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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a rhetorical and political mistake to tie this effort to police violence and systemic racism. If you say "We're going to have a special mental health response team to deal with suicidal people and the non-violent mentally ill." Who would oppose that? That seems a very reasonable thing to try.

On the other hand, if you begin by saying "Because the police are racist murderers..." It just seems like begging for a fight that doesn't need to happen. People who might support the effort will resist it. I think it's the same mistake some people make by saying "Defund the police" rather than "Let's respond to the non-violent mentally ill with trained mental health responders."

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> We're going to have a special mental health response team to deal with suicidal people and the non-violent mentally ill." Who would oppose that?

When it diverts funding away from mainstream policing then it would be very strongly opposed by police unions.

And it does not need simply a lack of opposition. It needs people to actively support it, and be motivated to support it as it requires funding.

And there’s a bunch of straw manning in your arguments that is quite distasteful.

Wikipedia suggests [0] that the majority of NYPD officers come from minority backgrounds. Whites are slightly overrepresented in leadership vs. the demographic backdrop of New York. Though that is probably inertia, as they used to be a majority instead of just the largest minority back in the 90s.

It seems to be a stretch to say the NYPD could be a hotbed of racism in particular. They look rather diverse. I suppose possibly the argument could be made that black NYPD officers are racist against whites, whites against latinos and latinos against blacks. But from what I've understood that isn't the accusation being made at them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...

Here in Australia, the English colonialists established many policing units composed of aboriginals from one area (nation) who would then be responsible for hunting down and massacring the aboriginals in another area (nation).

The institution itself was racist -- regardless of the composition of individual members working under that institution.

To insinuate that an institution's ability to be racist depends on the ethnicity of its individual members is to deny that institutions have their own power.

This would be a very good time to break out the systems-level thinking and apply it to racism in policing. In particular, the idea that if individual racism is low implies that racism is also low the composition of those individuals is a fallacy of composition.

So, the NYPD is hiring a most of their workforce from minorities, who are then banding together to support systemic racism, because I am making the fallacy of composition?

I'll admit my argument here isn't proven with academic rigour, but the NYPD isn't the racist actor in the current narrative.

You mean it could be a “fallacy of composition” - if you provided some evidence for the claim that a group of likely non-racist individuals are nevertheless racist as a group - whatever that means.

If the argument is that low individual racism implies low systemic racism of the group then I very clearly mean yes it is a fallacy of composition. I want to disentangle the idea that a fallacious requires implies a judgement of the truth value of the argument. It doesn't. It just means that avenue of reasoning is flawed. There may be other ways of proving that the NYPD is not as a group racist, but by arguing by way of individuals is not one of them.

Is your assertion that only white people can uphold an inherently racist system?

“inherently racist”?

Inherent: “existing in something as a permanent, essential, or characteristic attribute.”

Once you define something as “racist”, then it’s not hard to conclude it’s “racist”. Sounds a lot like the christian doctrine of “original sin”:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

“Is it your assertion that only white people contain original sin?” - yup, both sentences seem equally meaningful IMO.

Race doesn't exist in humans. Races are subspecies, and homo sapiens doesn't have those. "Race" is a concept maintained to exist by people who think society should be organized by ethnicity, and those people are called racists. Racists have an extensive literature supporting this fundamentally fallacious worldview, stretching back centuries.

In the US, who has benefited from the historical ethnic organization of society, and who might feel they're losing something when society is organized that way less than it used to be? "You will not replace us!" they chant.

>Once you define something as “racist”, then it’s not hard to conclude it’s “racist”.

As I laid out, racism can be defined in concrete terms that, as it happens, don't constitute a tautology.

"Original sin" is entirely fictional, invented to convice people that they are fundamentally guilty of something, a guilt from which release is inconceivable. This was the innovation of Christianity: you were born with a debt that cannot be relieved.

It's just so interesting that you'd try to sidestep my question by bringing up religion, and then just asking my question back to me. Do you think black people can't make decisions that are negative for other black people? Do you think every woman votes entirely for feminist movements? If yes, I have a bridge to sell you. If no, you seem to have answered my original question more honestly than your first attempt.

