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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

This mindset, along with the police behavior that motivates it, will eventually turn the US into a mind-your-own-business country, where crimes can happen in broad daylight and people get in trouble while passersby do nothing. We've seen a similar culture in action in news stories from China.

The net result: cops' job gets harder, and they only have themselves to blame for alienating the people who should be their allies. At least maximum employment will be guaranteed for them.

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The uncanny thing about this kind of ever-increasing animosity and mutual antagonism between the public and law enforcement ( of all kinds - local, federal and the miscellaneous) is that there has to be someone benefiting from this state of affairs.

It simply cannot be that neither side - groups pushing for stronger prosecution of crime and ones pushing for decriminalization of petty crimes [4][5][6] - likes it , yet does nothing to ease tensions and head towards less contentious state of affairs.

I suspect the groups who stand to benefit from this state of morass have cozy relations between them and are likely :

a) the private prison lobby like CCA [1]

b) the police unions [2] and

c) the prison guard lobby like CCPOA [3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Amer...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_O...

[4] http://www.salon.com/2013/09/23/6_shocking_revelations_about...

[5] http://dyn.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.r...

[6] http://www.salon.com/2013/11/22/humans_shipped_across_the_co...

Edit: Corrections

> where crimes can happen in broad daylight and people get in trouble while passersby do nothing

There are plenty of places in the U.S. where this has been the case for decades.

Not at all like the situation in China. In the U.S., if you're in a neighborhood with a large organized crime presence, passers-by will often refuse to testify, but what the parent is talking about in China today and the U.S. in this hypothetical future is different. In China, there is a recent history or at least public perception of victims falsely accusing good samaritan helpers of being the perpetrators in order to sue someone, even if they can't catch the perpetrator. The parent is saying that the U.S. could become the same way, except with would-be good samaritans/crime reporters not being afraid of the victims but of the police.

The US is historically a mind-your-own-business country. See pre-WWII isolationism and the time before the Truman doctrine.

So is Europe currently.

Link is 404'ing now.

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