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Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

It is striking how there is literally not a single mention of what the community members think about this officer in your comment, only the satisfaction of other officers, even when talking about something--enforcement of "trivial violations"--that might have a direct negative effect on the community members.

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That's because I'm almost uniquely poorly placed to evaluate community opinion of this officer.

How can that be if you have such detailed knowledge of his conduct?

Most police departments have a site where you can see complaints raised against officers. Assuming you know his name and the department you could look that up and if the number is low you can be reasonably certain the community didn't hate him.

I agree with you here, that it is striking there isn't a single mention of what members might think. But I also wonder if it's relevant at all. To me, there's no real correlation between intelligence and being a good person. A really smart officer might also know precisely which things he or she can get away with, to the community's detriment.

> But I also wonder if it's relevant at all.

The idea that "Was he a good cop?" can be answered without asking the community being policed is just a dumbfounding notion, and really puts some urgency behind the question of who is the police serving.

The article mentions they spend 25K to train an officer. Given that police departments have insane budgets, does 25K matter that much? How many intelligent officers leave solely because of boredom and their high IQ? Maybe a handful? The math doesn’t add up here. It sounds like an excuse to weed out people who wouldn’t fall in line.

This sounds similar to the psychological tests given to candidates in various jobs under the pretext of measuring compatibility with job requirements - but the real reason is to find out if the candidate would be obedient, not join unions, not think independently etc.

> negative effect on the community members.

You misspelled positive.

The primary reason we call them "trivial violations" is that enforcing them causes more harm than it prevents.

You can't litter vs beating you up

What kind of things do you have in mind?

My first thought was traffic things like prohibited turns. UK is seeing more automated enforcement around this and the purpose is to improve traffic flow, or to increase fine revenue if you're more cynical.

Take it a step further where you have cops who are forced to meet a certain quota in ticketing violations (with those quota targets being directly driven by budgets). What happens when a cop can't meet their target for a week? A hint: they don't pat themselves on the back for upholding a safe community.

Isn’t “Jay Walking” the classic trivial ‘crime’?

Most countries are happy to let you cross a road at any convenient place provided at that particular moment it doesn’t cause vehicles to slow down (ie there’s a safe gap in traffic). In the US, and often in a oddly ‘ethno-sensitive’ way, that’s an offence.

My country can't recruit enough police officers to go after anything. Even rapes lmao.

As many people as I have seen run through the street in the middle of the night when they're barely visible, I'm less inclined to think of that as 'harmless' and more inclined to think that some of them are nearly suicidal.

Wearing all black at night and sprinting in front of cars on fast, busy roads is not something people should be doing, yet I see it constantly.

A point of view I can imagine on these infractions is this: it is necessary that there be a clear line between what is legal and what is not, and that all the law be enforced. Failing either of those, officers have the opportunity to selectively enforce the law in a way that is biased, brings them profit, or intimidates people for reasons outside the law. For that reason, every infraction, no matter how minor, must be enforced, and if it's unfair, law will have to change to exclude those edge cases. Otherwise you have unjust chaos.

I'm not sure I agree with that, but I think it's not irrational.

It is irrational in the context of the US legal system, in which almost all infractions go unenforced simply because there are so many infractions. The point of view you espouse here is literally impossible to achieve.

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