>Honey, did you see this? - Apparently, the Police have been beating up negroes like hotcakes!
The special he mentioned this joke was aired in 2000. I bring this up because it highlights that for some people the police haven't been a force of good for a long time, and smartphones and social media are forcing people to confront that fact. There has been many arguments that people have always been making about how the police in this country been over militarized despite have far fewer training than actual soldiers, and these weapons built for use in the middle east are being used against the poor in the US.
IMO, it's not that the police is now more overall a force of "evil", is that there always been systemically corrupt, and you have just been to well off to notice.
Police are not that effective, society does not completely collapse in their absence, and there needs to be a cost-benefit analysis done for even things that obviously seem good. When police murder and assault people regularly, using military equipment, that's a serious cost to take into consideration.
Overpolicing has serious consequences, and the evidence suggests it actually increases crime. When NYC cops stopped proactive policing, _serious crime decreased_.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/nyc-cops-did-a-work-...
"I'm not here in good faith" is an even shorter way of saying the same thing.
I have watched a video of a SWAT team breaking into a man's home and murdering him point-blank because he was holding a golf club for the crime of using naturally occurring plants and chemicals. No charges filed against any officer. Even though trained for combat, apparently their life was in mortal danger.
I have been personally threatened with arrest by police numerous times for the "criminal" offense of not following their exact instruction or being in an angry disposition for extremely minor offenses. If you want me to be peaceful, why are representatives of The State negotiating with me using violence?
Yes. This is evil.
If I was the cop watching, I would kick that asshole in the face and try to stop him. I'm sure if you asked 99% of normal people they would agree. But three cops literally watched and did nothing.
Many cops do not partake in evil, but almost every single American cop has no issue with letting the bad cops be evil. And that makes them evil too.
And these aren't a few occurrences; they have been happening frequently for decades. We only see them more often because of smartphones and people only got so mad about this occurrence because Coronavirus means everyone has too much spare time.
based on what?
At some point, decades ago, one must assume complicity.
1, maybe 2, deaths are a "handful". Repeated, country wide, incidents is far more than a "handful".
How many people should be executed, in your opinion, before you are ready to condemn the entire institution?
Police, in the abstract, are still a force for good. But it's becoming clear to more and more people that the police we actually have commit an intolerable quantity of evil acts.
EDIT: I'm a little confused about the downvotes. If the answer is "no", then what's the problem with police using slack? Isn't it just a basic tool for communication? Is selling them radios also bad? I should also say that my answer in my city would be "no".
I'm white, so the interaction with society during the completely corrupt OPD wasn't really ever a concern for me. I expect plenty of black residents are much happier now than they were then. I don't see MORE crime now than before, and I don't expect the police to ever show up if I call.
So, disbanding the police force isn't necessarily going to equate to complete and total anarchy. Most people don't break the law because we want to exist within the social contract that's established. Police can help enforce that contract, but they're not strictly required.
If disbanding police forces makes it very far in the political discourse, then gun control will be dead as a concept in the U.S. Even felons (who have served their time) have some rights, and without police to protect them, it would be inhumane to deny them self-defense. It's arguably inhumane even with police.
Note that I'm not suggesting we disband them. I am just trying to follow the logic.
This is pretty common in lots of things so it's pretty easy to understand. You have an aim you want to achieve (peace), you have a tool that does not achieve that (current police), so you discard the tool and get a new tool.
According to HN, everything is impossible. In reality? Going to space didn't have to cost a billion a launch, electric cars weren't impossible, and we can have fibre internet.
For every one of these things, the HN gestalt is that "they're a complex interconnected system influenced by thousands of different external forces". Welp, guess what. Alexander's cut the Gordian Knot. It's clear now that everything is possible and y'all are just hyper risk averse.
> According to HN, everything is impossible. In reality? Going to space didn't have to cost a billion a launch, electric cars weren't impossible, and we can have fibre internet.
Not exactly. It's more like the status quo that serves them is impossible to change because they don't want it changed.
Stereotypical HN likes space and electric cars and hates anything that may disrupt their comfortable sociopolitical station.
It would depend on the specifics. I can definitely imagine a situation where the "company culture" of a department is so corrupt that replacement would be preferable to a destined-to-fail reform attempt.
Some kind of law enforcement is necessary, but no specific police organization is.
There is widespread rationalization and support for the "few bad apples" perpetrating violence/looting/burning/rioting. There is very little condemnation. Lots of quoting MLK Jr. "rioting is the voice of the unheard" and yet MLK Jr. certainly did not practice or advocate violence.
If the protesters can't regulate their own bad apples then how can they judge police for not being able to?
Currently, this is two groups of unethical idiots fighting with each other. With each group's extremists serving to justify the other's extremists.
The outcome is easily predicted. Either the protesters take the ethical high ground or they lose.
