Hacker News Reader

Comment by alharith | Hacker News Reader

Caused 670,000 to uphold the law and prevent us from inching that much closer to anarchy. That's the invisible benefit to most. Soon as criminals can figure out the law enforcement's cost-benefit ratio, they will start exploiting it, and there's too many examples of this to count.

View on HN

I'm sure the homeowner who had their entire house destroyed to catch a petty thief appreciated the police's efforts to save him from anarchy...by essentially being anarchists themselves.

Even if you follow this logic and believe it to be true, the police decided that putting an innocent homeowner out of a house and over half a million bucks, plus the cost of all the officers spectating, and the cost of rolling out a tank, was worth it to recover a few dollars of lost income for Walmart.

You don’t see any possible middle ground between “let criminals run rampant” and “LARP your favorite action movie”? No room to, say, wait the guy out or talk him down before you systematically destroy someone’s house? Even though not immediately resorting to military-levels of violence works better and cheaper in most other countries?

A gang of guys with weapons and a tank destroyed the home of a family who did nothing wrong, offering no compensation or apology afterward. And the shoplifter is the bad guy who society needs to be protected from?

If "upholding the law" means we create yet another innocent victim who is actually worse off than any of the previous victims, what's the point? If the government is that unaccountable, isn't that essentially anarchy? They're only getting away with it because you can't win a fight with them, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com