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Comment by olingern | Hacker News Reader

I come from small town America and NYC, so I'm jaded. There are a lot of good cops out there who set out with good intentions, but I believe their training is inadequate. In my experience, they do not act as stewards of a community, but rather someone with power who is to be feared.

In regards to my comment of "most other countries," I believe 'most' could be changed to 'many'

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American police are corrupted by a catastrophically broken justice system that, in effect, makes cops judge, jury, and executioner. I call it the "martial law bubble" that surrounds each cop. That's bad enough but what makes it galling is how they expect you to be grateful and friendly when stopped and fined, questioned, etc.

But I honestly don't think its their fault. A working justice system would mean a) getting arrested is no big deal, and b) cops are held accountable for their excesses.

(The system is broken because of capacity, complexity of law, powerful police unions, and voter apathy and ignorance)

> I call it the "martial law bubble" that surrounds each cop.

Ironically, given the discussion about Japanese cops, I refer to it by a Japanese term: kirisute-gomen, "the privilege to cut and leave". If you were a commoner and offended a samurai, the samurai had the legal right to kill you with his sword and didn't even have to report it (hence "cut and leave".) Samurai also used live commoners as swordsmanship practice dummies, but this practice was nominally illegal (still rarely enforced though).

And that's what cops are in the USA: a special privileged warrior class with rights to use violence indiscriminately that commoners do not have.

Good thing they were denied carying swords after the Meiji Restoration then.

Yeah, I'm deliberately comparing modern police with conditions in feudal Japan for a reason :)

My knowledge of this era is limited to the 80's mini-series "Shogun", based on the book by James Clavell, but wow, I never made that connection before, thanks.

> That's bad enough but what makes it galling is how they expect you to be grateful and friendly when stopped and fined, questioned, etc.

Wow. You are right on the money. So well put and so succinct. This isn't just a problem with cops though. It's in the culture at large. People in power not only expect to hurt others and fuck them over, but also that others should be grateful for being fucked over. Got passed up for the promotion / raise and instead got more responsibility with no increase in pay? You should be thankful you still got a job. Got wrongfully arrested, charged, and offered a plea deal to go to jail for something you didn't do? You should be grateful for the 5 year prison deal. You'll get 30 years at trial. Oh you're innocent? We don't care. Got overcharged by a company for a bill that's not even in your name? You should be thankful you can spend two hours a day every day for two weeks on the phone trying to get the charges reversed before they send you to collections. Got invaded by the US and millions of your citizens slaughtered? You should be thankful and grateful for the US bringing "freedom" to your country. The "freedom" to thank the US for killing your family. In all of these cases and so much more, the victim is expected to be thankful to their perpetrator while the perpetrator is fucking over the victim. It's a huge part of American culture and the police are just one example of it.

> but rather someone with power who is to be feared

That's the core of police country idea.

Will training really turn assholes into stewards of a community?

It may alleviate some performance anxiety in a high pressure job with huge responsibilities, but is up against a range of management decisions like quota based policing and other systematic factors influencing policing away from stewardship in a community. Trying to reduce it to a single factor may be simplistic given the complexity of the problem.

It seems for the US it's not, there's groupthink that some citizens are the enemy and they're hungry for police blood. That's why they say "thin blue line" or "cops lives matter", and they aren't even being ironic.

People learn by example. Either you give the well thought out patterns of behaviour with training, or, they learn them in the field. So, with proper training, they would not necessarily have to have to mirror the learned bad habits of others.

Police have no such legal obligation to be stewards of the community, anymore than Google must be the champion of righteousness. From what do we assume that without incentive or structure that one day moral expectation is sufficient to bring forth the character and quality we expect?

Is this not similar to calling for more medical or legal ethics classes?

Police do have such a legal obligation. The whole point of a police force is to maintain public safety. You might argue that this has been corrupted into “arrest people” by quotas or bad culture or civil forfeiture or revenue-based policing or whatever, but their mission statement is fundamentally about keeping people safe. That’s totally different from a for-profit search engine.

Where does this legal obligation come from? State law? The constitution? Is the mission of an organization the slogan they put on cars or websites?

Expecting police to be stewards of the community is the same as expecting ICANN to be stewards of the web — it’s a lot of unchecked moral assumptions for how things are supposed to work, rather than structuring a result to happen. It’s also a failure to discuss the imperatives created by who feeds whom, and why moral presumption of police workings should matter in the face of that.

Americans believe it is the structure of their federal government which generates stressful imperatives for different bodies to behave “well”. What structure guides any faith or optimism that police will be stewards of the community?

Have American police been generating a lot of faith and optimism recently?

Are you citing the non-binding "protect and serve" motto, or something else? Enforcing the law isn't necessarily about keeping people safe - whether that's true depends on what the laws are.

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