This comment is very strange when you consider that the only reason there's even traction in switching to mental health professionals is specifically because of the injustices inflicted on specific groups and the ensuing protests.

I also find it amusing that the tone of your post is that you rightly don't want there to be pointless fights and denounce said pointless fights, but also lament poor language (e.g. "...racist murders"...) while simultaneously using it yourself. Seems pointless given the article in question doesn't use the language you are using nor does it make the claims you're hypothesizing.

Regarding language use - the article describes this program as one of many "trying to address police violence and systemic racism following George Floyd's murder". That's the basis for my stating that discussion of the program is tied to police violence and racism. Later in the comment, I sum that up as "calling the police racist murderers" which I rephrased to elucidate the problem some people might have with the description, but which is also a faithful rephrase as systemically racist and violent police that commit murder are pretty clearly racist police murders.

I can't imagine what other language in my comment you might have a problem with. Please let me know if that wasn't it. I would say that I am not using any poor, inaccurate, or unfair language.

Your comparison is nonsensical. Calling police racist murderers does not follow from mentioning addressing police violence and systemic racism.

Your summation of the situation is more reflective of your interpretation of reality than the actual situation at hand.

An accurate analogy per your logic would be to call tech executives sexist after reading an article where it mentions steps are being taken trying to address tech sexism and unequal pay.

If you said "Because of the sexism and discrimination at Blizzard, we are doing X" I would, of course, take it to mean you think Blizzard was sexist and discriminatory. I think that's overwhelmingly obvious - so obvious that I'm not even sure how to argue it. Similarly, it just strikes me as incoherent to say you need a program to address racism in the police, police violence, and murders by the police - but also to say it's an unfair summary to say that you've called the police racist murderers.

> switching to mental health professionals is specifically because of the injustices inflicted on specific groups and the ensuing protests.

That is completely untrue. As I said in my comment there are many countries who have police departments who have enacted special mental health professionals prior to BLM being a thing as they saw a general need for it in their community. Not because one specific minority group called for it. Instead it is because everybody benefited from it.

We’re talking about the United States so your mention of other countries is completely irrelevant.

The police forces of other countries are run completely differently nor do they necessarily suffer from the same issues as the ones in the USA.

> The police forces of other countries are run completely differently

No they are not. That's like saying you're not allowed to compare between other American states because different states run their police departments completely differently.

You're just making up arbitrary rules to stipple discussion.

if you think other countries police forces are the same as america then we're done here, lmao. ask yourself, how many other countries' average daily police forces have guns? you can't be serious

I only specifically talked about Canadian police forces which are indeed very similar to American police forces. They may have a bit more training/education but for the most part operationally they are pretty similar.

But again, if you don't have anything of substance to say please just stop replying. All you're doing is trying to dismiss what I have stated while providing nothing to the conversation. It's unproductive and useless. Further comments and I will be flagging it.

look at gun ownership in Canada vs USA. your comparison is nonsensical. furthermore Canadian police follow a single federal code meanwhile USA's police vary wildly per jurisdiction - this has affects both in law enforcement and training. if these facts offend you flag away if you like

Edit: For context, my reply was to what OP originally replied to me with before they decided to make a sneaky edit

> look at gun ownership in Canada vs USA. your comparison is nonsensical. flag away if you like

We are talking about mental health in relation to policing and that is your argument? About the number of guns owned? That is not a conversation. That is you making zero point and again contributing nothing to the conversation. Just stop if you're not going to have a constructive conversation. You clearly have nothing of merit and are still just trying to dismiss an opinion you disagree with rather than having an intelligent conversation. Maybe Twitter or Reddit would be a better place for this.

In regards to your newly edited comment:

> Canadian police follow a single federal code meanwhile USA's police vary wildly per jurisdiction - this has affects both in law enforcement and training. if these facts offend you flag away if you like

This is only more support for what I said. That you're trying to dismiss my opinion because you say Canada is too different from America, yet you are okay with comparing state by state despite your own words acknowledging how even that doesn't make sense. Your own argument contradicts yourself. Don't try and dismiss my comment by saying countries vary too much to compare, but then in the same paragraph tell me how much America varies in policing by states.

