

If all crime is committed by South Asian women, you're right that it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures such as, for example, only looking for suspects that are female and have a South Asian suspects.

Profiling, however, where you preventively search if not outright harass people, is something entirely different: if one in ten South Asian women engage in crime, every time you preventively search and harass one of them, you have a ninety percent chance of searching and harassing someone who is innocent.

For example, Finland has a large number of firearms, but police don't come to a crime scene guns ablaze unless they have a very good reason to think there is a need to use them.

It's the root of many of our problems.

To see the real root of the problem, compare the USA to other western democracies such as in Europe. The structure of society is very different, the nature of poverty, the number of people living as an economic underclass, the acceptance in the USA that poor areas of cities will just be fucked and that's normal, the presence of a never-ending source of ignorant, and often racist, people from small-town America, and the presence of a never-ending source of guns. Of course a lot of the above is related to the lack of a strong belief across the voting population that government should protect and support the poorest in society.

Things won't change in America until the above changes meaningfully. That would require the majority of the population to start thinking more like the liberal half, and there is no reason to think that that will happen any time soon.

This is certainly not limited to the USA and you will readily find it in European democracies as well. A significant portion of French people have long since assumed that the banlieues are hopeless and there is little sense trying to improve them. In Eastern Europe you will find the same attitudes about Roma neighborhoods. Even in the Nordic countries which are held up as models of social equality, one finds the genesis of immigrant-heavy neighborhoods that, local people tell themselves, will forever have the problems that immigrant-heavy neighborhoods stereotypically have.

"According to the Washington thinktank the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), the average student in Singapore is 3.5 years ahead of her US counterpart in maths, 1.5 years ahead in reading and 2.5 in science. Children in countries as diverse as Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, Finland, Netherland, New Zealand and Singapore consistently outrank their US counterparts on the basics of education."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...

All this means that it isn't really evident that money doesn't translate into better results. It isn't strictly funding, that is true - poverty seriously affects how well students can perform, for example - but it should be quite obvious that a school that cannot afford maintenance, proper computers for students to learn on, or enough staff so that classes are a manageable size can't really teach as well as a moderately funded school.

Some of the worst cities have the beat funded schools. Minneapolis spends as much per student as Switzerland. Baltimore spends more, and spends as much of more than the rich suburban schools around it. The US also has relatively low rates or private K-12 compared to the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.

This incident in MN with United States citizens getting shot at on their own porch is a much milder form of thuggery — it was not legal application of force — that Palestinians have been living with for decades.

Karma.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joint-us-israel-police-...

This is false. There is a long history of police membership in, involvement and collaboration with explicitly racist groups.

Embracing this human weakness is part of developing the structures to keep us accountable.

Those who are vehemently racist are likely only a minority of the expressions of racial injustice which minorities face as a lifestyle in America. The answer to both should point to structural solutions rather than making this an individual moral matter, asking people to monitor whether they're consciously racist.

No, they're not! One is quite obviously extreme, the other is quite obviously not. Some things are, and some things are not. Something that isn't can't be. I apologize for paraphrasing a disgusting piece of crap guy in this context, but... please understand that your nothing-matters philosophy is helping people get killed/the people killing them go without accountability.

These things can be taught directly. There is nothing special about it, and it's not about strengths or weaknesses. Most human brains work pretty similarly and have the same strengths and weaknesses, all of which can be managed or improved.

  The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist.

The police exist to preserve the established order. If you believed a social order can exist without being preserved by violence, then i'd call you an anarchist, (i'd call myself one too.) If you believe anything remotely resembling the present social order can be preserved without violence then you're naive, and very few people are that naive, least of all the police. Under what circumstances violence is required to preserve the established order may be shocking, but the individual police officers aren't pushing the system around, the system is pushing them around.

Sociopathic bully cops would ve weeded out. They are covered for instead. Video of them murdering people would prompt action from the system to get rid of them, but the system declines to prosecute them, and i'd guess a third of the country hmms and haws and theorizes about what the murder victim should've done to avoid getting murdered. The victims of these bad cops would be treated by the media the same as any other person whom tragedy befell, instead the media digs up dirt on them.

Individual bad cops can't exert the kind of pressure on the system needed to do all that. It's the established social order expressing itself.

Depends on what you mean by “they.” Individual officers are a mixed bag, but someone else mentioned the ties between police and right-wing/racist groups. “The police” as an institution however is definitely racist.

> The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist. People who want power over others sign up for policing - and then go after groups who have the least ability to fight back.

The fact that racial minorities have the least ability to fight back is a significant component of institutional racism. Why are they in that position in the first place? Because the USA has not yet excised from its culture the racist policies, values, and attitudes that it has held since before its foundation.