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Comment by syzarian | Hacker News Reader

You have pointed out the essential part of the policing problem. Anytime police are given genuine punishments for excessive force the entire department’s response is to stop doing their job.

Another problem I see is that in some cities (mine) people see racism at any attempt to alleviate the crime problem in lower income areas. I used to use the public transit system but it is now filled with drug users and people who enjoy terrorizing others. Police do nothing about it partially out of a fear of being called racist.

For whatever reason I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.

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> I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.

My childhood friend's dad was a cop in a riot of historic significance in my country.

Protesters greatly outnumbered the police, and they threw stones and pushed them into a corner. Shots were fired, nobody died. They really thought they were going to be stoned to death because of all the anger. The few dozen cops left the event with PTSD and a handful never worked again.

As an individual policeman there is very little you can do about an agitated crowd who starts chanting.

So while a harsh reaction to police brutality is understandable, every single policeman carries the recent collective history of violence and knows they could be the subject of retribution. So the healthy thing for them, as an individual, is to not engage, because previously only potential perpetrators would engage in violence, but with enough heat, even bystanders may. Maybe the non-racist cops can't hide behind a collective, when entering a public conflict, as well as they could before.

In the U.S. my sense is that police do not fear retribution by the public. They fear only being held accountable in the same way the public is held accountable. Police mete out non judicial punishment all the time and are almost never arrested for it. They fear being held to the same standard as non police.

Here's how it falls out to me:

1. Laws and adherence to laws are required for a society to function.

2. Policing is necessary to enforce the law.

3. Policing, as a job, sucks. It's the tedium of TSA + the rare but lethal risk of being in a combat zone.

4. Policing, as a job, is made worse by politicians abusing it as a panacea, where other, less politically- and financially-palatable solutions would be more appropriate. Trained mental health professional intervention, drug programs, etc. Instead, cops are put in situations they shouldn't be.

The issue is thus not that police fear being accountable in the same way the public is held accountable. It's instead two-part:

A. Police feel they are owed a different sort of accountability than the public, both in service to and as a reward for doing a job the public doesn't want to do.

B. Effective police work requires a different sort of accountability than the public, as criminals doesn't operate in a vacuum and exploit known police limitations.

C. The most effective police work, for both police and the community, is deterrence -- the prevention of crime from even happening, by simple virtue of police presence. Deterrence requires respect and/or fear, and impoverished people without economic opportunity and living in communities where might makes right aren't deterred by gentle policing.

All of the above are contradictory with civil rights (and also with themselves).

Ergo, the appropriate level of accountability for policing is "what gets the job done, with the resources the city/state/federal government are prepared to invest in it."

Which makes it a multi-variable optimization problem.

Clearly, SF's current values are not producing an acceptable result.

I don’t disagree with the essence of your point. I suppose I fall further to the side of accountability than you do. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that people not be beaten once arrested. That people not be met with violence for exercising their rights. Perhaps I’m naive and what I seek is some sort of utopian Star Trek society that is completely unreasonable to expect.

A lot of cops went to the ju-jitsu gym I used to go to. They assumed that I was an ally so to speak and were quite candid and about beating suspects. The whole system is rotten. Part of the problem is your point 3. The number of guns in the country makes it prudent for police to treat every encounter as if they could be shot. I imagine that alone puts quite a lot of stress on the mental health of police officers.

I'd say that it's always bad for people to be beaten once arrested. Or with violence for exercising their rights.

But I'd put the "optimal" (in the efficiency and good-social-outcomes sense, as distinct from a morally good-bad action perspective) amount at >0.

A credible threat of violence by police is a powerful deterrent. Especially to people who don't see the world in more nuanced light.

If someone like that is afraid of the police and so doesn't commit a crime, then everyone wins -- the potential perpetrator (who isn't exposed to the criminal justice system), the victim(s) (who don't have a crime committed against them), the police officer (who doesn't have to be in that situation and can focus on better parts of the job), and society as a whole (who save the substantial cost of dealing with all of the above: incarceration, rehabilitation, salary, lost productive economic activity).

The more nuanced discussion that tends to get lost in the weeds is "How do we simultaneously allow police latitude to do the job we want them to do, while also ensuring that latitude isn't disproportionately employed against minorities or political out-groups?"

In other words, police may need to crack a few hard heads. But those shouldn't be statistically-over-representative person of color heads.

Of course, fold in that economic situation is also racially biased, as a consequence of historical inequities, and actually accomplishing statistically-fair policing seems intractable. :(

But at the end of the day, people getting stabbed isn't good for anyone.