Police are hired by a system, trained on constitutional law, trained in law enforcement technique, take an oath to enforce the law (including the constitution and the public trust), are paid money for their on duty actions, and have a system of discipline and internal review.
What the protestors have in common right now is that people showed up at a place and at a time. Protestors have a right to assemble, they inherently have little right to inhibit an anarchist from protesting at the same location without breaking laws or even a holier than thou ethics. That the press have captured intentional subversion by white supremacists, boogaloos, and even police furthers this false dichotomy.
Police are just people. Protesters are just people. Every one of them has to decide what they will and will not abide.
It's not a matter of protesters not being able to stop the extremists among them. They're not even trying. They don't even want to.
The problem is that most people (including here in these comments) are rationalizing the actions of these extremists, hence the misapplied MLK Jr. quote. This is an implicit endorsement.
A black police officer was killed by extremists. There is serious violence and burning by extremists. These acts are being implicitly endorsed. In the same way Trump implicitly endorses the behavior of his movement's extremists, by not vehemently denouncing it and distancing himself from it.
It doesn't require training or an oath to condemn extremists and seek to exclude them from your movement. It just requires principle.
Anyone can become a protester by showing up with a mask and a brick in a sock, while the police force is an actual organisation with rules and plans.
Your comparison is very flawed.
And they beat him, demonized him and arrested him. More recently the President and his supporters called Kaepernick “a son of a bitch” when he was peacefully protesting and the wider society just yawned.
It’s kind of hypocritical for the country with the largest military in the world to say that violence doesn’t achieve anything. Peaceful protest and singing Kum Bah Yah didn’t work.
The US doesn’t mind collateral damage to achieve its goals as long as the damage is in a foreign country.
Yeah but you know, one group _took oath to protect and serve_ and the other didn't.
It's like when Trump say some racist shit VS when your drunk uncle says the same thing, you can't put both sides to the same standards.
Everybody condemn rioters, but for some reasons a lot of people, including the president and many officials, manage to rationalise police brutality and if you don't see that as the obvious main issue you're most likely in the wrong.
> The outcome is easily predicted. Either the protesters take the ethical high ground or they lose.
This is the kind of thoughts I had when I was 15, I don't even know what to reply to that anymore.
______
Also, why do people keep creating new accounts to post these very poorly thought comments ? Don't you have the balls to attach your speech to your semi public internet presence or are you just trolling ?
I think it's fair for someone on the fence, or visiting the conversation from the other side, to comment on the crimes of both sides without fear of being personally insulted on HN.
We can condemn the police and hold them to the much higher bar they should be held to, and also condemn whatever looting and vandalism is occurring. "Two wrongs" etc.
I do condemn both, but you have to remember that one caused the other and one is a matter of your country becoming an authoritarian police state, not the other.
I'd take temporary riots over permanent US style law enforcement abuse. In a perfect world I'd be happy with none of the two but were not in a perfect world.
So what exactly does someone "deserve" for expressing a contrary opinion?
And this is the kind of insult I used until I was 12. Either address the argument or don't. Bless us lesser beings with your wisdom.
"Don't you have the balls to attach your speech to your semi public internet presence"
Pretty easy if all of your opinions are borrowed from others.
If you actually consider every issue for yourself then you're going to need to have discussions/disagreements.
And in modern "leftist" culture it's absolutely not permitted to disagree on certain issues. There is a correct way of thinking and any deviation makes you an enemy. You're either onboard wholesale for everything (making you a second class "ally" if you're out of the relevant racial/gender group) or an enemy.
I want to live in a good world as much as anyone. I have no belief in the superiority of any race or sex. I absolutely would have supported MLK Jr. and I'm fairly certain of this because my parents did and I have a lot in common with them.
And yet I find myself dismayed by the whacky thinking that has infected part of American culture. There is a new world in which racism isn't racism if it's aimed at certain racial groups and violence isn't violence if it's against police or certain racial groups. Permanently destroying people's lives is okay now too, as long as they made some kind of mistake related to a hot issue.
This stuff is insane and totally counter productive. The majority of people are too smart and good to buy into this perverted worldview. Most people are never going to come around to the worldview where it's not-so-bad to kill a police officer that is responding to a break in.
What we should hope to see is a separation process, where the extremist crazy people and ideas are abandoned.
There seems to be a hostage/hijacking situation, where the majority are being cowed/controlled by the extremists, dooming the movements to failure.
An enemy of racial equality couldn't organize better sabotage than what the people involved are seemingly doing on their own.
I just did and you don't seem to have noticed. Protester never took an oath, the police and the president did, that's all there is to know, stop acting like the riots are the main issue in today's America, that's a pretty small hill to die. Do you think nation wide riots appear out of thin air? Don't you think it's a symptom of a much deeper issue? Do you think people go out everyday to get gassed and beat up for fun and giggles?
There is always a good rule of thumb to estimate on which side of the fight people are, look at the group which has nothing to lose anymore, that's most likely the one which is right.
