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Comment by virmundi | Hacker News Reader

Generally not. Unfortunately civil forfeiture is a thing. There are many stories, frankly 1 is more than enough, where people are driving with cash because either they, or their business partner, prefers/only-can-take cash. The police say you are a criminal intent on an illicit transaction. They seize your money. They hold the money on separate charges than you. If you lack the wherewithal to sue for your money back, you forfeit it. The money is then spend on things like guns, tanks, and margarita machines.

While this single link does not argue for all the expenditures, it does show the corruption in the system. https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/06/05/...

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>> Genuine question: is getting pulled over in the US really that hazardous that people have to record it in case things go wrong?

> Generally not. Unfortunately civil forfeiture is a thing. There are many stories, frankly 1 is more than enough, where people are driving with cash...

Right now, I think people are more concerned with getting shot or roughed up by the police than with getting their money stolen by them.

As someone who is from a western European country, this sounds completely messed up.

If you are scared of law enforcement (first not to get shot, but also to not have your stuff stolen), how can you ever live comfortably?

I live in a pretty gentrified and wealthy area and when police show up it looks likes when a shark is moving near fish. The place usually heavily depopulates just by seeing them. I don't mean when they show up to an event either. I've seen them casually walking down the street and there's just a wave of everyone coincidentally realizing they have other places to be.

The only regular exception I see to this is when there are large crowds like concerts or public events where the cops are standing guard. Even then there's a relatively large space between the cops and the crowd.

I guess the answer is that you live comfortably until you see cops

That's all sorts of insane. I have a few really fun photos of police officers in London during Pride this year — rainbows painted on their arms and/or faces, posing for photos with visitors, etc. That's very much my expectation for how police should act.

There's still places that happens in the US. There's outlier cops who still get to know their community, people who think cops can do no wrong even when watching a video of a cop murdering someone, or if you're in a small town and socially accepted.

On the whole though it seems that trust in police has gone down since the 90s. Look at popular cop procedurals from then like Law and Order. I watched a few episodes and youd see little things that showed the cultural view at the time. For instance in one episode, they portrayed a new detective as a bad partner and hopelessly naive because he wanted a warrant before breaking open someone's car so that the evidence was admissable. The episode painted it as him getting in the way of catching that criminal because the cops just _knew_ he was at fault and they were cops so of course they were doing the right thing.

Every episode I saw had large violations of rights bit portrayed the cops as the good guys and I don't think you'd see that sort of portrayal on any modern US media

> I live in a pretty gentrified and wealthy area and when police show up it looks likes when a shark is moving near fish. The place usually heavily depopulates just by seeing them. I don't mean when they show up to an event either. I've seen them casually walking down the street and there's just a wave of everyone coincidentally realizing they have other places to be.

There's also the fact that being near police means you're more likely to get into trouble, even if you're just a normal person doing normal things. Sort of like how everyone who drives regularly commits minor ticket-worthy infractions, even if you're a good driver. It's super-uncomfortable to have a police car behind you, because you know everything you're doing is probably getting analyzed for opportunities to punish you.

Well, for some perspective, it's not just the police in the USA that shoot people is it:

https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistic...

"The US has one of the highest rates of death by firearm in the developed world, according to World Health Organization data. Our calculations based on OECD data from 2010 show that Americans are 51 times more likely to be killed by gunfire than people in the United Kingdom."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/06/5558618...

"The U.S. gun violence death rate is also higher than nearly all countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including many that are among the world's poorest."

The numbers are less exceptional when suicide is factored out. Where other people eat pills, Americans eat a gun.

Does the NRA have a mailing list where these kinds of "arguments" are promoted?

Not being facetious here, I'm merely asking because 1-2 weeks ago somebody else made exactly the same point in another US gun-violence discussion I participated in.

And just like you, he didn't support his claim with any numbers.

But even at first glance, this argument does not check out at all. It basically argues that all the extra gun violence in the US is the result of people buying guns only for the purpose of committing suicide.

Yeah, no, not buying that. Suicide is an issue, but it's not that big of an issue that it alone accounts for the massive gun violence outlier the US represents among developed countries.

Especially in the context of prescription meds also being way more easily and readily available in the US (opiate crisis) than many other places, I find it hard to believe that all US Americans simply prefer firearms to pills for their "suicidal needs".

The rule of thumb is that about two-thirds of gun-related deaths in the US are suicides, another third are murders, and a small percentage are accidental. There are still more murders than there ought to be, but the statistics that make the US look like Pablo Escobar Columbia typically are counting people offing themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...

> but the statistics that make the US look like Pablo Escobar Columbia typically are counting people offing themselves.

I don't see a problem with that as long as the statistics for all the countries are handled that way, the datasets still remain comparable.

Or are you suggesting other countries don't account for the suicides, yet that's the only real difference?

What about the argument that people killing themselves with firearms, due to easier access to them, might have gotten proper help elsewhere and survived? In that context, even these suicide deaths can be considered victims of the failed firearms regulation.

A loaded firearm is quite a low barrier of entry for any person in emotional distress. Most other methods of suicide require at least some level of research, planning and preparation and often still fail.

Restricting firearms because people might hurt themselves and restricting them because they might hurt others are two very different things, and it is important to point out that the number include voluntary self harm.

