Comment by vdaniuk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vdaniuk | Hacker News Reader

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> The entire time, the officers' job is to protect themselves and their fellow officers.

>This is unpopular, but I believe it to be true, I think.

Your belief is simply wrong. The risk of dying in a line of duty for cops is quite low, being a LE is not even in the first top 10 dangerous professions. Most deaths are due to the traffic incidents.[0]

>Aaron was a great kid, but the majority of people brought into the station aren't.

Who defines that? Police? Nice circular logic you've got there. Until the court says otherwise they are citizens whose rights should be upheld as much as possible.

Also it's great that US has such upstanding citizens as you, protecting the real opressed minority - policemen. If Aaron would be wearing his shoes, who knows what grave harm could he do to a police station full of armed cops?

EDIT I digged a little deeper and found out that number of police deaths in the line of duty during latest years had been around 100/year[1].

At least 1450 were people killed by police since May 2013[2].

I don't wish that on you but there would be a certain ironical justice if police apologists like you would experience non-lethal brutality themeselves. Maybe then you would learn something.

[0]http://www.theagitator.com/2007/12/28/how-dangerous-is-polic...

[1]http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.htm...

[2]http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/another-much-higher-count...

>Here's a number, in 2012 ~53,000 officers were assaulted in the line of duty. Those assaults could have happened from arresting a dangerous gunman to booking a 130 pound 24 year old for B&E.

Here's another number, most of those numbers are BS incidents reported by the police as "assaults" (much like the black guy shot that was said to "hold a gun"), and a lot of those are provoked by the police too.

Ask yourself how Germany (1/5 of the US in population) manages have its police use a total of 85-100 bullets in a whole year (for every city / policeman / incident in aggregate!), whereas a US police team can fire more than 90 in just one incident:

http://www.theweek.co.uk/crime/46907/us-police-fire-more-bul...

> Here's another number, most of those numbers are BS incidents reported by the police as "assaults"

That's

a) not a number

b) prove it

American police are definitely out of control. No disagreement from me on that matter.

But their job also has risks, and unlike what vdaniuk and other naive people here seem to think the two options for an officer are not "make it through their day having pleasant exchanges with every person they meet" and "die in the most horrible manner possible".

I understand that you don't like the police. Most people, myself included, have trouble with the amount of power the police have assumed and the amount of power the courts have allowed the police to hold on to. But I'm also capable of rational thinking on the matter instead of diving into immediate hyperbole whenever the word "police" are brought up.

I understand that it makes you emotional and brings up all kinds of feelings of injustice. But your arguments just become troll fodder when they start the way you've started your argument. And you've only simulated the appearance of rationality by bringing German police shootings into the matter, something almost completely non-sequitur and demonstrating your lack of rational thought on the issue.

This is why policy shouldn't be made on emotional input like yours. Because then the system would be optimized for petty theft and people that swear on Sundays and have no capacity to handle higher modes of human failure, or it would be the opposite and be completely punitive regardless of the arrest circumstances.

>I understand that it makes you emotional and brings up all kinds of feelings of injustice. But your arguments just become troll fodder when they start the way you've started your argument.

Not sure what's trollish about it. There are lots of instances of police reporting BS assaults just in order to arrest someone. People have spoken about such experiences in HN too. Not to mention the recent thing in Fergusson, were the same kind of incident happened twice in the span of a month.

I'm not in favor of "proving" things with numbers outside of hard sciences. In real life numbers are dirty themselves, tailored, manipulated etc. Either you know about some things from experience and/or can draw conclusions from the limited input that you read and learn about or not. Statistics ain't the answer, official statistics even less so.

>And you've only simulated the appearance of rationality by bringing German police shootings into the matter, something almost completely non-sequitur and demonstrating your lack of rational thought on the issue.

Not sure how it's non sequitur in any way. It was an argument that police forces can and DO operate differently in a modern, advanced, western country.

If you want to argue that the US is not as advanced and civilized and as such it's more dangerous for policemen, I might agree, but that's another point. And it might be one caused by the way the police/justice/prison system itself works here too.

Anecdotes are not data.

If you want proof, do your own sociology homework. I think the burden rests on you, to show most assaults on LEOs are not trumped up bullshit, in this case. Cops lie.

I don't see how you can claim the burden falls on him. They already presented a study saying how many assaults happen on cops per year, if you want to refute that study with evidence then that's your burden - It's not their job to form your arguments for you just because you think you're right.

The burden of proof doesn't fall on me, I didn't make the claim.

You seem to require no proof from those making the statistics though.

Is it because police and official documents have been historically proven inherently trustworthy?

You'd be surprised.

Data are just collections of anecdotes.

Everything in the end goes down to trust, if you trust official statements then you probably haven't read enough history.

There are anecdotes that are more accurate and trustworthy than "data" on the same subject. For example, would you believe the official "annual report on poverty rates" by the government of South Korea? Or would you believe a person who lived there and is recounting the conditions?

