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Comment by mrangle | Hacker News Reader

Everyone doesn't get treated like shit. Most people respect and want cops. People whining about cops being mean to them, and their general dispositions, tends to think that their police interaction is a super special customer service experience and that the system is faulty when it falls short of their expectations. The reality is that cops deal with the worst of society multiple times per day, even if you don't represent it. The robot doesn't yet exist that can remain psychologically fresh given that. The summary take is to move to a very rural area if you need to feel relatively better respected by cops.

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> Most people respect and want cops

89% of Americans think that changes need to made to make policing better and 50% of Americans think that major changes need to be made [1].

> People whining about cops being mean to them, and their general dispositions, tends to think that their police interaction is a super special customer service experience and that the system is faulty when it falls short of their expectations.

If those expectations are the cops not shooting or assaulting innocent people I think those are pretty reasonable expectation and if the system is falling short of them it is absolutely faulty.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/393119/americans-remain-steadfa...

None of these thing are mutually exclusive with what the parent poster said.

Believable metric.

Many citizens in the abstract, "support" police. But police are pretty indiscriminate with their power tripping. So people with actual experience dealing with them tend to form negative opinions when they realize this might be a Leopard Ate Your Face moment.

I've heard an actual person say, "I though police were only like that to <...> people".

An old saying I heard was, "Everyone is a liberal until they are mugged. Everyone is a conservative until they are harassed by the police."

>I've heard an actual person say, "I though police were only like that to <...> people".

I saw a video of a lady getting a ticket for something and kept saying, "But I'm a Republican!" As if that would make the officer change his mind.

Very, very few innocent people are being shot and assaulted by police. You're using hyperbole to throw the discussion off track. Read the post to which I was replying and stop ruining any chance of discourse with nonsense claims.

Your POV is equivalent to shouting in someone's face about surgical malpractice when the discussion is about the benefit of doctors in spite of the fact that some don't live up to expectations when providing GP service. Give us all a break for once, from your warped corner.

If you want statistically inevitable bad-cop events to stop happening, the only way to do that is to reduce the events that cause violent cop interactions. That is, crime has to reduced at the community level without law enforcement.

Garbage poll. It utilized questions that close to zero Americans would disagree with, in that the policies in question aren't controversial and are already enforced. Ignoring the intentionally murky language of the third question. And ignoring the fact that their methods can't be critiqued given America's current rock solid trust in polling.

See the first three:

Require officers to have good relations with the community

Change management practices, so officer abuses are punished

Change management practices, so officers with multiple incidents of abuse of power are not allowed to serve

> in that the policies in question aren't controversial and are already enforced

These policies aren't enforced

> Change management practices, so officer abuses are punished

"Less than 10% of officers in most police forces get investigated for misconduct. Yet some officers are consistently under investigation. Nearly 2,500 have been investigated on 10 or more charges. Twenty faced 100 or more allegations yet kept their badge for years." [1]

> Change management practices, so officers with multiple incidents of abuse of power are not allowed to serve

"Officers like Wiley Willis, who was caught on video manhandling a handcuffed woman in an interview room until she lay injured in a pool of blood. He got his firing reversed because an expert didn’t record a polygraph ... Among the officers who benefited from it: a Shreveport officer accused of raping a woman at police headquarters; a Baton Rouge officer who shot at a fleeing motorist and was fired for dishonesty; a Eunice officer disciplined for choking and tackling a motorist; and a Hammond officer who took part in a beating that a policing expert hired by the city said was one of the “most abusive uses of force” he ever reviewed." [2] all of these cops got their jobs back

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/0... [2] https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/louisiana-shields-pol...

I'd say most people want cops, because they hate criminals even more, but even in my conservative groups, no one respects someone for being a cop. It's a shitty job that attracts rough characters.

I want tons of cops, but I don't want to interact with them ever. They are very often just thugs operating within a structured organization to stop thugs operating with no guiding principals.

>The summary take is to move to a very rural area if you need to feel relatively better respected by cops.

As someone who has lived and worked in many rural areas, this advice doesn't work if you're a minority.

"Doesn't work" is nonsense language that arises from a clinically neurotic view of reality, which is in response to my patronizing (if practical) response to a clinically neurotic view of urban life.

Apparently, you've never had the police violate your rights, and for no reason at all. One day, you will be in a place and at a time that the police do not like for some reason, you will be perfectly within the law and within your rights, and you will catch a beatdown. Tell me how you feel once that happens to you.

I'm a white person, probably considered upper-middle class. I have no criminal record, I don't even have a driving record. Yet, I've been felony stopped and harassed repeatedly - never arrested or even given a citation. I filed citizens complaints, and cops investigate their coworkers and find nothing wrong. The bruises on my body were plenty proof of something wrong, there is documentation. Qualified Immunity means the cops can do whatever they want and get away with it. It takes undeniable citizen evidence to fight back, exactly the kind of evidence that these new laws would like to limit. Cops are never above the law. If the cops can film me in public then I can film them in public too. Frankly, I'm willing to die over the right to film the police - they'll have to kill me to stop me.

    > "People whining about cops being mean to them ... tend to
    > think that their police interaction is a super special 
    > customer service experience"

Strong disagree. In the US, cops are much more likely to hurt minorities than white people. Maybe other white folks the luxury of considering a police interaction as a "customer experience," but every single one of my Black&brown friends doesn't feel safe around cops, and with good reason. Minorities whine about police because police are more likely to unnecessarily hurt them and their friends.

You're making a classic Bayesian error.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/report-black-people-are-...

> Everyone doesn't get treated like shit.

But enough people do, by the police, that wanting to be able to hold the police accountable for their actions by recording them seems a reasonable position IMO.

If they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear, right?

Of course the majority respect cops. It's generally the minority that they abuse.

And very frequently, the cops in question are minorities themselves.

Personally, I don't see how that changes things. Even minority cops work in a systemically flawed system.

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