I was with you until you used the inflammatory ACAB term. It’s incredibly offensive and doesn’t help your argument.

Of course it is offensive. But so are all the "cops" who follow the Korpsgeist and keep their mouths shut when they see their colleagues openly break the law. Or those that spend 80% of their work time on "traffic stops" aka harassing Black people and other minorities.

Remember George Floyd or all the others who died under suspicious circumstances without a bystander live-streaming their deaths.

Observation: Your profile says: You call it "alt-left", I proudly call it "Antifa".

Attack the argument, not the person making it.

Where was the attack? Does mschuster91 consider being associated with antifa (that's how I interpret it) an "attack"?

How is it relevant?

How is it not relevant?

It should not matter if one is on the right, center or left end of the spectrum to recognize that police should be an instutition that is accepted by all members of society - and that in most Western countries, public distrust in police is only growing over the last years due to (severe) misconduct, incompetence, selective enforcement and a lot of other problems.

Of course, as someone associating with the far left side of politics and being politically active in general, I may be a bit more opinionated than many other people - but that fact alone is sad, given how important governmental institutions are for our daily lives.

Beyond that - did you disagree with me showing that part of your profile? Did you feel like your privacy was being violated, or something like that?

Picking details from their profile is an attempt to discredit them without addressing their message. It’s a distraction at best, deceitful at worst.

They could be the stupidest idiot and still be right occasionally, and vice versa. So if you have issues with the point they are making, engage with the point instead of looking for dog whistles.

Also, seriously, you have to be in the US for antifa to be considered a bad thing somehow. I thought we decided back in the 1940s that we were all anti-fascists.

>Of course it is offensive. But so are all the "cops" who follow the Korpsgeist and keep their mouths shut when they see their colleagues openly break the law.

I'm going to go out on a whim and say you wouldn't be comfortable saying that all black people are bastards because they don't stand out against their peers.

What about this cop who rescues a 9 year old kidnapped child?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jzHi6Xs0Qc

If they looked the other way while fellow cops violated peoples’ rights then they’re still a piece of shit, even if they also did their job and saved a kidnapped kid.

Counterpoint: it's not offensive at all and helps lots of people to understand the inherent problems with policing.

It is offensive in the sense that most people don't like being called bastards, and it doesn't "[help] lots of people to understand the inherent problems with policing" because it is just a heightened way of saying "I think cops are bad". There's no information in it, just opinion. The idea that making a strong emotive statement and assuming your interlocutor is going to fill in all the reasoned arguments behind it is somehow brave or worthwhile is, I think, a problem with a lot of modern discussion.

> It is offensive in the sense that most people don't like being called bastards

Their employment in a bastardizing profession is entirely voluntary, and they can forego that employment in favor of earning an honest living at their leisure.

Well said!

That's a critical point in the discussion, this is a job is a voluntary occupation. Nobody forced them to take the position.

At anytime they can quit and find other employment, but all it seems to often that most are complacent and complicit in the terms of their employment. Boss says do this, this and that, and they do it lockstep.

There should be more discussion on the policy and procedures they use. i.e. "broken windows policy", "stop and frisk policy", "Tuesdays & Thursday" [ I have experienced this one personally, in New York city there is a known tactic that nyc police undercover (plain clothes officers) would stalk the streets harassing citizens in the name of crime prevention[Washington Heights, which is north of Harlem], and if you're darker skin, or just in a irradiated mood for being harassed weekly by these "crime stoppers", you can find yourself in handcuffs, and the drama that follows it.]

Again there are lots of people who say " but, but the police are there to protect you" or "if your not doing anything wrong you have nothing to be afraid of" when the cold hard truth is, it's selective enforcement of laws and selective outrage on "blue crime" that creates these false narratives. Case in point, the policing in Witchta, KA is different from Las Vegas, NV or Los Angeles, CA or NYC. But those differences do not green light racist or elitist policy that protect chosen few communities and while systematically injuring the majority of the other communities. [i.e. Greenwich Village vs. Harlem NYC, this is small atom of the picture of disfunction that is NYC, that I am trying to relate.]