I wouldn't believe official records of police "assaults" that the police has compiled itself either. Like I wouldn't believe official records that show how police was totally "racially blind" in Missouri, etc.

I find this obsession with data on non hard-science issues, especially social issues, idiotic and mechanical. If anything it obstructs with getting to the truth of things.

Here are how some of the official responses (that people esteemed as "data") turned out:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in...

> Data are just collections of anecdotes.

No, actually they aren't. Pretty much the rest of anything you can say on the matter, and anything about how you view the world is invalidated by that simple belief.

You see, the problem is that you've decided to build a world view off of unfalsifiable beliefs, not fact. You pretend to sound like you're questioning the veracity of facts, which is normally a reasonable thing to do, but what you're actually doing is preventing anything from shaking the preconceived notion that you've decided to glom onto. It's simply a ceremony you follow to help reinforce your beliefs.

When you enter into a "debate" like this one, you aren't there to change people's minds, or have your mind changed, your simply shoving the iron bar of your belief system down everybody else's throat and see if you stir up sympathetic ears to help continue to justify what you want to see in the world.

When you can't find support for your notions, you rely on semantically connected, but otherwise nonsequitur references, a classic redirection technique.

The issue that started all this is "was Aaron treated well in police custody", some people were shocked at what the inside of a police station looks like, but Aaron was treated just fine. Meanwhile you're off in Denmark and South Korea talking about poverty and experimental Danish maximum security prisons. They both involve "the man" so they must be relevant to the discussion, no?

No. They aren't.

> But I'm also capable of rational thinking on the matter instead of diving into immediate hyperbole whenever the word "police" are brought up.

Unfortunately, on the interenets, hyperbole wins. I just flag articles with discussions that have gone off the rails like this.

Also: http://ordrespontane.blogspot.it/2014/07/brandolinis-law.htm...

So for police it's a binary outcome? Either they handle a suspect and everthing is peaches and cream or they die?

You need to go spend some time in a police station, do some ride-alongs.

Here's a number, in 2012 ~53,000 officers were assaulted in the line of duty. Those assaults could have happened from arresting a dangerous gunman to booking a 130 pound 24 year old for B&E.

It's important to have perspective about what police do and deal with everyday. They aren't acting irrationally. There really are reasons for why they do what they do, even if we disagree with their actions.

>It's important to have perspective about what police do and deal with everyday. They aren't acting irrationally.

Sure they aren't. Most of them are psychopaths(yes,"psychopath" term is not a perfect model for describing personality disorders, deal with it) who are using their privileged position and monopoly on violence to satisfy their urge for power and control.

It is perfectly rational if you understand that police are NOT there to "serve and protect" you and not legally obliged to protect you and are blue wall of silence covers up "the bad apples".

> Most of them are psychopaths

That's quite a claim. Demonstrate it.

I certainly can't do it in a rigorous, scientific manner. However, my line of thinking is as follows. Persons with antisocial personality diaorder ( a correct term) fail to exhibit guilt, empathy or admit the responsibility for their actions among other factors. That is consistent with general, averaged cop behavior in US and existence of blue wall of silence that effectively prohibits making those accountable for multiple transgressions accountable.

But yeah, I was too irritated by apologists and didn't use enough guarding. I'll admit that I have no proof of "most" police officers being psychopathic. I am sure many of them are, though.

We need every cop to wear cams as soon as possible. Then all these "the cop is the perp and the perp is the victim" idiots can watch the videos and shut up.

> Here's a number, in 2012 ~53,000 officers were assaulted in the line of duty.

One of those assaults was a suspect bleeding on their uniforms as he was having his head stomped. They charged him with destruction of government property for his blood stains.

Of course, I don't think just one of those 53,000 was like this. It wasn't a fluke.

Whenever police end up using force, they inevitably attach the "assault of police officer" charge, to justify their use of force. If they did not, the defence could ask: well, why did you beat him up?

That's not really correct. It does happen, but not as a typical case.

I'd be interested in independent and unbiased studies of violence against police officers if you have any.

Whoa. Let's be clear: I am not an apologist for anything, and I do not appreciate the ad hominem at all.

I am, on the other hand, capable of realizing that police officers do have a dangerous job (by definition, actually), and that it is their right to protect themselves and their fellow officers, as well as our fellow citizens.

I am not excusing any sort of unjust death or brutality, but nobody was brutalized here. I watched the video just like you. Yes, they gave him a hard time for not knowing his social security number; that could have been handled better. But that's it.

As for who defines whether he is or isn't a good kid: that's just my point, it is /not/ the booking officer. That is, the booking officer has no idea whether Aaron was just brought in for a stolen bicycle as a suspect, or whether he had been seen beating a helpless old man with his own cane. Nobody defines it for the officer, I am simply stating the obvious: Aaron was a good kid, but it is entirely possible that a worse kid could have been brought in, with worse intentions, and the officers who were booking him would have been none the wiser.

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