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Comment by viburnum | Hacker News Reader

The police almost only abuse very poor people. Eliminating poverty with redistribution and active labor market policies would mean fewer targets. Better housing and land use policies would help by allowing people to live in mixed communities rather than concentrating poor people into ghettos. Making policing an easier job would attract less problematic people. Hiring a lot more cops and banning guns would greatly reduce the stress cops are under. The cops in prosperous, egalitarian places are generally pretty chill, so the idea is to recreate those conditions.

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Or if you have dark skin. A coworker got pulled over while on a family trip. He was searched, the car was searched, and the only reason his wife wasn't searched was: "You're lucky I don't have a female officer available". He was a developer (so not poor) and ex-military, which usually gets you some respect.

Don't think this can't happen to you. If you, an ordinary person, find yourself in a bad neighborhood and lost, you also can be abused just as easily. Such a thing happened to me a long time ago (it was the only time such a thing happened). but because I was lost, and switching signaling from left to right, they assumed I was on drugs.

Redistributing wealth does not eliminate poverty. That's not how economies function, and poverty is a social class as well as a financial state.

Sure it does, just compare America 1955 to America today.

> Eliminating poverty with redistribution and active labor market policies would mean fewer targets.

I think you'd need to prove the direction of causality here to be convincing.

> Making policing an easier job would attract less problematic people.

What are "problematic people"? I find this judgment to be very, very troubling. Is it that "problematic people" are becoming police officers? Or that something about the job is causing problematic behaviors in people like you and I?

> Hiring a lot more cops and banning guns would greatly reduce the stress cops are under.

This seems downright preposterous to me. Guns aren't a significant cause of death for cops. Cars (including their own cars) are a far bigger threat. Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that places where guns are materially banned enjoy less police corruption. Chicago has has some of the most draconian gun laws in the nation for decades and also has a police department indistinguishable from a criminal cartel by most measures.

> The cops in prosperous, egalitarian places are generally pretty chill, so the idea is to recreate those conditions.

Again, I suspect the causality may run in the other direction.

Making guns illegal will do little if it is not accompanied by getting rid of the existing guns. People are poor judges of risk and it would not surprise me that cops are more fearful of guns than they are of cars even if it ought not be that way.

You may be right in the direction of causation that questioned. I look at it this way. Suppose we create a more prosperous, egalitarian society and find out the cops are still jerks. The experiment shows you are correct but at least we'd end up with a better society in other ways. There does not appear to be any harm in performing the experiment.

I'm suggesting that it's possible that corruption, and particularly unaccountable police forces historically infused with racism, might be among the primary barriers to achieving such a society, and that a plan to directly engage with this problem might be a necessary precondition to any such movement.

I see. As you have phrased it just now; this seems sensible. Thank you for the clarification.

If you’re a cop in Denmark or Japan you don’t mistake someone reaching for their wallet as a gun, because almost nobody can have them.

Also, if they legally own one, chances are about 100% they aren’t allowed to carry it, loaded.

Even if they carry a loaded gun, they’re less likely to use it against the police than in the USA because punishments are less severe. In the extreme, three strikes laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-strikes_law) makes even petty thieves with a previous felony conviction more likely to use a gun.

The USA has found a local optimum where cops have reason to be afraid of a large fraction of the population and vice versa, and doesn’t seem to be able to find a way out of it.

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