This is exactly it. People in Canada I often see blindly pushing for this stuff but they don't realize a lot of police departments here already have had these kinds of resources they utilize and have been having success with them before the BLM stuff got popular. But now the BLM stuff surrounding it makes it focused on the wrong goals and creates controversy and drama and it's rather annoying.

It's a shame that propopents of good ideas need to mollycoddle fragile egos before the ideas can be approved on their merits.

Why is "stop killing Black people" the wrong goal?

> Why is "stop killing Black people" the wrong goal?

Because it perpetuates a false narrative that police are killing black people en-masse which is not true. It also creates a narrative that other races, including white people could not also benefit from mental health specific support. It focuses on one specific group rather than focusing on the fact that everybody has the problem.

It creates an unneeded divide in people when really it is uncalled for. It could just as easily be focused on everybody. This is why I still think it is silly to focus on one race when it comes to things like these. Because at the end of the day it is all lives that matter when it comes to mental health, not one specific group.

When we focus on support for one specific group that is discriminatory. And that is complete crap. Progress should be focused on benefitting everybody, not giving certain groups advantages based on historical disadvantages. We should be moving forward as a society together, not trying to make up for past issues that the majority of the population weren't even alive for.

> non-violent mentally ill

Is this true though? Many cases involved violent mentally ill.

Police frequently get called to suicide threats.

While threatening to commit suicide is a horrible thing to do, it doesn’t warrant an armed response.

Instead of arguing over the edge cases, I suggest pushing for the part of the proposal that’s unambiguously helpful (eg: no armed response without a plausible threat of violence).

I'm not American. But I used to be firefighter for 2 years. Where I live both firefighters and police respond to suicides. In the 2 years I have attended over 100 suicide calls of various forms (in various stages). In none of them have we ever used an "armed response" unless you consider a bolt cutter/saw a weapon. It does seem to puzzle me why one would want to use weapons in a suicide case.

The language used by the parent comment is ambiguous. By armed response they mean that the responding police officers carry a gun. I don’t see that as a problem, because you never know what kind of situation they will encounter and what the needs might be.

I don’t know about you but when someone with a gun shows up, my motivation begins and ends at “get rid of this person”.

I am not going to have a productive conversation, because I don’t know what kind of situation I will encounter.

> Many

Citation needed.

Certainly, you make a good point.

When we talk about someone “in crisis” it’s very likely to have them appear quite violent. And all people threatening suicide are threatening violence.

====

edited to add (as stated below)

What I'm intending to say, quite badly as it appears, is that even if someone in crisis appears to be "violent" -- or if a person threatening suicide can be interpreted as threatening "violence" -- that is no reason to withdraw them from eligibility for a caring response.

Your estimation of "very likely" here is entirely made up, imaginary, based on nothing but your own preconceived notions.

What I'm intending to say, quite badly as it appears, is that even if someone in crisis appears to be "violent" -- or if a person threatening suicide can be interpreted as threatening "violence" -- that is no reason to withdraw them from eligibility for a caring response.

Daniel Shaver was interpreted as threatening violence.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/12/0...

Yes - a person who has been drinking and who is being shouted at by officers, reaches down, probably to pull up their pants, and it is interpreted as a life threatening act to those officers.

(And a jury goes on to uphold the reasonableness of this interpretation!)

Not only the moment “in crisis”. Some have violent history. Burglary / robbery is not uncommon among drug users.

Burglary is not a violent crime, it’s a property crime.

Updated my text.

I feel any crime involving physical force (such as breaking and entering) constitutes violence, whether it involves a person or property. From the American Heritage dictionary (https://www.wordnik.com/words/violence):

> Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.

Using intentionally ambiguous language to misdirect is only temporarily convincing until people cotton to your game.

