Hacker News Reader

Comment by pennaMan | Hacker News Reader

LE, as far as the oficial legal standpoint, are nothing more than goverment thugs and enforcers. The notion that their basic duty is to protect the public is absurd but at the same time it is widley belived to be true, including by some naive LE agents themselves. And I'm not talking about the US, this is true virtually anywhere.

View on HN

For a different perspective, in the UK the approach taken to policing is (in theory) governed by the Peelian Principles [0]. None of the principles explictly mention protection of the public, but 5/9 of them do refer to the police force's relation to the rest of the population.

Principle 7 - ‘Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.’

[0] http://www.lacp.org/2009-Articles-Main/062609-Peels9Principa...

As far as I know, this is US-specific. For example in Germany, it is very specifically duty of the police to protect the rights of citizens, which includes their right to not be harmed (which also comes from the duty to uphold the law, which is typically being broken when people are harmed).

Not just US-specific, but anywhere where the police force believes themselves to be separate from the folks they are policing. The police force in the US arose from "slave patrols."

So in Germany, you might have "Germans policing Germans", but in the US it's basically "Whites policing Blacks".

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-origins-of-policing-in...

> "Germans policing Germans" vs. "Whites policing Blacks".

The German constitution is also very clear on this:

"Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. 2Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt."

https://dejure.org/gesetze/GG/1.html

"Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority."

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...

So human dignity is inviolable. Not "citizens", not "Germans", but "humans".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com