Things to do Instead of Calling the Cops: If you see something, do something | Hacker News Reader

Things to do Instead of Calling the Cops: If you see something, do something

theanarchistlibrary.org

26 pointswahnfrieden70 comments

This advice is almost uniformly awful, but this last one just puts women and children in danger:

> Remember that police can escalate domestic violence situations. You can support friends and neighbors who are being victimized by abusers by offering them a place to stay, a ride to a safe location, or to watch their children. Utilize community resources like safe houses and hotlines.

If you’re in this situation, call the police. This just happened in our neighborhood. The cops came and dragged the abusive guy off to jail where he belongs. Don’t risk becoming a statistic out of some misguided ideology.

There's no lack of times where somebody called the police, and the police stopped by and shot the caller.

Either/or, you can become a statistic

No lack of times, but drastically different odds. What's possible is not the same as what's sometimes probable, and it's definitely not the same as what's very probable.

So this do/don't call cops dichotomy is not reliable. It's pointless to argue over it & new ideas are needed.

First of all: Men can be victims of violent domestic incidents. Don't use "woman and children" here.

However, I think you're right, in the circumstance where domestic abuse is ongoing in the moment. If there is physical violence happening, the police need to be called.

If this is more of a "when he gets home he'll be so mad" situation, I think other resources are probably a good first step. Then a police report will need to be filed so a restraining order, etc., can be pursued.

As male who was previously a frequent victim of domestic violence, the cops are the fucking worst for this. I don't even normally have beef with the cops, and have predominantly had good interactions with them, but the system taught to police in the U.S., the Duluth Model, is broken beyond repair. It literally teaches them to assume the guilt of men in any domestic incident, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It's absolutely bullshit, a male domestic violence victim, especially one who is disadvantaged, can have their life turned upside down by someone calling the cops.

not only that, but in some states (LA, Missouri or KS, forget the rest) calling the cops on domestic abuse will get both partners put in jail. They claim it's just in case the situation is more nuanced than "husband beats wife", but realistically, it's to terrorize the abused person into *never calling the cops again*.

> First of all: Men can be victims of violent domestic incidents. Don't use "woman and children" here.

We shouldn’t let a misguided sense of equality blind us to the real nature of the problem. Women are not only twice as likely to be murdered by an intimate partner as the other way around, but in over 40% of cases where women murdered men, there was evidence it was in response to violent acts by the man: https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/encyclopedias-almanac...

Statistic after statistic bears out the fact that men are by far the more violent sex, and “women and children” are the victims of male violence.

It's not a "misguided sense of equality" to suggest that ignoring male violence just because it's less common is bad.

Violence is not exclusive to murder. Men are socially shamed for being victimized by women. My experience with sharing my stories of abuse have led me to completely hide it away from anyone; I will be judged as weak, incompetent, emasculate, or worse. To the best of my knowledge on the topic there hasn't even been much serious inquiry into male victimization[1].

I do not doubt that given their significantly higher natural testosterone men have both a greater raw rate of violence and more incidences reported.

That said, Intimate Partner Violence carries significant psychological trauma. You are completely downplaying that trauma, focusing on only the most extreme and rare cases.[2] 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men report having experienced Intimate Partner Violence.[3]

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15248380211043...

[2] https://psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/diversity/education/int...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolen...

This seems like a "two evils" situation, not a "this one is obviously worse" situation. Trying only to provide help as a community might not be enough, but calling the cops might result in collateral arrest/injury/death. It requires good judgement.

This bit of advice is awful. If the person is in a relationship with an abuser, especially a weapon toting one, there is nothing stopping that person from coming to my house and harming me and them.

Good news, in the US at least, you have the right to have your own weapons. Firearms, especially, are a force equalizer. So, there's that stopping them from coming to your house and harming you and them.

That said, I do agree that bit of advice is ill advised. Call the police, they're trained for this stuff.

And hopefully you'll never have to use your weapons.

