Hacker News Reader

Comment by POiNTx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not pro gun or even American, but to me it seems a lot of those shootings happen in high stress situations, not in a remotely controlled environment.

View on HN

Usually the high stress situation is manufactured entirely or significantly heightened by the officers involved

Which is why I think I might be on board with this. The “police are professionals trained to keep their cool even in life threatening situations” boat sailed ages ago. So making it so police aren’t in the life threatening situation at all might be a win.

> So making it so police aren’t in the life threatening situation at all might be a win.

Cops routinely kill people even when there's no reasonable way to claim they were in a "life threatening situation".

All this will do is make it easier for cops to kill people and evade accountability.

Not being in life threatening situations hasn't stopped cops from killing people before.

Robots are not going to solve the problem of people abusing the power they're given because they can. I'd argue that it would exacerbate it.

I don't see anything good coming from turning shooting real people into a video game for cops.

Police being in life threatening situations is a bullshit excuse. None of these killings have the police been in a life threatening situation. They’re just murderous thugs, we should stop buying them expensive toys and start locking them up when they commit crimes

Not an American either. I'd wager it's hard to come up with actual numbers on how many of those happen in high stress situations and how many are triggered by the police themselves.

The main issue to my understanding is that you can't trust police reports as they have no incentive to write their motives plainly, and no peer pressure to expose bad reporting.

A lot of the stress is manifested by the police themselves (which is an issue specifically called out by the "defund the police" movement, e.g., mental health crises when the better path is deescalation by trained mental health workers)

Have you followed up on those "trained mental health workers"?

Yeah they stopped going on calls unless cops were present because they kept getting injured or used as hostages.

This isn't even remotely true. My city, Portland, etc. Have had great success with these programs. The vast majority of calls they respond to don't require police.

Please cite your sources (or any evidence at all) if you're going to make statements like that.

Genuinely curious, do you have a source handy for that?

I did a search on this to see if I could find some source of what you’re referring to. Came up with nothing. Most of the information out there on this topic is in stark contrast to what you’re saying here.

Yes, there's a model program in Eugene, OR that's being adopted elsewhere because of its success: https://www.vera.org/behavioral-health-crisis-alternatives/c...

It seems you're proposing that the only sensible option is always more cops.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com