So you’ve made a definitive conclusion and will now approach information with this bias.
> At this point, you can turn on the news and the evidence is right there.
> If you see the abuses and think "well, they deserved it" or "ah it's a few bad apples" I'm not trying to speak to you. I don't think we'd really ever find common ground.
The media has a narrative. They push all anti-cop stories as part of their storyline.
Every single day there are cops putting their lives on the line to do good. And you will never hear a single story of their heroics. The coverage is nearly 100% negative on the national level.
I’ve personally dealt with horrible cops that should absolutely be fired and heroes that deserve community recognition for their bravery.
I agree with you on one thing: we’d likely never find common ground. I cannot respect people that fall for the news storylines hook, line and sinker.
You claim, without proof.
> They push all anti-cop stories as part of their storyline.
You claim without proof.
> Every single day there are cops putting their lives on the line to do good.
Every day there are cops killing Americans - at ten times the rate of any other country.
> And you will never hear a single story of their heroics.
This is provably false.
Go to any news site you like. Search for "hero cop". You will find endless stories.
Simple test: will it hurt more _overall_ to suddenly lose them or keep them?
> You can turn on the news and the evidence is right there.
Selection bias is huge - not making the news are the vast, vast, majority of daily interactions that are net positives for society.
I’m not saying everything is perfect, but talking about “the police” as if they are a monolith in a country of hundreds of millions spread across 50 states and innumerable local communities is never going to be a good starting point for analysis.
Suddenly is doing a lot of the work here. Can police be unbundled over the course of years and result in an overall net good? Emphatically yes. We should examine the forces that prevent such an unbundling from taking place and work toward rendering them impotent.
"Suddenly"'s inclusion or exclusion dramatically changes the answer so it needs a bit more justification than it currently has.
Do you have proof or some source to support this idea?
So everything or nothing? Sounds like a false dilemma.
Another problem with this decision-making approach is that anything can be un/justified simply by changing the unspoken timescale at which you measure outcomes.
On a short timescale, a knife stabbed into my gut should stay, because removing it will cause blood-loss.
However on a longer timescale where I'm in the hands of some doctors with bandages, it should absolutely be removed...
Someone suggests you'd be better in a house.
"Imagine where I would be without the tent! This is a thought experiment to test the statement of 'this tent being overall bad'. Therefore I won't move."
Police don't do everything right. But if you think that _everybody_ who had a bad interaction did nothing wrong, well, that's just foolish.
These are not equivalent. Police who do bad things not only cause extreme harm, but terrorize people whose protection is the whole reason we gave police the monopoly on violence in the first place. This is not a "two sides to a story" situation. This is a situation where one side has all of the power and far, far too much documented abuse of it.
Not only to people in their daily business as police but also in court
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/us/police-reports-lying-video...
https://www.rosenbergperry.com/blog/can-police-lie-to-you/
They literally have their own term for lying under oath because its so common: testilying
https://justice.gawker.com/ask-an-anonymous-cop-how-often-do...
The police kill roughly 1100 people every year.
The entire job of police departments is to interact with people who are breaking the law.
If 0.25% of police arrests turned violent, that means police have roughly 25,000 violent arrest incidents each year. This is a number I am coming up with on my own, but if you actually grew up in a bad neighborhood you will see this as a conservative estimate.
So, if you're looking at this from a raw numbers "how many people die" perspective -- it's actually low.
All that said: cops aren't perfect. I have had bad experiences with them. I think some changes need to be made.
But the idea that there is an epidemic of police killings is not supported by the numbers.
With how often the police lie, it is foolish to give them any benefit of the doubt.
American cops terrified me with their aggressive ineptitude and I'm a polite older white guy with an English accent with short hair and a jacket. They never fucked me up, but I certainly saw them fuck up loads of other people, accept bribes, refuse to investigate blatant drug houses for years, and the like.
It took me quite a while to understand that cops here, while they do make mistakes sometime, are professional people with a sense of humor who aren't interested in displays of power.
I just don't understand it. If you see the abuses and think "well, they deserved it" or "ah it's a few bad apples" I'm not trying to speak to you. I don't think we'd really ever find common ground. I'm really trying to ask such questions to those of you out there who still seem surprised when the police do something bad, or those who just claim to be unaware. Do you or do you not talk to people who claim police are abusive? If you do talk to them, do you just not believe them? How many of such people have you talked to, and after talking to this many people, how many more people would have to confirm such abuses before you believed them? When you hear such stories, how do you discount them, or otherwise minimize them to the degree that your beliefs are not swayed?