I do wish these broader debates were clearer and more nuanced. I get the strong impression that certain participants are not only deliberately trying to prevent this sort of nuance altogether. I'm not sure why anyone with a genuine interest in solving these problems would behave this way.

A lot of people are just really, really angry at this moment in time due to the long history of injustices and numerous examples in the past few days.

Nuance is real hard to do under these circumstances.

It's not so hard if the media didn't cherry pick examples for the purpose of enraging Americans. There's probably a lot to be legitimately upset about, but blacks are killed by police less frequently than victim-reported crime statistics predict. If the media gave proportional attention to white victims like Tony Timpa or Daniel Shaver, it wouldn't feel so much like police are targeting black citizens. Maybe we would be having a different conversation--"police are too brutal in general, and while they aren't targeting minorities in their fatal offenses, perhaps there is a racial disparity for lesser forms of brutality, etc". But that's a terrible headline what with its nuance and truthfulness--I would never hack it as a journalist.

I mean, media sensationalism aside, honest question from outside the US: they had decades to change something and just about nothing happened, is a nuanced conversation about this realistic?

Plus, if they wanted a nuanced conversation it would help if they didn't shoot at and abuse media representatives. One journo I follow tracks unprovoked attacks on clearly identifiable journalists, days ago when that was at about 5 incidents I might have understood the call for nuance but it's now at over 200.

Some of those are white, if that helps the odd call for nuance and both are shown in the media I tend to consume. I don't feel distribution of fatalities is a great argument. The absolute number of officer involved shootings in the US is just ridiculous for a first world country, supporting those currently visibly affected shouldn't be too hard then, it would help others as well.

> they had decades to change something and just about nothing happened, is a nuanced conversation about this realistic?

This is simply because it hasn't been a priority. It's good that this is drawing attention to the issue (assuming there aren't more important issues that aren't receiving attention as a consequence--I'm withholding judgment), but it's bad insofar as it's being portrayed as a race issue when there is apparently no racial component in police killings. I think the good outweighs the bad, but we could have it both ways.

> Plus, if they wanted a nuanced conversation it would help if they didn't shoot at and abuse media representatives.

I care very little about whether the police want more nuance or not. Americans deserve a nuanced debate, better data about police violence, a media apparatus that isn't overtly and deliberately optimizing for strife and division, etc.

> I don't feel distribution of fatalities is a great argument. The absolute number of officer involved shootings in the US is just ridiculous for a first world country, supporting those currently visibly affected shouldn't be too hard then, it would help others as well.

It sounds like you don't understand the argument :). It's not "we shouldn't do anything about police brutality because it doesn't have a strong racial component"--virtually everyone agrees that our rates of police violence are far too high (however, that doesn't mean everyone agrees that it's the most important problem). The debate (well, to the extent that this is a debate--it's highly taboo to try to understand and remedy these problems) is about the extent to which this is a racial issue--this is important because (1) it's important to our ongoing national dialogue (again, not much of a dialogue due to taboo) about race and political ideologies and (2) it determines how we go about fixing the police violence issue (if it's not a function of bias then anti-bias training won't help).

Thanks for the explanation, you're right, seems like I misread that part of your suggestion.

Yeah but it'd be even easier to just not kill so many black people for what often appears to be very little reason. The whole thing would solve itself.

If a few police started stepping on babies and killing them for sport, making sure that all the other victims of police got 'equal-time' isn't going to be winner.

woops there goes the nuance again :D

I don't get it. Do you believe that by oversimplifying the conversation you're going to actually solve problems? Do you think it's helpful? Or is the problem less worthy than venting your frustrations (and in the latter case, are the frustrations legitimate or simply a product of the aforementioned media misinformation)?

This conversation isn't going to solve the problem (but that is a cop-out).

I think the metaphor though hyperbolic was a bit germane: I too have a lot of problems with media coverage in general. But the reason why it's covered a lot more is because it's often super egregious. So it's oversimplifying to not consider the impact to the community (especially given the long historical context of racial oppression).

My frustrations are legitimate, as I'm sure are yours.

Calling it 'media misinformation' is begging the question.

> But the reason why it's covered a lot more is because it's often super egregious.

Daniel Shaver had no criminal history, he was unarmed in his own hotel room on his hands and knees begging for his life when a police officer shot him five times.