>Good news, in the US at least, you have the right to have your own weapons. Firearms, especially, are a force equalizer. So, there's that stopping them from coming to your house and harming you and them.

I'm all for gun rights, but this strikes me as a super weird thing to say.

It's like saying "Good news, in the US at least, all cars have safety features. Seat belts, especially, save lives. So, there's that stopping oncoming traffic from harming you and them if you drive at full speed going the wrong direction on the interstate."

This is one of the most naive takes that I hear often.

An assailant with a gun is prepared to do you harm. There is a 100% chance that they are going to have their gun with them and be ready. They are no more going to wait for you to prepare to defend yourself than the person with a knife is going to swing it widely in a way your corner self defense class is going to prepare you to defend yourself.

That’s like people saying they want guns to protect themselves from the federal government when a small town SWAT team could take them out without breaking a sweat. Let alone the federal government with the worlds largest military.

You're still making a bet here that the abuser will be the statistic and not you. There are plenty of examples where the police don't protect the abuse victim. I agree that you shouldn't just sit back and do nothing, but it is a FACT that domestic violence situations can escalate in a horrible way when people show up with a gun.

If they sent community resource officers (not pointing pistols/rifles at people) around that would be a nice option to de-escalate but most departments I know of don't do that.

The statistics aren’t even close. About 40-50 women are killed by police every year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585149/people-shot-to-de.... Over 1,500 women are killed by a domestic partner every year.

I’m hopeful this worked out well for the target of abuse in the situation you saw. But being cautious about calling police in domestic abuse scenarios is almost never ideological, it’s self preservation. Cops are disproportionately domestic abusers themselves and they carry the justifications they use at home on the job. Well before I knew that, the people who were their victims knew, and lots of other people share info even if they’re afraid to go public.

I’m far less likely than many people to be a victim of police violence, but I categorically won’t call cops for anything that would put them in the same space as my pup, because I know they’re much more prone and able to kill dogs on the spot. That’s not ideologically motivated, it’s just risk assessment and precaution.

4,000 women die from domestic violence each year.

26 unarmed individuals die from police shootings.

Of those 26 probably 3-4 are women.

Your odds of getting shot by the police are 1000x lower than getting killed by your partner.

how many people are actually killed by the police while being defenseless is massively under reported.

Source?

you want a source of police accountability? lol, most police agencies don't even report killings of armed suspects unless it makes the news.

I can start a video stream on one of my servers that will just be several hundred videos of police killing unarmed people, if you'd like. would that count as a source?

Yes if someone documented over an order of magnitude more unarmed police shootings than the fbi statistics that would count as a source.

Cops are 3x to 4x more likely to be a domestic abuser than a the civilian population.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskSocialScience/comments/b9fkny/is...

this is just because they are 3x to 4x more likely to be men.

That's why one of the strategies presented is to offer a place to stay. This let's the person being abused a way out.

Like, if your image of domestic violence is two people on their front porch throwing chairs, maybe it's too late to do that. But there are probably less volatile moments where you can act if they are your friends or neighbor.

Dying from abuse is horrible of course, but most abused people suffer it and its trauma, live some time longer with its effects, and experience being broken in ways they come to understand by being broken in ways they could cope with until they cannot anymore. Before we even talk about the risk of cops, in domestic abuse scenarios, it’s impossible to talk about any of this meaningfully if we’re using death as the criteria.

Once that’s established though… cops are disproportionately domestic abusers. People who live with cops are disproportionately abused. People who encounter cops are confronted with people who are disproportionately abusive in the privacy of their own home with the benefit of doubt of most of society and almost all legal mechanisms.

Your odds of being abused by cops are much greater than by any other person you meet outside your own community, and those odds increase as your odds of being abused by anyone else do too. And as those odds increase, so too do your odds that an otherwise gentle cop won’t do a thing about anyone else who abuses you. Those odds are correlated to the cop relating more to the abuser than their victim.