I am not sure whether your claim is that my use or the GP's use of "violence" is ambiguous. My point is that most property crimes are violence by the most common and widespread definitions. The attempt to recast property crimes as non-violent is very recent, pushed by progressive activists to play down widespread property crime in places like San Francisco or to play down crimes committed during riots throughout 2020. A non-violent crime would be something like identity theft, not someone using physical force, like a hammer to break a car window or whatever else.

>My point is that most property crimes are violence by the most common and widespread definitions

Don't be coy, which definitions? When someone in a coffee shop goes to the bathroom and their laptop is gone when they come back to their seat, where is the violence? Actual violence, not abstract "they murdered my trust in society" stuff.

I think if you're honest, you'd say that you prefer property crimes to be treated as violence.

I linked a definition above in my earlier comment. Violence involves exertion of physical force to cause damage or injury. The recipient of the violence (be it property or a person) is not relevant. Would I consider your example violence? No. But I would consider someone forcefully breaking into a car or someone committing arson to be violence, due to the unusual exertion of physical force.

> I think if you're honest, you'd say that you prefer property crimes to be treated as violence.

I have the opposite perspective, that most people have a wider definition for violence than just harm against a person. I feel activists who want to excuse low level crime or rioting tend to be the ones who prefer to narrowly define violence. But such a redefinition wouldn’t make sense - we already have terms like “assault” for narrow cases like harm against a person. Violence is something broader.

There you go again with the groundless "most," not to mention your thinly veiled bias against "activists."

>The recipient of the violence (be it property or a person) is not relevant.

The law disagrees, for decades if not centuries, and your sense of the relationship between assault and violence are misinformed, if not completely upside-down, backwards, and possibly with i's dotted with flowers.

Not just many cases but also some of the most prominent ones hailed as an instance of unjust policing. For example, in Seattle there was a situation where a woman named Charleena Lyles called in a fake incident to lure police, with an intent apparently to kill them because she is thought to have had some kind of fear that they would otherwise come for her. When the police responded, she cornered an officer in a kitchen with knives in hand (https://www.q13fox.com/news/seattle-officer-in-charleena-lyl...), and another cop had to shoot her.

All this took place in 2017. Activists initially tried to turn this event into something but it didn’t gather momentum because it was clearly a defensive police action after they had been lured with an intention to do harm. Come 2020, this incident was dredged up after George Floyd’s death, and suddenly it gained lots of news attention, activist vigils, and so on. And despite how clear cut this incident was, activists claim the police were wrong and that responses to the mentally ill don’t require armed response.

Meanwhile, the fact that Lyles had just recently been arrested for harassment and obstruction of police has not been scrutinized. The truth is she was let off with no consequence, a byproduct of Seattle’s restorative justice policies, and went on with her mental health issues / intent to harm police officers.

This is an absurd misrepresentation of what happened to Ms. Lyles.

Can you help me understand why you hold this perspective? Per various news sources the previous incident involving Lyles was very similar, where she threatened police officers with scissors, but they were able to convince her to drop them and arrest her without anyone being harmed (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/seattle-police-shooting-charl...). There are also audio recordings from the officers’ response in the later fatal encounter that corroborates their version of the story, including the fact that they gave her warnings to back away 11 times before shooting (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/charleena-lyles-seattle-pol...). Per these links she also had a long history of crimes going further back (assault, robbery, theft, etc). To me it is unconscionable that someone with her history of crime and mental issues is permitted to live without supervision, let alone keep her children, and it is further unacceptable that she was let off a serious incident (threatening to kill a police officer) with no consequence or accountability by a “mental health court”. This looks to me more like a failure of soft-on-crime restorative justice policies rather than a failure of policing.

> If you say "We're going to have a special mental health response team to deal with suicidal people and the non-violent mentally ill." Who would oppose that?

A lot of people! One of the standard arguments is, mentally ill people are by definition unpredictable, so you can't classify then as "non-violent," so all responders must be armed and trained in the use of force for at least their own protection if not the protection of others.

Note that this is the actual argument as to why traffic cops are armed in the US. Erratic drivers are considered unpredictable, and anyone in the US could easily have a gun, so there isn't a special team for handling "non-violent" traffic offenders. It's the regular cops with their regular authorization to use deadly force.