Respect for your fellow human should be transparent and universal, Dr. King's speech "I have a dream" is achievable, but we're not there yet.

I often wonder if it's capitalism in the US that keeps Dr. Kings dream just that a dream...

Policing as a concept? Because my local bobbies are stand up folk.

So? How is that relevant to this discussion? You're the first person bringing the phrase up.

Time and time again this kind of civility check, often arbitrary, reinforces the existing social order and the everyday violence underneath it. But that's okay because if you don't pass the civility check, you are deemed undeserving of humanity.

What are you, a bootlicker?

I feel like this perspective comes from not having coming face to face with the nihilistic, sociopathic behavior of a decent percent of the underclasses. Some people don’t understand anything but immediate pain. It’s tragic, the life circumstances that got them to that point, but that’s where they are. Maybe we can do things to prevent more kids from growing up into that. But right now, millions of good people, who can’t afford to move to a nice suburb far away from the problem, need cops who are willing to bring that pain, and if that doesn’t work, lock the criminals up until they’re old enough to be docile.

So the job of police is (or at least should include) not crime fighting, but beating some sense into the underbelly of society?

You talk about preventing kids from growing up and becoming bad people, but consider what it does to a kid (or any person for that matter) to see the government only interact with anyone through violence. Is that not going to exacerbate the problem?

incarceration rates in the US have been higher than anyone else by a huge margin for decades. it doesn't help anyone. it keeps people, families, communities perpetually in poverty.

> I feel like this perspective comes from not having coming face to face with the nihilistic, sociopathic behavior of a decent percent of the underclasses.

I got more experience in that than one might believe on a tech forum, from working as a bartender in soddy half-casino half-bar locations.

The entire point of dismantling and rebuilding police from scratch obviously includes creating actually sustainable structures to help people with issues: expanding mental health care access, housing-first programs, financial/food aid and safe injection sites would be the top priorities.

Someone with mental health issues and a drug addiction on top isn't going to get helped by getting arrested and thrown into jail repeatedly, and yet that seems to be the common approach to such people worldwide.

My suspicion is that society would be much nicer if we could find a way to reign in the nihilistic, sociopathic behavior of the upper classes much more than the lower ones.

> But right now, millions of good people, who can’t afford to move to a nice suburb far away from the problem, need cops who are willing to bring that pain, and if that doesn’t work, lock the criminals up until they’re old enough to be docile.

The cops bring that pain indiscriminately. The people who can't move away get it every bit as much as the sociopaths, maybe more so... because unlike the sociopaths, some instinct of theirs is that they should be safe for being innocent, and so do less to avoid interactions with cops.

The cops don't even help much when their attention accidentally falls on the sociopaths. Far from prosecuting and deterring the crimes that impact those "who can't move away", they invariably target drug crimes. Why? Because it's free cash. There are no amounts of cash that are so low that they don't invite civil forfeiture. Or for that matter, no sorts of valuables... jewelry, electronics, just whatever. If the cops only had sailing ships and eyepatches, they'd meet every criteria there is to become classical pirates. (Funny, but civil forfeiture law seems to originate in laws much like the letters of marquee nation-states used to issue...)

They perform no investigations, save those obligated in obvious homicides. None for larceny, petty or gross. Often, they'll only take reports of such things when victims require it for insurance claims, but then only begrudgingly and only because too many accusations of refusing to take reports is likely to stir up shit at the state capitol. They do not patrol, and if you see a car out there that looks like it might be patrolling it's more likely it's just out there trying to ambush someone for that sweet, sweet civil forfeiture money.

For some very vast majority of the public, if the cops disappeared tomorrow, nothing would change at all for better or worse. And that could continue for as long as no one realized they were gone (the panic is what could cause chaos, not the "lack of deterrence" that some would expect).

The British police (apart from the metropolitan police) are just fine thank you very much.

Please don't try and generalise problems from (parts of) the USA to the entire world.

I'm not even American, I'm German. Our police are better than in the US, but still nowhere near the quality one generally observes in your police officers. IIRC, you Brits run a completely different, community-based approach, in contrast to almost anywhere else. And unlike even us Germans, there are barely any guns, which is a serious game-changer in how cops can interact with citizens safely.