I’m more likely to die of heart failure but that doesn’t mean I trust the guy who probably beats his wife and probably won’t shoot me. And as I mentioned in another comment, that distrust goes so far as I will not under any condition allow a cop in my pup’s presence if I have a choice. See, they do actually shoot dogs, a lot.

the kicker on the police abuse stats is that the study that everyone links was self-reported. 40% of active duty cops who were asked if they ever abused their partners said "yep".

I've embellished or lied to survey takers a couple times, mostly to protect my anonymity or because i forgot something. I assume they try to correct for "self-reporting" in statistics.

but 40% of active law enforcement had no problem saying "yep i beat my partner".

I have bad news as someone who grew up with a lot of domestic abuse: lots of abusers think they’re in the right and don’t have any sense of shame. They probably feel well protected by all these people making absolutely every possible excuse for them imaginable.

I mean fuck I just did it without meaning to. I literally just confronted my own dad for being abusive 6 months ago and he still speaks to me as if I get where his anger and overreaction comes from, even though I never have and my only remaining emotional bond with him is that I remember him being kind and tender and sincere when no one else was.

uh, in what country? US police have shot 10 people a day since at least the 1980s.

you may be confusing some statistics here. About 26 police die each year. about half are from violent conflicts, the rest are traffic incidents, gun cleaning accidents, etc.

I'm not sure where you're getting "26" from, but that's literally never been true in the United States. I can probably collate and link 26 videos of cops shooting people without weapons this year. and what is a "weapon"? they brandished, aimed? or just had one nearby? if i have guns in my house and the cops shoot me in my house, was i armed? what if i was asleep in bed when the cops busted in my door? does this change your calculus at all?

Huge majority of people shot by police is armed. Only very small fraction is unarmed. This is well known to anyone familiar with statistics on police use of force. FBI publishes this data. You act very confidently, but you are clearly not familiar with the data, and in fact seem to be more interested in second guessing it, because it doesn’t fit your preconceptions.

The problem is that the number of unarmed people shot by police should be zero. There are bizarre, exceptional circumstances, but they should be numbered in the handfuls, not in "small fractions".

Once it gets beyond a rounding error, you get a vicious cycle. An armed criminal now has to make a judgment call: if they disarm, will they be shot anyway? An unarmed civilian has to watch every cop to wonder if this is the one with a bad attitude and a gun. And now the police are worried, too: every single person has to be treated as if they are armed, and has to be prepared to shoot them on very short notice if they are.

Exacerbating matters is that there is a large contingent of people who will excuse every single unarmed shooting. There is no circumstance so egregious that won't bring out a lot of people finding excuses for it, no matter how absurd. So people believe that each unjustified shooting is prelude to even more, because you never get a unanimous "This was a bad thing and we need that to not happen again". Instead, we hear loudly "This was an OK thing and could happen to you."

So people are reacting rationally to a "very small fraction" of shootings, because the consequences are so bad. It doesn't matter that the overall number is small: it's enormous when it's you, and that enormity overshadows many people who want nothing more than to have it not be them.

I think it's a decent advice. It doesn't say "don't call the cops" in these situations rather to consider it. As a good citizen/human you should look out for others in your community. Calling the police is just pushing that on to somebody else

> Street art is beautiful! Don’t report graffiti and other street artists. If you see work that includes fascistic or hate speech, paint over it yourself or with friends.

Uhhhh this sounds like terrible advice. If someone is vandalizing my property, it's well within my rights to call the cops or deal with the criminals myself.

Street art can be beautiful, but it can also be ugly or unwanted.

Somebody painting your personal property (which invokes the image of a home or point of sale shop) is a miniscule subset of all cases of anybody "seeing graffiti". Also, the author doesn't call into question your rights. I see this a lot: Being asked to do or even just consider something, and falling all the way back on rights as an angry retort, which is irrelevant to the request. He didn't say, "do this or I'll sue you."

Some "street art"is beautiful. But most graffiti is just an eyesore. It is even worse when it is vandalizing a public at exhibit.