Tim Timpa was pinned to the ground with at least one officer kneeling on his back while he struggled to breath, begging police officers to get off of him, saying they were going to kill him. He begged more than 30 times over the course of 14 minutes. The police officers joked about killing him even after he was unconscious and possibly even after he had died.

Justine Damond was a 40 year old Australian-American woman who called the police to report a possible sexual assault in the alley near her home. She was unarmed and barefoot as she approached the police after they swept the alley in their squad car when they shot her in the chest.

I don't see how these killings are less egregious than those that the media do report on. Moreover, there are also patently fraudulent media reports of racism, such as the Covington Catholic affair that are designed to get the nation in a race frenzy even if it means sending an angry mob after innocent children. I don't think "concern for the community" is motivating the media. Minority communities' anxiety is the result of--not the cause for--the media's fear mongering.

> Minority communities' anxiety is the result of--not the cause for--the media's fear mongering.

I would politely exhort you to do more research on the subject and meet members of the communities involved.

I've always been amazed at how when the black community mentions something to do with race, it's always seen as if we are making up some kind of elaborate fiction solely for slandering the United States.

> I've always been amazed at how when the black community mentions something to do with race, it's always seen as if we are making up some kind of elaborate fiction solely for slandering the United States.

That wasn't my claim, and you know it. I'm happy to be wrong, I'm just trying to make sense of the contrast between the data and public opinion. I'm genuinely very sorry for any emotional distress this debate causes and I know that the distress it's very one-sided, but I don't know how we are going to make social progress apart from real dialogue (both across political lines as well as racial lines). Why malign people who are trying to understand and help?

This stuff is highly charged. Doing it over text messages just makes things harder.

I appreciate you are doing it good faith, but 400 years of blood makes for murky waters.

I understand and agree. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I'm always doing research on this subject, including speaking with members of these communities. I agree that it's important. There's also a lot of nuance that my comment glossed over, for brevity.

EDIT: In fact, my desire for better dialog and my ongoing research are both motivated by a desire (for me personally and for our society more broadly) to better understand and fix the problem.

So you are going to use absolute numbers vs. per capita when comparing killings by police? And I love the way that you explain non-white communities being targeted as "feelings" and not a historical constant as long as the US has existed.

My numbers were population adjusted (per-capita), and there's no dichotomy between "black communities have historically been and perhaps still are targeted" and "the media is amplifying the perception of the degree to which they are targeted". Thanks for pushing for me to be more clear. I really do appreciate it.

I think the current action of work was "it's bad PR". And just that (no notion of good and bad).

My personal take is:

Police is conceptually good, but in practice can be be anything from net bad to net good. And while you can give a label per country. Differences in the same country (and state) can be huge. If many bad cases exists there is dangerous failure in the system. While for view cases is most often a human failure. Lastly it's currently net bad to be associated with police for PR, independent of wether police is net good or net bad in the US.

Tbh. If I'm not wrong then the problems in the US are much deeper and systematic then "just" degrees of police violence. I still remember that since states used or still user a KI system to decide about bail cost and possibility which had a very clear bias against black people. Not because it was made intentionally with a bias but because the data of all cases of recent years was subtly but consistently biased against black people. And there are many other things wrong. Some not specific to black people but anyone which had not much Mony. Bring them all together and you have defacto systematic discrimination.

Edit: Spelling on a phone can be hard. ;)

> Police is conceptually good, but in practice can be be anything from net bad to net good.

I hear this a lot, but I have a really hard time imagining a functioning society with no police. A society can't function (pretty much by definition) without law and order and law and order has never existed apart from some policing apparatus (at least not for anything besides the simplest of civilizations). Our police are surely suboptimal, but I don't see any sense in the idea that we would be better off with no police at all.

Yes, through if you look at the role the police plays for some minority's, especially in some authoritarian or unstable countries they might be better off with no official police and (likely biased and not very good) self mad order keeping.

Through I don't think this is the case for any democratic country.

In the end bad police is normally better for larger societies then no police at all.

But at the same time bad police can do a lot additional damage. I.e. it keeps some sources of danger in check but at the same time adds a new source of danger.

Which is, I thing, one reason why some people believe they can do without police. The other reason is the thing below:

Law and order exists just fine in small isolated (but not simple) societies without police. Especially if the society mostly contains similar minded people.

Additionally you need neither law nor order in the modern sense for a small isolated but we'll working society. A common goal, respect for other people and implicit traditions can be enough in that case.

