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Comment by mitochondrion | Hacker News Reader

Besides Donald Trump, there isn't and hasn't been even the slightest possibility of a meaningful [word used neutrally] political upheaval, and if Mueller gets him like he should, there never will be again.

The prime differences between European and American police are:

1) structural differences in that American police forces are semi-atonomous entities with poor command-control response down the chain (federal, state, county, city, town) whereas European police are basically all federal employees subject directly to central command and monitored as such, and

2) American police have a much longer history of dealing with, and adapting their policies to the governance of, high-violence subpopulations like (southern) Italians, the Irish, and Africans.

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> meaningful [word used neutrally] political upheaval

There's the potential for a lot more people to get killed, now the tactic of driving cars into crowds has been borrowed from Islamist terrorist by white supremacists.

> governance of, high-violence subpopulations like (southern) Italians, the Irish, and Africans.

There's your racism and colonialism right there. You could call it hegemonic and imperialist as well if you like.

Italians (of any geographic orientation), the Irish, and "Africans" (Africa is a huge continent, not a country, and people from that continent cannot meaningfully be compared to people from small European countries) are not "high violence subpopulations".

> Besides Donald Trump, there isn't and hasn't been even the slightest possibility of a meaningful [word used neutrally] political upheaval

Be reminded that we had a revolution less than two and a half centuries ago.

And a very tumultuous last few decades. I think that MLK represented a very real possibility of meaningful political upheaval.

> 2) American police have a much longer history of dealing with, and adapting their policies to the governance of, high-violence subpopulations like (southern) Italians, the Irish, and Africans.

This is obviously true. The current character of professional, paramilitary police in the USA is traceable in no small part to slave patrols.

Another difference is that the command structure of American police is different even than other common law countries - police (as distinct from sheriffs) are ranked in a paramilitary totem rather than a constabulary structure, have wide discretion in contrary to Peelianism, and in some cases are afforded greater arrest powers than the citizenry at large.

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