The last suggestion is pretty bad. Interfering with an abusive relationship can make you a target of the abuser. Trying to intercede in such is really not something one should try to do casually, without having a good idea what you are doing.

A lot of this strikes me as not unreasonable. Some people are for abolishing the police due to their track record that is rather unevenhanded when it comes to race. If you are in a community of color and are worried about police negatively impacting it, suggestions to physically go to the station to get the report you need rather than asking police to come to you is hardly extremist behavior.

I also had someone "helpfully" call the cops on me while I was homeless because they were supposedly "concerned" about me. The result: I was warned to not walk in the bicycle lane on a stretch of road with no sidewalk on that side of the road, something lots or people routinely did. Thereafter, I had to go out of my way to walk on the other side of the road where there was a sidewalk so that I wouldn't get ticketed if the same cop happened to see me in that bike lane again.

Thanks, asshole who was "concerned" and called the cops on me. Do you treat your mother or grandmother this way? "Oh, mom is walking somewhere that looks dangerous. Let's call the cops!!!"

> Encourage teachers, coworkers, and organizers to avoid inviting police into classrooms, workplaces, and public spaces.

Because that's where shootings by police definitely occur... /s

This is just anarchist LARPing hate-the-pigs rhetoric masquerading as concern for safety.

Point is to avoid propagandizing, not to avoid violence directly. Your support of inviting cops into community spaces is simply bootlicking masquerading as reasonability

>Your support of inviting cops into community spaces is simply bootlicking masquerading as reasonability

There are communities that work with and support the police and communities that are adversarial to the police. Your "bootlicking" comment assumes everyone is adversarial to the police.

they're adversarial to you.

So, uh... what?

The point per the web page is "safety." But I am not surprised at all that this claim is a lie that people don't even bother to defend.

An interesting read, and I agree that most of the things on this list are a decent alternative to calling the cops. I think that there also needs to be a heuristic for when one should call the cops, though (because I don't believe, as an anarchist might, that state law enforcement is an inherently illegitimate thing to have, just because I don't like the American version).

Here are some times when I would call the cops via 911 (e. g., come quickly, be prepared for something dangerous to happen):

* A mugging, assault, or fight in progress.

* A person brandishing a weapon - a knife or firearm, for instance.

* Someone driving erratically (eg swerving, veering into incoming traffic) or hyper-aggressively (see above)

* A break-in or property theft where a person is inside/nearby/would be at risk if seen

Basically, any time there is an obvious, emergent, physical threat to myself or someone else for which reciprocal violence might be a necessary and valid response.

For everything else, there are these resources, or the non-emergency number. Police are much less likely to respond in a hyper-aggressive way if you do not present the situation as an emergency.

This was interesting to read, thanks.

TBH some of the items do seem like they could be outright dangerous for the would-be-RP in many situations. The format could really use more nuance so people can make smarter decisions with the information.

Like, maybe don't confront or even talk to your drunk neighbors about their music in situations like X, Y, Z.

A lot of us aren't going to be gaslit into thinking that a given neighbor is magically going to be OK with personal interventions, just because we decided to act more accepting and upbeat starting now.

Also for example the "don't cooperate with cops" one, that needs to be reworded or just broken out into a guide of its own--not all rallies or demonstrations are the same at the very least...

A lot of the items are also based on psychological ideals held by given temperaments and cultural personality archetypes, so they are not shared by all of society and don't really need to be. In fact, acting as if one is a newly-converted community idealist is a good way to get social dichotomies to come out of the woodwork and fight against you from the start.

There are many more creative ways to work around the street art issue than "just learn to like street art OR paint it over" for example. But maybe the best ones involve a framework that helps people better navigate their specific situation first.

Overall I really like the idea, but get a bit of a feeling that it is going to keep some people feeling stuck doing the same things they were before.

More new info, details, etc. would be so helpful--trying new things is what will work; the old stuff like the "resist at all costs" hyperbole is what keeps breaking down for communities that want to believe in community growth & success.

