It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police work which was more my point; lots of people make excuses for the excesses of these systems based on this sort of "98%" (or whatever big number) argument; mostly those excuses are pure fertilizer.
Good people don't rob their neighbors because they're "having a bad day." They're shitty people. And no, poverty doesn't excuse it. People in Bangladesh, where I'm from, are vastly poorer. If poverty caused crime, they'd go around stealing, joining gangs, etc. But mostly they don't. In Bangladeshi villages, crime is lower than in U.S. cities. And when they do those things, nobody hesitates to call them shitty people!
I'm extremely sympathetic to police reform, because I think even shitty people don't deserve to be abused by the state. But let's not mince words here.
> It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police work which was more my point
That may be your point, but I wasn't talking about pulling people over for speeding. My point was in the context of this article, which is about someone who was prosecuted for brutally raping and murdering a woman.
> but I wasn't talking about pulling people over for speeding.
Neither was I. I was talking about the majority of all the work they do.
Everyone can identify clearly horrible behavior, and often it is police who have to deal with this as part of their job. This is difficult and unfortunate, but it is not the defining characteristic of the work. Pretending that it is in order to somehow excuse bad behavior on their part doesn't do anyone favors.
Fertilizer is good and useful (it helps plants grow); what you're talking is raw sewage, complete with draino and hastily-disposed medication.
But randomly pick out some sentencing hearings one day at your local federal court. They’ll go over the rap sheet of people who actually go to prison. It’s eye opening.
You can even see this in the criminal justice advocacy materials if you read carefully. I love the ACLU but if you read beyond the headline in many cases it’s quite revealing. I remember a case a few years ago where the headline was some “child” was imprisoned simply for being at a scene where a pizza delivery guy was murdered in broad daylight. Turns out he was actually in a gang, who murdered the guy in cold blood, and the legal theory is that the cops can’t prove which kid actually fired the shots. You can find the legal theory compelling (and I do) while acknowledging that this is the kind of shit that turns up even when social justice types are trying to pick impact cases.
Or heck George Floyd. I think the media overlooked a really important angle on this story that would have spoke to religious people. Floyd was a guy who spent most of his life being a pretty bad person: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-us-news-ap-top-new...
But he had found Jesus, he was turning his life around and reaching out to kids, and when Derek Chauvin murdered him he cut short what could have been a path to redemption. Reflexively saying “criminals don’t deserve to be murdered” when Floyd’s background comes up is a tautology. Sure. But does pretending that stuff never happened help you understand the real human story of Floyd, Chauvin, and the people in that community? Why making progress on criminal justice reform is so hard even as it’s extremely necessary? Is your phat dismissal and reduction of people to a demons and angels binary persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you?