Even from an anti-police perspective, it builds support for "hard policing" policies among the general public, and eventually an election swings someone they support into office.

There was another comment in here that asserted that cops commit domestic violence more often than the general public.

Which immediately made me think "Why?"

Obviously, the acceptable amount of domestic violence is zero, but (if those statistics are true) there's something causing police officers to commit it more frequently than the general public.

It's probably partly that policing selects for "tough" people, by virtue of the work...

... but it also speaks to cumulative trauma caused by the job, and the effects of that.

You can't watch humans be shitty to each other, repeatedly, without it changing you. :(

It feels like we need a more complete lifecycle than "police for life," that includes cycling through various related components, some of which provide an opportunity for healing.

E.g. also stints helping defense and prosecuting attorneys, legal defense funds, partnering with mental health professionals, EMS, fire/rescue, etc.

Here’s a report regarding police domestic violence.

https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2017R1/Downloads/Comm...

I agree with what you wrote and largely agree with it. It’s a tricky situation and I don’t pretend to know of any realistic solutions. I’m a keyboard warrior spreading the gospel against illegal police violence. Such voices are needed if we are to keep excessive police violence from being normalized and accepted. Voices are too needed in support of police. Extreme outcomes on either side of this issue are bad.

I wasn't sure if you were the OP of that tidbit or not.

But yeah, to me, if I see police officers are 2-4x more likely than the general public to engage in domestic violence, that engages my curiosity about the job rather than the people.

You don't pick bad apples at a reliable 2-4x rate across the entire country.

And so much police reform (when it happens) seems to start and stop with the individuals. 'Find the officers who are doing bad things and apply more consequences to them,' etc.

Part of the solution, to be sure, but IMHO we should look equally closely at what all these super-offenders have in common -- the same job!

"How can we change the policing job to one that doesn't cause its employees to perpetrate domestic violence and employ excessive use of force at greater rates than the general public?" is a question I don't see much.

As an analogy, farmers commit suicide at far higher rates than the general public. Yet somehow I doubt it would fix the problem to identify only the suicidal farmers and just help them. The root cause is the stress and challenges of the profession, shared by all, even if it only ends tragically for a subset.

> As an individual policeman there is very little you can do about an agitated crowd who starts chanting.

You can kneel with protestors.

A cop tried this at a BLM protests I was at, which was peaceful including when the cops inexplicably arrived in riot gear. His buddies yanked him back and we never saw him again.

So you're right, very little cops can do when the system selects for bad behavior.

Police say that's the reason, but as you noted in the first paragraph, they're willing to manipulate the public for their own ends: why trust them on this motivation?

What consequences do they have from perceived racism that they fear it so much? Again as you noted, they are rarely punished for anything at all. They also do a lot of pretty unambiguous racism without apparent concern over this.

> For whatever reason I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.

It's both, and the reasons are interrelated. Passivity in some areas protects their right to do violence in others. Public fear of crime, avoidance of public spaces, these are results that benefit them institutionally. What incentives do they have for not working towards that result?

What consequences do they have from perceived racism that they fear it so much?

When the white liberals (like me) of my city unite with poor people of color and decry an action of the police it does affect them. They are human and criticism does affect them. It especially affects them when the whole city is up in arms over something they do. Mostly white liberals in my city don’t think about policing issues until something egregious happens. My experience is that when the whole city is up in arms about their actions then police respond like a petulant child by refusing to enforce the law.

Public fear of crime, avoidance of public spaces, these are results that benefit them institutionally. What incentives do they have for not working towards that result?

I grew up in the Canal Zone in Panama and remember the time during Noriega when he and the U.S. were opposed to each other. I remember the way I had be when dealing with Panamanian police during that time. Even though I was a white American I had to be very careful when dealing with them. I feel the same way around American police as I did when I dealt with police of a dictatorship.

My experience in America is that it is considered suspicious if a group of people are just hanging out outside. Four black kids walking together in my neighborhood would have the police called on them. We are, in essence, a nation of building dwellers who only go outside for the purpose of getting into a vehicle to drive to another building. It is as you say a situation that benefits police.

We don’t really have civil rights in the U.S. because police can, with impunity, fuck you up for exercising them.

> the entire department’s response is to stop doing their job.

This is one hell of a claim. Can you share some good sources that verify it?

No. I live in the area and there are places near Lake Street that police simply won’t go to unless it’s a violent crime in progress. One councilman from south Minneapolis, before George Floyd, mentioned that in his district police took their time to respond to calls and when they did show up told people to thank their councilman. They didn’t like his calls for greater police accountability and this was done in retribution. There are links in the comments regarding how police hold cities hostage when they are held accountable.

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