Or put another way - if it were such an obviously good idea to the whole political spectrum, why hasn't it happened before?

"The police are racist murderers" is, first of all, objectively true and facts don't care about your feelings, but more importantly, it's objectively better rhetoric. Problems with inappropriate police responses have been around for a long while - and, unsurprisingly, they affect whites too (Ryan Whitaker was killed by officers investigating a noise complaint, and six-year-old Jeremy Mardis was killed by officers after chasing the car he was in the back seat of). But there hasn't been any real movement to change things.

Meanwhile, a whole lot of local governments are making good and meaningful changes thanks to people saying things like "The police are racist murderers" and "Defund the police." So while you may not like the slogans, they definitely seem to be working.

>"The police are racist murderers" is, first of all, objectively true and facts don't care about your feelings

Um. No? Drawing a hard line on the facts is understandable, but you sound completely out of touch.

>So while you may not like the slogans, they definitely seem to be working.

I take it you don't live near "the hood." De-policing is a luxury ideology for political dilettantes well insulated from the consequences of their juvenile theories.

Your definition of objectivity on both counts seems to be subjective.

If someone said "black people kill each other for crack corners, facts don't care about your feelings" you'd at the very least say they were painting with a broad brush. I'd agree with you. There's a difference between a race and a profession, sure, but you're generalizing a diverse group of people.

And is it objectively better rhetoric? Objectively? Empirically I see it has a very divisive effect, much more prominent than any positive effect you can find examples of. But say it is effective, that's more important to you than it's truthfulness? Do you want to live in a world where we pretend to believe lies because they're effective at achieving some end?

I'm all about reigning in the police, cutting budgets, cutting staff, whatever, not because they're racist (as a group they're not) but because they're goons for the state, it is their job to go sniff your butthole and ask you what you've been doing under implied threat of violence. That's objectively better rhetoric because it's true, and it's all inclusive because they do this to all of us equally.

> And is it objectively better rhetoric? Objectively?

A lot of liberal politics nowadays makes claims of "facts" when it's actually..just politics and opinions and all that ends up matter is a mix of philosophy and public opinion.

At least among the NYPD, which is what this article about, it's not actually true that police are "goons for the state." The state has no effective control over what the police do. They quite literally turn their backs on elected leadership. They engage in all sorts of petty abuse of power like parking illegally in ways that are bad for the ends of the state (like promoting commerce). Police are, if anything, goons for themselves.

I agree that if it were untrue that the police are racist murderers, then building public policy on it would be bad for society. But it's true, so it's fine to base policy on it.

But it's not true though. You saying it is true doesn't make it true. It's about as true as the statement "black people kill each other over crack corners." Sure, some do, but most don't, most just live their lives like the rest of humanity.

In the US, there are hundreds of thousands of police officers who have hundreds of millions of public interactions a year. Almost 100% of those interactions are fair, just policing and not an instance of racism or brutality or some other offense. Also consider that an overwhelming majority of black Americans want policing to increase or stay the same (https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...).

Sure - I think that reinforces my point that there isn't and won't be any political will to send unarmed social workers instead of cops on mental health calls solely on the abstract merits. Almost 100% of cases where the police check in on mental health cases end up fine, even though the cops are armed. If the attempted rhetoric is that sending in armed cops is a bad idea, the evidence suggests that it's generally fine in practice and probably does not warrant a change.

What is new about the "defund the police" and "racist murderers" rhetoric is that it suggests that almost 100% is meaningfully different from actually 100%. Almost 100% of interactions Jack Ruby had with people ended up with them surviving, but he is still a "murderer."

I've been thinking why media and politicians use so radical language. My guess is that moderate language will be seen by their voters as a conspiracy of some sort. You say "mental health responders" but the radical voters read it as "hmm.. by not demanding to defund police he must be secretly supporting police, so he must be a republican and we don't want any of those here". There was an HN post explaining this idea better, why there are no moderate centrists these days: those would be ousted by both hard left and hard right.

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