Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdiddly | Hacker News Reader

Not to be too blunt, but that's why they call it law enforcement. What's causing all the cognitive dissonance is the fact that law enforcement was summoned inappropriately -- i.e. on a an innocent person in a situation where no laws were broken and no enforcement was needed.

If the drug-lord whose assassins raped and killed your sister is confused and groggy in the middle of the night and gets shot accidentally or even "accidentally," there won't be any conflict in your mind. That's the kind of situation the process is designed for. Unfortunately it's also designed for a world where you can mostly trust what a 911 caller is saying. They'll have to tighten that up, especially after this incident. I just hope it doesn't get so bad that real victims have to beg and plead for 15 minutes and show two forms of ID and receive an auth code on their 2FA before a cop can show up to save them.

View on HN

I have a huge conflict in my mind.

I am a firm believer is due process and equal protection under the law for all. What you are suggesting is far from it, and a far cry from the ideal.

SWAT teams, as heavily armored as they are, are still police, serving under the motto of protect and serve. If armor and automatic weapons are necessary to fulfill that goal, so be it.

But SWAT teams are fundamentally not an extrajudicial force to kill people in the middle of the night.

Actually I agree, and I think most cops would agree with that too. One thing hindering that ideal is how police officers are trained to have a chickenshit mentality where no risk to an officer's safety is tolerated ever. In that philosophy the balance is tilted too far in favor of officer safety and away from public safety. Scour the news for any "hero" story. A hero never displays concern for his own safety, he acts out of concern for someone else's safety. (Remember heroes/heroism? So quaint!)

Nonetheless, and maybe I'm just jaded here, if the police show up anywhere, be it an Occupy protest or a carjacking, there is likely to be mayhem and bloodshed. They're a blunt tool with a single purpose. It's only after the smoke clears and the cuffs are on, that someone gets a formal legal proceeding. Cops always stand between you and a courtroom, in other words. Not sure I like it that way, but that's how it is.

>if the police show up anywhere, be it an Occupy protest or a carjacking, there is likely to be mayhem and bloodshed.

If you grew up in the US (I can't speak for other countries), I think most people, despite the media coverage, would say otherwise. There's way too many cops for this to even make sense. If even 1% of police interaction ended in a death, there would be literally millions of people dead by cop every year.

>chickenshit mentality where no risk to an officer's safety is tolerated ever.

Again, I'm not sure this is true. Are cops selfless superhuman crime fighting machines, charging heedlessly into danger? Of course not, and it's unreasonable to expect them to be. I would go so far as to argue we don't want heros. Heros are a band-aid fix, a substitute for good training and careful decisions made possible by always selfless, often reckless, decisions. We shouldn't be putting officers in a situation where they need to step up to become a hero.

Of course, there is the unpredictable event that necessitates a hero, but we should be working to reduces these edge cases.

I think we are waiting to hear: "and this culture of impunity and valuing their own lives above the lives of the people they swore an oath to protect needs to end and we need to re-train our forces and hold those who use deadly force accountable"

That would go further than making excuses for the rash thinking on the part of trigger-happy leo's.

The "swatter" should be charged with 2nd degree murder, minimum, but this particular instance is just the icing on a cake in which over 1000 people die every year from leo firearm discharge, and that is due to a culture within law enforcement that needs to CHANGE NOW. We have seen this coming for over 50 years, and it's OUT OF HAND at this point. It's past time for legislative actions to have taken place.

We are absolutely globally isolated in this regard (unless you count Duterte as good company and a supporter of the sort of society America should stand for.)

Of course. I think bodycams are a huge step in the right direction, in terms of holding police officers accountable for their actions whilst also protecting them from false claims.

Culture change is fundamentally slow, but I think process is being made. We're talking about a whole new generation of cop, from new supervisors to new codes of conduct and police union leadership.

The comparison to Duterte is unfair and minimizes the atrocities in the name of justice happening in the Philippines. The NYT has/had an excellent article, replete with photos, of the devastation. It is a whole order of magnitude more people in a much smaller nation.

>One thing hindering that ideal is how police officers are trained to have a chickenshit mentality where no risk to an officer's safety is tolerated ever.

Absolutely. And in spite of this zero tolerance, "officer safety over everything" mentality, they continue to use the PR crutch of being in "constant danger" without ever acknowledging the extreme mitigation tactics they employ against that danger, regardless of if it's real or imagined.

You can keep it, I don't want any part of what you're into. And that's not for lack of life experience with dangerous situations.

Wait what am I into?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com