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Comment by sseagull | Hacker News Reader

I generally am in agreement. However there's a complication in my mind.

My dad was a police officer and I grew up around police. It's there's one thing to know about police, it is that they are human, and subject to all the emotions, inconsistencies, and foibles as other humans.

However, they are given an extraordinary amount of power, with very little accountability. Think about what it would take for a regular person (maybe even you) to lose their job. Yet here is an example of an officer, behaving very aggressively, against department policy, causing a major accident and injuring a pregnant woman.

As far as I can tell, he still has his job (although he was "disciplined", and the lawsuit was picked up by the taxpayers).

https://apnews.com/article/lawsuits-arkansas-legal-settlemen...

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Alright but again, the anecdote of "This one time in Arkansas" can't reasonably be used as a justification for stating "All police are bad and out of control all over the country"

> Alright but again, the anecdote of "This one time in Arkansas" can't reasonably be used as a justification for stating "All police are bad and out of control all over the country"

In this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30987681 you wrote:

> ...There may be 1 in 100 truly awful police men and women out there, just as their are truly awful people in every known profession.

Your complaint about others' anecdotes would hold more weight if you weren't just making up statistics.

I think it's extremely clear that I'm not trying to portray that exact number as a fact and more as a general portrayment of "most police officers are good, just as most people are good"

> I think it's extremely clear that I'm not trying to portray that exact number as a fact and more as a general portrayment of "most police officers are good, just as most people are good"

That sounds about as useful as the anecdotes in this thread. Police aren't a random sample of the population after all. Even if it's true that most people are good, that doesn't imply most police are.

Alright sure, I guess so. Neither of us have any hard data to back up our opinion so I guess it turns into a debate of feelings, which will lead neither of us anywhere.

What I do know is that as of May 2021 there were 665,380 police officer employed in the US, and trying to generalize all of them in any way based on a few highly edited videos is absolutely not a valid approach given the standard practices in data science and statistics. Given that the US generalized crime rate is 47.70 per 100,000 it's reasonable to argue that unless there is evidence showing otherwise, police officers also fit roughly into that same distribution and therefore would be "mostly good" (as defined by law), as most people are.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes333051.htm

Look up the per-capita number of deaths caused by U.S law enforcement officers vs other countries.

Then look up the per-capita number of people put in hospitals by U.S. law enforcement officers vs other countries.

Then look up the consequences U.S. law enforcement officers face when they harm or kill. Also look up their relative training.

Finally look up most dangerous professions and see where law enforcement ranks to get an idea of whether their lives are truly in such danger as to justify their actions.

After looking at this data (and I apologize for not providing citations directly but I’m on mobile), it’s hard to avoid forming the opinion that U.S. law enforcement is undertrained, unjustifiably aggressive, protective of bad officers, and unaccountable to the communities it serves.

Anecdotally, I’ve had more than my fair share of interactions with officers and about 20% of them have been hotheaded jerks.

Oh, I forgot one: look at the domestic abuse numbers for law enforcement officers too.

Edit: here’s at least one citation:

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...

That is not a valid citation, it immediately starts off by illustrating it's own political prejudice. The fact that they don't link directly to their sources is also questionable. They say they use Source: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/data/ (among others) but I don't see any data for some of the numbers they're projecting.

It's also not quite fair to analyze this data without also taking into account the prevalence of violent crime in general at each country in question. Of course a country with more violent crime will result in more violent policing.

I'm not saying that it doesn't make any valid points, but you can literally make any profession or population of people look bad if you cherry pick data-points and provide politically biased commentary while also not explaining co-factors or context.

The statement there isn't "All police are bad and out of control all over the country" but rather whether you should perceive that possibility as threatening enough to seriously affect your possible actions i.e. whether stopping in a non-dangerous place (as opposed to stopping immediately and staying put) is permissible. And if there's a 1-in-100 chance of a police being unreasonable, then that definitely is a too high of risk.

That's fair, I just pulled that number from thin air to try and portray my point. The actual crime stats in the US is 47.7 per 100,000. Unless there's hard evidence to the contrary, it can be assumed that those number also apply roughly to police.

I think it is entirely reasonable to push for a (much) higher standard of police accountability. The problem is not that all police are bad and out of control, it's that whenever these incidents occur the leadership and police unions institutionally push back forcefully on accountability. This institutional pushback is what makes this into a systemic problem that needs to be addressed.

Sure I agree, that is reasonable. Many people try to make the argument that all/most police are bad and out of control, which is what I refute.

Organizational leadership really matters. Imagine being a law-abiding person who joins an organization that's run by organized crime. Most of your colleagues are decent law-abiding people, but a few are thugs. And when those thugs hurt people, leadership pours all its resources into supporting and shielding them from consequences. When you (a law-abiding employee) try to report a thug for misbehavior, your leadership supports the thug over you or even drums you out of the organization.

Do you think this would be a sustainable organization? Should the general population look at a given representative and think "90% probability this is a good person" or should they think "10% probability this person is a violent thug who can hurt or kill me with impunity, and in any group of ten reps one might try to kill me and the others will look the other way?" What is the right way to engage with an organization like that? And over time is this organization going to reform itself, or is it increasingly going to attract bad people and drive away the decent ones?

There's a lot at stake here. Recent anti-accountability political activism by police leadership and union bosses is really scary and counterproductive stuff even if most cops are fundamentally decent.

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