IMO (as a left-leaning person politically) choosing not to call the cops is generally going to increase your danger level. It's a decision you make if you want to protect other people, because calling the cops to protect yourself or your own property rights might result in an innocent person getting injured or worse.

I've called the cops before when my judgment call was that someone was in serious danger and they were the correct people to resolve it, but my bar for that is much higher than some other people I know. If I see someone looking 'suspicious' I generally mind my own business or might settle for talking to building security (not carrying guns around eager to use them) or something like that instead.

This does mean that, for example, when someone tried the (locked) door on my apartment (running up and down the hallways looking for an unlocked door), I didn't call 911. I called building security instead, even though that event did make me feel unsafe.

> Street art is beautiful! Don’t report graffiti and other street artists. If you see work that includes fascistic or hate speech, paint over it yourself or with friends.

This reads like a joke. So is it OK if I draw dicks on the neighbors walls by using the pretense of Street Art?

Street art can be beautiful, for sure. But a lot of graffiti is just scribbled words and names. It's weird for the article to suggest all graffiti is "street art."

In fact, worst of all, I often see scribbled words and names added on top of real street art.

Point 12 says you can support someone who is being abused by watching their children. I wonder how one brings this up. "Hey, are you going to be abused later? Need me to do some babysitting while that's happening?"

I'm also reminded of the somewhat anarchist protest in Seattle called CHAZ or CHOP. They had nightly shootings and multiple people killed. CHAZ guards shot and killed a black teen who hadn't done anything and was just joyriding through the area at night.

You don't bring it up, you simply have relationships with people that includes child-watching. Friends and neighbors are resources to each other. Abused people absolutely take advantage of this. Your sarcasm is a little uncalled-for.

Also, is your anecdote simply to summon the image of a killer upon the author? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the write-up, and it's something you could do with any ideological or political group.

My anecdote is the one time in my life I've experienced people try anarchy and it immediately degenerated into chaos, violence, and murder. I suspect that's the rule for anarchies.

Regarding watching the children of the domestically abused - no. If I know someone well enough to watch their kids then I'm not going to just sit idly by while they are abused. I will contact the police, because I don't care if the abuser gets hurt, imprisoned, or killed - shouldn't have been abusing. If the police were magically off limits I would settle the problem directly - which, incidentally, is why rational people prefer legal systems with enforcement agents, so that they don't have to handle things by themselves and deal with the ensuing chaos and violence.

You check up on people close to you. If the situation at home is deteriorating, it's very valuable for someone to have a way to keep their kids safe. It can be as simple as telling their kids to go to the friend's house when they get off the school bus.

Also, CHOP was chill. I got cookies, browsed the free library, and hung out in the park. Protesters watched the barricades and wouldn't let police in, but ambulances could come in if someone needed health services. I didn't live there, but I felt safe when I visited. It was very different on the ground than what was reported on the news.

If you hated the ideas of CHOP, it looked like hell on Earth. If you found the ideas attractive, it was a brief grasp at something bold and beautiful. A word that describes both is "anarchy."

Again, there were nightly shootings. I went there personally for about thirty minutes and witnessed a girl screaming at a man that he had raped her. Interestingly, nobody among the anarchists did anything. The people at CHOP literally murdered a teenage kid because he was driving while black - describing this as a "brief grasp at something bold and beautiful" is... not apt.

I'm sorry, are there not nightly shootings in the areas where this occurred anyhow? Not everyone was participating, perhaps drawing conclusions based on partial evidence isn't warranted here.

No, there are definitely not nightly shootings in Capitol Hill. And all of the shootings that happened during CHAZ were related to the protesters and anarchists. The conclusions I made above aren't being drawn, they are well established and undisputed facts. The zone lasted nine days, there four nights of shooting and two dead plus a few wounded.

The CHAZ protesters were violent. They vandalized the area with graffiti and left lots of litter. They killed innocent people. They occupied a few city blocks, where people lived, forced businesses to shut down and turned it into this noisy, dirty, dangerous block party for a week or so.

https://www.areavibes.com/seattle-wa/capitol+hill/crime/

okay!