> This stuff is insane
You know what's insane? Seeing a man being executed by the police on television. Look at the history of black Americans, they never earned anything by sitting in the corner and licking the white man boot. Riots are always a necessary evil.
The only hijacking of the situation I see is people like you trying to make the debate about "is rioting good or bad?" instead of the hundreds of other question you could ask like "why is the president calling for 'domination' of every protests", "why are we seeing hundreds of videos of people being abused by law enforcement?"
> Pretty easy if all of your opinions are borrowed from others.
Man, in what kind of world do you live if you think you have original ideas pure of any influence... Give me a break
> I absolutely would have supported MLK Jr
But what are you doing today? The opposite. It's easy to say "I would have been against slavery back in the days" yeah ok sure, most people say that, most people weren't, and of the one who were most didn't do anything
It's the usual double standard "Tiananmen Square protesters were so brave, the Arab spring revolutions were so beautiful, the end of slavery was good, &c." yet when it happens under your own nose you have officials asking for "no quarters" and send the army in the street to maim and kill
> where the extremist crazy people
Yeah these extremist crazy people asking for the end of systemic racism, police abuse and the death of unarmed people in the hands of the police, they are such vile beasts...
I don't even understand where half of your rant is trying to go, it doesn't really seem to be about the same topic as your original comment so I'll leave it at that.
The other is a loosely networked group of malcontents and opportunists with a relatively low regard for commercial property rights and capitalism.
It's disingenuous to equate them, and something tells me you know this and set up a throwaway account to protect your main from the entirely predictable barrage of criticism.
This is exactly the same reason police officers are ethically in the wrong. They could decide that "enough is enough" and push out the "bad apples" among them. Instead, they do nothing. That is their ethical failing.
The protesters (and their supporters) are doing the exact same thing, ethically. They refuse to even attempt to push out the extremists, as evidenced by the widespread rationalization and minimization of their actions.
These are very basic ethical dilemmas. Do you or don't you call out and punish bad actors among your group?
Ancient tribes were generally okay with anyone of their tribe committing any atrocity as long as it was against a member of a foreign tribe.
Civilized people condemn and punish even members of their own tribe and do it even when the victim is a member of a foreign tribe.
There's a continuum of what "defund" means, but the idealists are pushing for actual, no-hyperbole defunding and disbanding. Police cannot be made good. They believe would be easier to reduce crime some other way than authorized state violence, and the funds could be redirected to those ways.
[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/06/03/black-lives-matte...
(a) Get used to it.
(b) Get ready to join up. More officers who care about justice mean that it's easier to get rid of the unjust officers.
(c) Get ready to defund/disband, or at least reduce the scope of, the police department.
It doesn't shock me that (c) is being mentioned. It's probably a bluff, but might have enough credibility to change the power dynamics.
One would expect that if the system were set up right, it should a) find people who would police well b) setup systems to ensure as few abuses as possible happen c) encourage the good cops to push out the bad cops.
It's pretty clear that it's more than the people themselves that are broken. The system isn't set up to result in good policing.
This page says Georgia has 42k police officers.
I think the disbandment you mention was clearing out old corrupt officers and replacing them with new recruits, which is mentioned there. Not actually getting rid of the police.
https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/gx20pi/lapd_shoots_ho...
https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/gwzrap/this...
https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/gwvk...
After seeing things like this (hell, these are some of the tamer videos I've seen in the past week), I'm not sure how anybody can seriously still support the police. Police as a concept is absolutely necessary in a civilized society. But the police that the US has? They're nothing but state-sanctioned terrorists.
https://www.investigativepost.org/2020/06/05/police-unit-res...
> “Fifty-seven [officers] resigned in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,” said John Evans, PBA president.
> The announcement comes one day after two members were suspended without pay when a video surfaced, showing the officers pushing over a 75-year-old protestor, causing injury. The BPD Internal Affairs unit has opened an investigation into the incident.
I’ve watched journalists arrested and senior citizens bowled over and horrific horrific force used against children on TV and then seen how police chiefs and their lieutenants excuse and deny it in bare defiance of the documented truth and have concluded that, at the very least, evil forces in the police are unconstrained.
Until we see evidence of that constraint, it seems irresponsible to add force multipliers to the equation.
This is highly dependent on locality. I don't claim to follow broader national trends, but certainly things in the Bay Area have improved significantly in the last 2 decades.
e.g. SJPD has seen encouraging reductions in use of force over the last five years (https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/29/as-police-decry-georg...)
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/05/31/lets-get-this-motherf...
They seem hellbent in making sure they are the villains.
Or can we both believe that police is net good but falls far short of how good they should be? And that they deserve to feel the heat for it.
Right now, police are legally allowed to bully the communities they serve. Not all police do, but the problem is normal citizens have no recourse to hold them accountable when they do. The system in place is evil for allowing such behavior to go unpunished and needs to be changed.