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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.