This shows an "NA" for every crime stat, including murder, in Capitol Hill.

If the estimates on this page are right, Capitol Hill has 3x national average, and national average is 6 murders per 100k. So this is estimating Capitol Hill has 20 murders per 100k per year. If you assume that all 32k people in the neighborhood were in CHAZ then to get a per 100k rate we would say 2 / 32 to get murders per thousand, multiply by 100 to get murders per 100k, then multiply by 35.6 to convert the ten days of CHAZ to a year, and we get an estimated murder rate of 223 per 100k, or 37x the murder rate estimate for Capitol Hill from this website. And, of course, not nearly all 32k people were in CHAZ. And, of course, the four separate shooting events within 10 days lends credence to the notion that CHAZ was extraordinarily violent.

Or, practically speaking, if you live in Seattle, then you just know that shootings don't happen in Capitol Hill every night, because you hear about them when they do happen.

I definitely agree with number 3. My grandfather was a diabetic and I once saw my caring supportive grandfather become combative and acting like a drunk when his blood sugar was low. If the cops had been called instead of the paramedics, I can’t imagine in hind site what would have happened.

This kind of advice is what leads to the breakdown of communities...

My first impulse is refute the text of the article, since I disagree with a lot of what's stated... that's not interesting to anybody else, and I'm probably not the target audience anyway.

So who is the target audience?

People who want to avoid involving the police (since many US police departments are shoot-first-ask-questions-later) but still want to improve public safety.

There's not been a police shooting in my city for many years, and I suspect it's similar in many other small cities in the USA.

Are we talking about people in neighborhoods patrolled by officers of a different race?

Are we talking about people who are or have been engaged in prohibited activity?

Are we talking about big strong men who don't fear violence against themselves because they don't feel they're a target?

Where's the nuance?

We're talking about the generalized case, as per the article. It would be noble to try to derive dynamic advice based on variables, but probably not realistic. People either trust or distrust their local police based on the information available to them and their experiences, which may be limited, but we all still make forced judgement calls regardless.

I don't think that's right.

In general we have police because they at some point were deemed necessary for public order.

When was it generally agreed that police are detrimental to community life?

EDIT: The top line is from theanarchistlibrary.org

Who are the target audience of a publication like that? What kind of person reads the anarchist library, what do they have in common?

Anarchists are respectable people who deserve dignity, not automatic criminals. Why are you using hardened political rhetoric to suggest otherwise simply based on political values

I'm not using any political rhetoric, and never accused anarchists of being criminals.

"cops were made for community welfare" is ahistorical political rhetoric. apologies for taking provocation from your hints about questioning anarchist audience/motive in relation to community welfare.

btw, the circle around the anarchist Ⓐ means "order" - anarchists are as interested in community as you are, the difference is in terms of political means (anarchists don't believe the state, legal and state-sponsored policing systems have community's best interests in mind or incentive). anarchist literature is for everyone.

> they at some point were deemed necessary for public order.

yeah, around when those pesky slaves were escaping and their owners sent squads out to collect their missing property.

I'm not sure this is the butt-slam you were hoping for, partner.

You're trying to bait me. I think we both know policing has a history and tradition in areas of the United States that outlawed slavery long prior to the civil war.

I didn't see anything there that improved public safety. I saw an apparently well meaning if patronising list of things to do in situations that weren't actually unsafe, (apart from the last one) being glibly presented as a way to maintain safety without involving the police.

The last one was the tell - minimizing domestic violence put paid any suggestion that this wasn't ideologically based, rather than written with genuineness or intelligence. And I say this as someone who has witnessed first hand the destructiveness of involving the police in a domestic violence issue (they cuffed and jailed my friend because his wife had severely beaten him). I would still call the cops. There's no one else to call.

so you witnessed the police abuse their power with your friend, but you still think that's the best bet?

i don't think you're the target audience. Since this post was about you being the person your friend called. you know, instead of the police.

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