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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I'm of several minds on this.

One, yes crude language is protected speech.

On the other hand people who deal with lots of grief hourly deserve some kind of protection from daily verbal abuse.

On the other hand, some of the abuse is likely attributable to "arrogance" on the public servant. So perhaps these people should receive training and become fireable, or at least reassigned if if becomes chronic. But being public employees and in a labor union, that's not going to happen.

Still, I understand its a tall order to ask people to put up with awful abuse day after day. Imagine you are a woman and the majority of people you process through are unenthusiastic males. You are bound to get fed up.

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You know what gets unending amounts of vitreol thrown at you? Working customer service. Especially tech support. I had urges to smash phones whenever I heard them ringing for years after doing tech support for three months. Tech support is a job where you sit on a phone and people abuse you all day, day after day.

Only cops get to pull this sort of crap in response. Find yourself a retail clerk and ask them how much abuse they have to quietly take, every day; it'll shock you.

Exactly. So you feel this way about people you dealt with over the phone long distance, sight unseen.

Imagine if you had to deal with people like this directly, some of which could be actual violent people (maybe didn't take their meds, had a bad day, whatever.)

To get a glimpse, imagine next time you get on a bus, or a coffee that someone you don't know, a stranger says, to you, "Hey asshole, you're in my way." Maybe you inadvertently took their spot. Now imagine this happening frequently, maybe daily, or more.

I think it's fair to say it's a tough job. That's not condoning the powertrips, but at the same time, one needs to understand the circumstances those people work under. In civil society some of it would be considered sexual harassment and intimidation and direct threats.

Sure, because that schoolboy flipping off the officer was obviously a punk gangster Al-Qaeda sleeper agent suicide bomber.

There are nice schoolboys and there are hardened dropouts too, what's your point? And I dint bring up schoolboys. You're injecting that where I didn't mention that.

All I'm saying is that public servants of all kinds face daily indignities. They may deserve some of it, other times it's people being jerks --but pubic servants don't face one or two antagonistic people a week, they can face many, depending on their post. And the point is no one should have face a daily dose of expletives directed at them. They face that, but they should not. Now granted, we have a right to express ourselves. My point is in any other job, this behavior would become unwelcome and would have consequences on the offender in the form of up to civil or criminal charges (sexual harassment, for example).

This work hazard is a bit unique to public servants and it's constant and that will take a toll on the affected's psyche, like if or not. Just because they get paid with public funds does not make them magically immune to human weaknesses.

Indeed! I did support for Apple for 10 years. In the last few years I began to have nervous breakdowns and suicidal thoughts. To have to put up with abuse on a daily basis and never be able to do anything but take it takes a toll.

Sprint/Embarq/CenturyTel/CenturyLink have an interesting policy on not showing up to work. Many years ago when I did work for them in technical support I was told two things. "Most people here do not make it past a year. The rest break at two years." After that, "We do not terminate people for missing work. If you do not show up for two days or answer your phone for two days we will assume you have turned in your two weeks notice effectively two weeks prior."

They understood people cracked and just would disappear never coming back to work. There were days of spending three hours on a phone with someone that clearly did not understand where the start menu was despite having been explained it many times over those three hours.

Verbal abuse does hurt and it gets to people after a while. Being in a position at the end of that requires a very tough resolute personality. I thought I was the best at being strong, but in the end I cracked refusing to get out of bed for several days.

In the ideal society, all citizens are equal in rights and privileges. But we don't live in a perfect society, and so we have public servants: citizens who have more rights than other citizens (eg. blowing through a red light without repercussions for a police officer) in the intent of them using those extra rights for the benefit of society.

This is a tremendous privilege; it cannot come for free. It comes at the price of being open to any and all forms of criticisms (public and private) from other citizens, whether this criticism is in the form of a polite letter or a middle finger.

You could try to legislate that only "constructive criticisms" are to be tolerated, but that's a very slippery slope towards a police state. The cost of allowing citizens to call officers "assholes" is one that we absolutely want to take on.

> On the other hand people who deal with lots of grief hourly deserve some kind of protection from daily verbal abuse.

hmmm.. do they? we are talking about law enforcement, which aside from being a public service is also _THE_ authority figure. The right to talk shit to authority is very important to me.

Of course it is. and it should not be abridged, but we should not underestimate the abuse public servants who interact with people face daily. Ideally, there would be a way to balance this, but there isn't. So the fairest solution is for one side to take it for the team (society) and that is the public servant side (parking meter maid, police, bus driver, dmv employees, social services employees, etc.

Still, it's not fair and I certainly would not work as public employee dealing with people who unload their problems on the face of the state.

It seems to me that they deserve protection from abuse the same way disaster-cleanup people deserve protection from biohazards and radiation: by limiting their total lifetime exposure. If being a police officer was, say, a five-year-limit tour-of-duty, which wouldn't be followed by retirement but rather by sponsored retraining (as for drafted soldiers after a war), I think we'd see a lot more people willing to become police. It'd be like joining the domestic peace corps!

That's an interesting idea. I would think limited 'tours of duty' might help with corruption as well.

We'd need a nationwide agreement of some sort to not employ people who have already worked their quota of five years in the police force. Other than that, I would absolutely agree with the idea.

Something I don't understand is how we tolerate the blue code of silence. If a police officer lies in a court of law to protect a fellow officer, they should get at a minimum the same sentence as the fellow officer in question.

You can talk shit to authority in a newspaper, letter, public forum, or demonstration. You don't have to do it in your car or on the street. And you don't have a right to choose the time, place, and specific officer you wish to talk to by making a scene where you can't reasonably be heard anyway.

I was a teacher, and I was pretty much called every name under sun. While I had some ability to punish children, at the end of the day, I had nowhere near the power to detain and charge somebody. It's not fun, but it comes with the territory. I can maybe support an officer's ability to give like a $10 ticket to someone who speaks abusively to them, but that's about it.

I'm not sure of the legality of that. Afterall it's free speech --but, for the sake of argument, the nominal value could prove not so much a deterrent as much as a restorative mechanism for the public servant (police, dmv, social services, etc.)

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