Also, the method of suicide people use tends to be highly cultural, even with gender differences. In France, the methods of suicide primarily used by men - guns and hanging - tends to be much more deadly than the ones used by women - medication overdose, causing women to have a higher rate of suicide but men representing the majority of deaths.

> Restricting firearms because people might hurt themselves and restricting them because they might hurt others are two very different things

The regulation resulting from the needs for these kinds of restrictions is exactly the same.

Firearm permits often have mandatory hours of safety training attached, that's also to protect people from themselves and drive home the point that this is a dangerous device they own and handle.

The same applies to drivers licenses, these have mandatory training requirements not just to protect other people on the street, but also the person driving the car and getting the permit.

In that context, it is completely irrelevant why you regulate something when both are valid reasons for regulating something, protecting people from themselves, by requiring them to show they are actually able and reliable to handle a dangerous device, and protecting others from people who handle their dangerous devices irresponsibly by requiring at least a basic amount of training and competency.

Do you have statistics for this? My feeling is that Americans would eat a gun much more frequently than others eat pills: easy, fast and non-revocable.

Unfortunately the statistics are extremely complicated (ie it's well and truly apples to oranges with no end to the confounding variables), and the subject is so politicized that even academics can't seem to be relied on (Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government, https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2016.2). Regarding the linked study, note that even they couldn't manage not to be biased - they're supposedly running a neutral psychology study, yet they only manage to pick a single politically polarizing topic to test!

From a quick look at Wikipedia (not exactly the gold standard of research, but hey) the US has a truly astounding suicide-by-firearm rate compared to the UK (7.1 vs 0.15), but if we only compare homicide-by-firearm it's actually even worse than before (4.86 vs 0.06 -> ~80x higher, but it's unreliable because we're dividing by such a small number). But then our income inequality is at least a bit higher than the UK (41% vs 34% Gini coefficient), we certainly have substantially worse social safety nets across the board, and we have serious systemic socioeconomic issues in a downright embarrassing number of locations.

But to me at least, by far the most important factor is one I can't easily turn up reliable statistics on - gangs, cartels, and other organized crime. Having lived in some questionable areas, I've seen first hand that in many cases criminal groups will engage in conflict with one another and not intentionally target innocent bystanders. I used to live in an area where there were nightly shootings (!!!) that I could hear from my house, but it was a seemingly mutual exchange of gunfire. I have no idea how you're supposed to account for that sort of thing in an analysis, but it seems clear to me that it must be accounted for if you're going to attempt to claim that it's reasonably unbiased.

Its so frustrating when science become politicized. Every "statistics on guns" report is either "America is less safe than Somalia" or "America gun owners are the safest people in the world". It's infuriating how politics an run math and science

If you're talking about suicide rates in general, numbers can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

TL;DR. The US seems to be slightly above the average EU suicide rate, but below several individual European countries.

The US spans a continent and is hard to easily generalize. Local and state laws are highly variable and complicate the equation. Based on where you live geographically and your ethnicity, you may have pleasant or completely horrible experiences. Since each state is almost like a european country in many regards, laws governing police can change just by crossing state lines.

The vast majority of "bad cop" stories come from the corrupt good old southern boys or inner city issues. Your average American isn't terribly worried about getting shot or money being confiscated.

If this is so, then your media is doing huge damage to American society by reporting it the way it does. There's a difference between "some policemen in some specific states/cities tend to behave badly" vs. "police in general is your enemy", and the latter seems to be the common narrative.

It's a bit of both. While there are certainly jurisdictions that are quite well behaved, there are also serious systemic problems. The aforementioned civil forfeiture is legal everywhere, so even if some departments don't engage in it there's still a very serious problem. As for other bad behavior? Income inequality, poverty, a lack of social programs, and other socioeconomic issues lead to (IMHO) fairly predictable systemic problems in the affected areas.

  your media is doing huge damage to American society by reporting it the way it does

Absolutely. The concept is referred to as "if it bleeds, it leads" (in terms of coverage). Media routinely will repeat news hourly of a 3-person shooting 2 blocks away from a school out of state yet completely ignore a 20-homicide-attempt weekend in Chicago, because that's how the narrative goes.

As someone from an Eastern European country, this sounds completely messed up. I've been stopped many times by police in Poland, had many interactions with them outside of car context, and I've never had a single unpleasant interaction. The worst one I had was when the officer started asking me questions before introducing himself by full name and rank - and I refused to answer anything until he did. He grumbled a bit but he did produce the ID and badge - then I answered his questions and he let me go. But at no point ever I was worried about my safety.

Poland is a largely white homogeneous country.

In the US, different people have different experiences with police.

Blacks and Latinos in particular are disproportionately high recipients of negative police interactions, caused by a history mutual distrust between members of those groups and police.

In general in the USA, if you're white (or Asian in some communities) and middle class or above, you generally have nothing to fear in a traffic stop -- and you're more likely to vote... so the candidates you elect aren't worried so much about what happens to those other people.

I don't think civil forfeiture is what people concerned to record police encounters have in mind. That is, I don't expect that video evidence is likely to decide such cases. What, exactly, would you be looking for? In the example you mention, where a sum of cash is seized on the presumption that it's drug money or whatever, the point of dispute (i.e. whether this is a reasonable presumption) will not be settled by video.

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