Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar hell. Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The issue is accountability. Police unions are much too strong, so the bad cops are reinstated even when they're on camera doing something heinous. How is the public supposed to feel about that?

The issue should be accountability. Police unions are a root cause of the problem. Instead, ordinary officers are being treated like the first five paragraphs of this story. The most popular slogan is "defund the police". There's people non-ironically advocating for 'abolishing prisons'.

This is why they're quitting, and this is why the drive to meaningfully reform police will be wasted this time around, too. It will be drowned in the consequences of the actions of radicals who push for simple solutions that are simply wrong, and all the nice middle-class folks from nice middle-class neighbourhoods who enable and support them, instead of calling them out on their bullshit.

> Instead, ordinary officers are being treated like the first five paragraphs of this story.

This should be an unsurprising reaction to there generally being minimal consequences for individual bad cops, though.

Sure. Unsurprising reactions all around. However, people who live in a city will generally have to deal with more serious consequences than people who cannot afford to live there, paid $37k to be spat on, abused and called a pig regardless of their individual actions. The latter can just quit. The former will hopefully live through a crime wave and urban decay unscathed.

> This is why they're quitting

The article doesn't say they're quitting because of slogans. From the article's citations, it sounds like they're quitting because they're essentially caught between a rock and a hard place; The public is angry with them because of little to no accountability and the police unions are too powerful and afraid to lose any bit of that power to be bothered to give an inch of accountability. It's an excruciating situation.

Shouldn't people call for more regulations against the Union instead of the entire department?

> despite most of them being professional and doing their jobs the best they can

If you stand in solidarity with those who flagrantly abuse their power, you're not doing your best.

> If you stand in solidarity with those who flagrantly abuse their power, you're not doing your best.

I've been thinking of this. And everyone on HN is not doing their best then.

Every tech employer that we all work for qualifies.

Not everyone works for an evil tech employer. HN certainly doesn't stand in solidarity with, say, facebook.

> despite most of them being professional and doing their jobs the best they can

I've gotta question your interactions with the police, if this is your stance. Maybe you live somewhere with a decent police force? But my experience is precisely the opposite of what you're describing here. I was arrested last year, during the George Floyd protests, for precisely nothing (I was recording the police beating a man in front of me). I was tackled to the ground by 3 police officers while my hands were over my head. Bloody and bruised, when I arrived at the police precinct, the ~20 officers standing out front mocked me, laughed at the fact that I was bloody. I said not one word.

Every officer I encountered that night was the antithesis of professional or "doing their best". They were goons and bullies.

With respect to the crime wave: crime is increasing across the US, regardless of political slant of the city. Crime is increasing in NYC, despite the NYPD being larger than the next 3 police forces in the US combined. Maybe raw spending / police presence isn't the only factor in crime statistics.

ETA: For whatever it's worth, my case was immediately thrown out in court, and the officer who arrested me is under investigation for misconduct.

The problem is that police have very little accountability to the citizens they are policing. I live in Minneapolis which has been at the center of these controversies, and the closest citizens get to influencing police policy is by electing the mayor who appoints the police chief who then (in theory) sets the policies. In practice, even if we elect a reform-minded mayor who appoints a similarly-minded chief who sets good policy it's up to the officers to follow that policy and they often tend to just ignore policies that they do not like.

Additionally, the police officers who work in the city do not live in the city and are much whiter and more conservative than the city's overall population (reminder that Minneapolis's current representative in the House of Representatives is Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant who is one of the most progressive members of the House). It should not be a surprise that the citizens of Minneapolis do not like people with a different cultural background applying force against them, all while we pay six figure salaries to them through our tax dollars.

>Guys, police are self-abolishing.

Do you think 2021 will end with less police in uniform than 2020? Do you think 2020 had less police in uniform than 2019?

Of course not. This is one of those "trend" stories that is basically inventing copy. Find isolated examples and propose a trend.

But if a police officer feels vilified or unfairly treated, blame the officers who grossly abuse the power society gave them, not the public. Blame unions and the knee-jerk circle-the-wagon attitude that defends these bad apples. If a group abides by and supports the bad apples, they are all bad apples.

>Do you think 2021 will end with less police in uniform than 2020? Do you think 2020 had less police in uniform than 2019?

In large cities run by liberal mayors/councils? I'm 100% certain.

>But if a police officer feels vilified or unfairly treated, blame the officers who grossly abuse the power society gave them, not the public. Blame unions and the knee-jerk circle-the-wagon attitude that defends these bad apples. If a group abides by and supports the bad apples, they are all bad apples.

No, they'll blame the abusers they see every day, quit, and won't police your streets. If you think they should be defunded/abolished/reduced anyway, it's a win-win.

> This is a completely rational reaction of people who feel they're being unfairly demonized as a group

That also explains the public backlash against police in the first place, doesn't it? We can't keep speaking with this perspective of police always being the good guys / bad guys and protesters / rioters always being the good guys / bad guys, otherwise we've just given up on any societal sense of right and wrong and all we're doing is picking sides to fight for the sake of it.

I don't disagree that this is not surprising; but no one really takes issue with the fact that the most of them are professional.

The issue is that the minority of bad cops are vigilantly protected.

The accountability for cops is almost non existant, and the power they hold is tremendous.

Anyone who genuinely thinks that the police aren't in many dimensions being "fairly demonized", seems to me, to be extremely likely to come from a well-to-do background.

I am white; spent my youth being a dirty hippy. I was endlessly harassed by cops who absoluted loved to wield their power to literally ruin your life.

As I've gotten older and more invisibly middle class, I no longer fear the police, but I have basically zero sympathy for them.

Once they stop protecting the bad cops, they will easily win over the hearts and minds of citizens.

Cops first. Seriously. If George Floyd (and countless other minorities who were unfairly demonized before and since) had gotten this respect, these protests, this demonization doesn't happen. Cops are the people in power, abusing that power. It is up to them to be the bigger people in this situation, to re-earn the trust they lost.

Also, this is an emotional reaction. A rational reaction would involve some sort of introspection, some sort of realization that there is a reason people feel the way they do.

Enjoy the crime wave seems similarly inflammatory and impolite, but I find HN moderation frequently falls on a certain "if you say something rude/inflammatory but phrase it a certain way it's okay" which drives me up the wall.

If by "HN moderation" you mean what the HN moderators do, that's not an accurate description either of our intentions or our practice. It's good to be careful with such perceptions as they are notoriously subject to sample bias. Lots of past explanation if anyone cares:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Yeah, as a meta comment, I've seen personal insults thrown around (including at me) that don't get flagged, but what does get flagged sometimes leaves me baffled.

There's inevitably a lot of randomness, given the quantity of things that get posted here. That is probably enough to explain what you're seeing. Flags are mostly by users; moderators don't see most of what gets posted here. We try to review all the flags but that doesn't help if a post doesn't get flagged in the first place.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. If it's something egregious, you can help by flagging it and/or letting us know at [email protected].

In any case, there's no consistency of moderation across all the posts, nor can there be. But certainly there's consistency of intent: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html