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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

Smearing the victim is SOP for cops. https://fair.org/home/6-elements-of-police-spin-an-object-le...

One would be tempted to extrapolate from the article title that it's disproportionately used against blacks. Since otherwise it wouldn't specifically point out the victim was black, just as stories of police shootings rarely point out in the title if the victim was white.

> Writers are told to avoid usage of the passive voice.” A rationalist whose background comes exclusively from science may fail to see the flaw in the previous sentence; but anyone who’s done a little writing should see it right away. I wrote the sentence in the passive voice, without telling you who tells authors to avoid passive voice. Passive voice removes the actor, leaving only the acted-upon. “Unreliable elements were subjected to an alternative justice process”—subjected by whom? What does an “alternative justice process” do? With enough static noun phrases, you can keep anything unpleasant from actually happening.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lz64L3yJEtYGkzMzu/rationalit...

Excuse my ignorance here.

How many police -> suspect interactions are there every day in all 50 US states? What percentage of them are this level of bad/corrupt yearly? Like, 0.2%? I'm not saying it's ok but... I'm pretty sure every business/sector has extremely gross behavior that if we knew about it, we'd be turned off morally. I don't get why hating cops in America is so "trendy" when statistically speaking, there's no way the majority of cops (or anywhere close to it) deserve the hate/flak they get.

Cool whataboutism.

Anyway, the majority of cops are complicit and circle the wagons whenever a bad cop gets outed. When they start defending the public instead of their friends then you can use the phrase "good cop", otherwise all cops are bad cops.

I agree, it's a small percentage. But if we are looking at the percentage of cops willing to lie to protect a bad cop or willing to look the other way when a bad cop does something bad, I'm afraid the percentage is way higher than 0.2%.

In only the past few months: Rochester PD showed up in hoards outside of the courthouse where their fellow officers were being charged for shoving a frail old man to the ground on video.

The reason they showed up was to support the officers that hurt the old man. They cheered them on as the left the courthouse. There's clearly a culture problem that needs to be addressed here.

[1] https://triblive.com/news/world/buffalo-protester-pushed-by-...

In the famous words of Chris Rock

>Some jobs, everybody gotta be good. Like … pilots. Ya know, American Airlines can’t be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land. We just got a few bad apples that like to crash into mountains. Please bear with us.'"

It’s not just the “Few Bad Apples” it’s the entire system where the “Blue Wall” protects them and the justice system doesn’t prosecute. Police rarely blow the whistle on bad actors. That means all of the cops that protect their own deserve all of the flak they get.

As always, I have to point out - as we know it today, the phrase is "one bad apple spoils the bunch". In it's original form, "a rotten apple quickly infects its neighbor". (Ethyl outgassing from over-ripe apples will encourage other apples to ripen too fast, and mould will spread from one to the next.) The idea has never been that we should tolerate the odd ones out, but that they need to be removed to stop the spread.

There's nothing wrong with describing such officers at bad apples. There's something wrong with leaving where they are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_apples

I think of this Chris Rock line whenever I think of "bad apples"

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