Comment by creative_bud | Hacker News Reader

Comment by creative_bud | Hacker News Reader

Imagine isolated anectdata determining people's opinions of police! One of the first rules of understanding the world is to not let emotionally charged anecdotes, isolated events and individual mistakes determine how you judge groups, trends and collectives.

What's happened in the last week is that targeted propaganda has flooded people with a few isolated examples of bad things happening and letting people's emotional response mechanisms do the rest.

Did you know that tens of thousands of people die from medical malpractice and medical errors each year? There are many thousands fewer people suffering from police brutality, yet somehow the police have an infinitely worse reputation than doctors and surgeons yet your chances of being killed by a surgeon is far higher than being killed by a cop.

The police do one of the hardest jobs in the country, dealing with the worst elements of society every single day. It's shocking to me that there isn't far more "brutality" every year than there is, and I commend the police for keeping us safe while having to deal with people that hate them and want them dead every day.

The judgement callously meted out on police on HN and elsewhere is completely unjustified.

Your analogy kind of works against you:

Doctors have their own personal liability insurance, if they make too many mistakes they literally cannot afford to continue working in medicine (or have to move to a lower risk sub-field that have lower base premiums).

If police held their own individual liability insurance, and it too could become uneconomical for them to continue to practice law enforcement, I'd consider that a huge improvement over the status quo.

If you want law enforcement to be comparable to medicine, then oversight is going to raise tenfold.

Police act in a hostile environment which can't be compared to the environment in which surgeons and doctors operate. Where their lives are not at risk. Mistakes are more understandable and more likely in hostile environments, which makes it a wonder that there are not more instances of police making serious errors given all the interactions police have with hostile and combative people.

Isolated anecdota? Literally the only thing on the news or any social media feed right now. Seems like you’re not paying attention.

Literally isolated anecdata shared by social media mobs who have a bad opinion of police because they were pulled over that one time or they didn't like how an officer spoke to them once.

"The police do one of the hardest jobs in the country"

You know, this is word for word what Russian 'patriots' tell me, when I ask them why 200 people were killed in Country's jails.

Somehow in UK the number is zero, the police must be superhuman here.

European police are just better at hiding murders as accidential self-immolation and the like. Google Ouri Jalloh.

To the downvote-brigades: Yes, this is embarrassing and not well-known, but that doesn't excuse further attempts at suppression. If you have something to say, say it, don't just press a button.

Are you implying that doctors are intentionally making these errors? Further, their work is typically to try to help the people they are interacting with, and usually the interactions are consensual. I don't think that is a really good comparison.

I support what the police are doing to handle the protestors, but if I speak out against that I'm labeled as a racist or a bootlicker or any other deriding comment the protestors want to label me. It's fine, I can take the behavior, I'll hold space while they let out their rage and then I'll embrace them again just like I would my own child. And one day they'll look back at themselves and wonder why it was so easy for them to be emotionally triggered.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com