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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

There is a vast gulf between 'plainclothes detectives' and 'secret police'.

Ummm...I don't know if 'vast' is what I would use there, but there's a difference.

The difference is that a secret police is used by a dictatorship to keep the dictator in power by systematically attacking the opposition and any grass roots movements.

Plainclothes detectives are simply police that are not in uniform ('undercover'), they are still part of the regular police force.

Obviously not to the same extent but, in that general area, you seem to have described what’s going on there. The police there are a mafia and people who look to damage them have ended up dead.

>The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it. And they were certainly not created to promote justice. They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.

Really not that different.

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17505/police_and_poor_...

> They were created to protect the new form of wage-labor capitalism that emerged in the mid- to late-19th century from the threat posed by that system’s offspring, the working class.

Nonsense, the police were not created with that goal in mind. The Romans had police, plenty of European cities had police forces prior to the 18th century (see Rembrandt's painting 'the Nightwatch' for some proof of that) and so does every other normal society today, even the ones that are not dictatorships. Also, you've just made the leap from 'secret police' to 'plainclothes detectives' to 'any police'.

The linked article is clearly pushing an agenda and in the process does a lot of historical revision.

Police is a normal and useful component of society, the kind of excesses that Americans have to contend with are a direct result of a society that is broken in many ways and for which there are no easy fixes.

If you let the regular police get away with enough bad stuff over time the good guys will leave the force and more bad elements will enter. Keep this going for a couple of decades and you get Baltimore. But it need not be that way. Fixing this will be hard though, they are pretty strongly entrenched now and it will take major force to get rid of them, similar to how hard it is to get rid of the Mafia in Italy.

>Nonsense, the police were not created with that goal in mind. The Romans had police, and so does every other normal society, even the ones that are not dictatorships.

So, every 'normal' society doesn't have a ruling class that uses police to protect its assets from the working class?

>Also, you've just made the leap from 'secret police' to 'plainclothes detectives' to 'any police'.

Don't see the contention here.

>If you let the regular police get away with enough bad stuff over time the good guys will leave the force and more bad elements will enter. Keep this going for a couple of decades and you get Baltimore.

Replace Baltimore with 99% of the police agencies in the US (can't speak for other countries), and I'd agree.

Detectives that just wear civilian clothes aren't quite undercover though. Much of what they do will involve identifying themselves as police (which is not a cover, it's fact).

In the US at least, "undercover" implies that they are not identifying themselves as police.

Right, sorry about that, so strike the 'undercover' bit, too late to edit.

I mean, there's stuff like this https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/12/undercover-o...

I see a difference between the Stasi and the US police currently, but its not like the US police don't exhibit many of the same behaviors. In a related article referencing the same group of police here, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/us/baltimore-police-depar...

That description of jump-out squads, where you never know when some random guy on the street is gonna detain you and arrest/beat/steal from you sounds a lot like the descriptions of secret police in other countries. There was also that black site in chicago where the police disappeared people

I also don't think a dictatorship is a necessary component for calling some group a secret police. An oligarchy and even a representative democracy can do that just as well. Its not like we don't already have secret courts. The apparatus exists for this already

Contradiction by mere statement. Explain why you would want to at a minimum intentionally create ambiguity as to whether one is a police officer, one's name, and what organization one works for - keeping them a "secret", if you will.

If you add a comment really late in a thread then it usually pays off to first read the other replies.

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