I also can thing of at least on model for a larger society working without police through some form of self policing and self survilence but that's much more distopian than the US system as far as I can tell.

It's a witch-hunt, plain and simple. Of course the police needs reform, demilitarization, higher standards, more accountability, and better educational requirements.

How you get any of those things by demonizing the police and making it a left-vs-right political issue is beyond me.

>How you get any of those things by demonizing the police and making it a left-vs-right political issue is beyond me.

These aren't new issues, practically speaking every attempt at less radical solutions hasn't worked and there have been many. In the end, the solution will be filled with political compromise and the weaker your starting position the more compromise there will be.

Surely the amount of police violence is less today than say, the early 1900s, when outright lynching was practically sponsored by the police? You deny that there has been any progress?

Society as a whole has changed and I'd argue police have changed less than the rest of society. Given the videos from the last few days it's clear that the police see themselves as immune to consequences even in the age of social media, cell phone cameras and widespread public opposition.

Sure, I agree to that absolutely. But how you get from "the police needs radical reform" to "we don't need police, abolish them" is a mystery to me.

> "we don't need police, abolish them

I think it's important to not conflate this movement with the defund movement, which merely points at the for example 6 billion dollar NYPD budget and says "is this really necessary?"

Furthermore, the "abolish" movement comes with its own subtleties, that don't necessarily mean "all cops gone tomorrow." An easy exercise to illustrate this to yourself: you can imagine that an alt-right 2a gunsrights activist wearing milita patches, body armor, and holding a rifle, while chanting "abolish the police," has a very different idea in their head of what that means from a liberal social-democrat holding a "black lives matter" sign and chanting "abolish the police," can't you?

Here's a good article: https://bostonreview.net/law-justice/derecka-purnell-what-do...

If I want a $200k salary I don't start the negotiations at $200k, I start them at $250k knowing that I will be argued down. Likewise, the fear of a radical approach drives those in power to actually implement a productive moderate approach. If all you have is the moderate approach than those in power will implement nothing of substance.

> How you get any of those things by demonizing the police and making it a left-vs-right political issue is beyond me.

I get this vibe as well. I want to interpret this charitably, but this seems antithetical to good faith participation. It feels like these people don't actually care about police brutality--any arbitrary partisan issue would suffice. Of course, I'm sure I'm misreading the situation (even though social psychology's most replicable studies predict exactly this sort of hyper-partisanship).

To work towards a solution requires understanding the problem. Understanding problems on this scale is very hard and it's much easier to say empty phrases that please your base.

Wait what? All the things you mentioned are table stakes. Till we have those things, there's effectively no police department. We have a bunch of empowered thugs roaming around unencumbered. We absolutely have to demonize (rather bring out their true color) in order to have any reasonable possibility of change.

How can these continuous variables be table stakes? That doesn't make sense. Type error.

> How you get any of those things by demonizing the police and making it a left-vs-right political issue is beyond me.

If not this way the, how do you get it? It's been hundreds of years. The U.S. is not immune to revolutions and revolutions have changed corrupt states for a very long time.

Study other countries which have less police violence? Incorporate more community involvement? Etc.

The idea that society doesn't need some sort of police force is so hilariously naive, I am in disbelief that serious people are suggesting it. Clearly they are from an extremely privileged background and never had to deal with living in poor areas.

The police absolutely need reform, but to pretend that they're more of a threat than criminals is factually false.

I'm sure it seems very alarming that people are 'demonizing the police' if you're new to this issue -- in which case this week has woken you up to something that's been a problem for people for a very very long time. But it is not a new issue, and people's fear and pain at it is genuine.

To some segments of society (who are not criminals), the police absolutely are more of a threat than criminals. When there are people who are terrified of getting pulled over by a cop in traffic because they know it might end up with them shot, even though they are in every way a model citizen, there is a deep problem.

Also, police as we know them are only a couple hundred years old. No one is saying there doesn't need to be people who fill most of the roles police do in modern society, they are saying the structure the police embody is rotten and can be replaced with better things.

And in my experience, it's the least privileged who take the hardest line on police abolition. Most 'privileged' people have, like yours, a lukewarm "some reform would be good" perspective.

I'm not new to this issue and I haven't "been woken up". As I just said, I actually have experience living in a crime-ridden area. Of course the police are a problem but again, the facts simply don't line up to your statements. The police killed 1,098 people in 2019.