> The British police (apart from the metropolitan police) are just fine thank you very much.

They are really not. The whole thing is dubious and the several recents scandals in local police forces show it (the latest example being the chief constable of the Devon and Cornwall police being suspended for misconduct a couple of days ago).

I do agree that it is still way better than in the US, in that you don’t expect to be killed just or having interacted with a cop and they are not vengeful thugs.

There is always room for improvement, but there is a generally good culture and processes with no obvious low hanging fruit for improvement.

> The British police (apart from the metropolitan police) are just fine thank you very much.

That the phrase "All Cops Are Bastards" originated in England suggests otherwise.

The British police don't do anything.

They arrest people for offensive Facebook and Twitter posts.

police behave essentially the same problematic way in france, germany and a lot more countries

English police are very much not fine.

Maybe you’re thinking of the fine upstanding members of the Greater Manchester Police who destroyed evidence and did not turn over evidence to the prosecution (to provide to the defence) which have cost Andrew Malkinson 17 years of his life: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/26/appeal-court...

Or are you perhaps thinking of the upstanding members of the South Yorkshire Police involved in the disastrous crowd control and subsequent cover up of said incompetence around the Hillsborough incident?

It seems unlikely that Northern Ireland’s police services are fine, either, given that sectarian violence and military involvement rampant in the Troubles (caused mostly by hard-liners and reciprocal incidents, and the Iron Lady’s stance helped everything as much as anything she ever did, which is to say not at all), but that may have changed since the Good Friday Accords took effect. It may also not have changed, given that sectarianism is still fairly rampant and the DUP are acting like spoiled children.

Maybe the Welsh and Scottish police are fine, but I am sure that a few minutes of searching could find examples of institutional issues for both of them.

What do you think listing exceptions proves?

When someone says X has Y property they don't normally mean it has Y property by definition or law of physics, they mean that almost all instances of X have Y property, to the point that you can effectively treat Xs as all being Ys and you're unlikely to run in to something in your life that contradicts this.

It's like saying "trans peoples aren't mass murderers". Yes, there may be an exception, but for pretty much all practical purposes it's true.

I think you misunderstand the exceptions that I listed. These are not examples of "bad officers", but entirely bad departments. Your original claim was that British police (excepting the Met) are 'just fine'.

They’re not, and pretending that they are is disingenuous. Compared to American police services, they may seem fine. And the nominal theory of policing in Britain (Peelian principles) is more sound than the theory of policing in America…but that does not mean that police forces in the UK are free from power-trippers, abusers, and even systemic bias against whole classes of UK citizens and residents.

Thats not an entirely bad department, that's a number of police officers in a department at a particular time who fucked up in a particular way. And honestly, "fucks up crowd control and covers it up" is, as far as examples of bad behavior, unimpressive.

UK police also tend to improve and institutionally learn over time as we get inquests and some of the recommendations get implemented.

If an attempt at a counterexample has to go back 18 years then for all practical purposes we can round that to fine.

Despite the article is on US data, it is no different in other countries, which many of them don't have the structures regularly held responsible for in the US. It is by the nature of the very system we have in common; central government. Law enforcement is primary goal of police, not crime prevention, it is nuanced and magnified in practice by the sophistication of our societies and more grift nature of everyday violent crimes.

I find it amazing that the police of a given city will protest anything they think is unfair refusing to work. How is this not armed mutiny?

"Become"? Did US law enforcement ever "serve & protect" the people? SCOTUS forceably rejected that theory.

The entertaining book Seattle Justice details how Seattle's police was conceived to protect business interests and quickly morphed into a protection racket. With drugs, gambling, and sex trafficking as side hustles. Adorable!

I now assume that's the norm (in the west).

The stated purpose of our "well armed miltias" was to repel slave rebellions (in response to Haiti as well as some domestic agitators).

The job of sheriffs et al was to catch slaves.

The job of Texas Rangers was to exterminate the Comanche.

This is just what I remember from popular media. I'm sure an expert has many more examples.

Sheriff comes from shire reeve in the UK, was their entire job keeping villeins down?