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org

Compare that to the overall murder rate (not including other crimes.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_homicid...

> To some segments of society (who are not criminals), the police absolutely are more of a threat than criminals.

So getting rid of the police will have no effect whatsoever on the amount of criminals or crime? It will simply remain the same? That, again, is extremely naive.

As usual, the predominant political news topic overrides all rational thought. One week, we have a mass shooting and call for more police and less guns. The next, the police unjustly kill someone and everyone wants to abolish them entirely.

I like how you just completely ignore the part about how no one is saying "abolish the police and replace them with absolutely nothing we love crime!" You also lump various different debates all into one and assume the people you disagree with are in alignment with each other on all of them.

But it's the other side that's had its "rational thought" overridden. These are not a good faith arguments.

I'm not really sure what you're arguing for. It seemed to be that "the police are more of a threat than criminals", which is factually untrue, even today, before any so-called abolition of the police (which is what people are calling for.)

Also, I am not "on a side" and my original comment was calling out this attempt to make it a black-and-white issue. There are more than two options.

That the police are more of a threat to criminals to specific subsets of the population is absolutely, unquestionably, factually true. There is more than enough personal attestation to the experiences of black and queer people (including those who otherwise have privilege in some ways) in the US with police to say this with confidence.

They aren't to you perhaps.

And again, when people call for abolition of the police they are not talking about leaving a complete vacuum of every function they serve in society. They are calling for dismantling police departments completely and replacing their functions in society with other, more directly capable, social systems. You may want to actually read some of what's been written on the topic instead of having a knee jerk reaction that assumes the worst.

Any statistic is true of a small subset of the population. To use your example of black people:

Killed in 2018: Black or African American 2,925

Police killed 1,098 people in 2019. (I can't find exact numbers by race)

Again, I'm not arguing that there isn't police bias against minorities, that they aren't disportionally affected, or anything like this. But the facts simply show that the police kill less people than other people do, so it seems like a stretch to say they're more of a threat.

In regards to the other point: that may be the case, but that isn't what "abolish" and "dismantle" mean. I still don't see how you avoid some amount of armed protective personnel (to deal with shootings or robberies) which are basically police.

> But the facts simply show that the police kill less people than other people do

The total number of police is a fraction of the population of the united states. Do you really not understand even the most basic math or is this argument in bad faith?

I am more afraid of a police department that has no legal accountability than I am of a criminal.

It's not a witch hunt if there's an actual problem.

B and C probably both fit - police aren't inherently a net bad, but the policing system in america produces too many bad outcomes to lend blanket support to; it's arguably unethical to profit from such a problematic body of work.

This is what I don't get: saying they are theoretically good but problematic (without necessarily saying "police are a net bad"), and then saying it's unethical to do business with them for routine products.

If there is logic there, it's very subtle and I'm not getting it. Can you elaborate or compare it to a precedent?

The logic is that you don't have to do business with organizations you don't like (outside of some very specific situations).

If you think police need reform and cause harm, then ethically you get to decide for yourself if you're ok with exchanging services with them despite the issues.

This reasoning seems much like Communism vs communism;

communism, as a concept seems fair and just. Communism in practice by Russia or China has often benefitted a few.

police, as a concept of investigating and providing justice for crimes is a good thing; American Police, however, are showing fundamental misunderstandings of the rights of citizens and have seen reduced repercussions because of things like qualified immunity, asset forfeiture, or biases.

Another example of an attorney representing the people, is a good thing; but in US law (as opposed to European law) the DA sometimes seeks a conviction EVEN IF the DA has found exculpatory evidence (and doesn't have to share that evidence with the charged or their attorney)

(d) police will never reform unless we make it impossible to do their jobs.

The more obvious lever here seems to be money.

What you are suggesting is very round-about -- somehow slack is so useful that, by denying police its use, they will see the error of their ways?

Where does this end? We could also make them wear boots that are 5 pounds each, and use cars that randomly refuse to start 10% of the time. What is the point?

Obviously it's not just slack. Every company should be shamed out of doing business with them, imo.

It is more than likely C. At least according to a comment here by a former Slack employee.

In my view, the dominant perspective currently is (b) and (c).

sure, let's frame everything in good vs bad, that's not limiting at all

Are legal bullies a net good or bad?