If there ever was a case of "don't comment unless you've RTFA" this it: people extrapolating their viewpoint on a list of 700 things from watching 1, 2, 3 ...
At a minimum, watch 100 videos. I did last night, only took about an hour, it's easy to find some to nitpick, some which are ambiguous ... and plenty that are totally horrifying.
If you can watch 100 videos in a row from Greg Doucette's list and say, "the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.
Otherwise you're not speaking from an honest grappling with what these videos contain.
I’ve reached the point where the problem is more than just the equipment, it’s the culture.
There are way too many cases where a cop provokes a confrontation, often by stopping to allow someone else nearby to run into them, and every other cop in the group responds by beating anyone nearby and shoving back anyone with a camera.
You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice.
>I’ve reached the point where the problem is more than just the equipment, it’s the culture.
This is absolutely true, but the problem goes much deeper than just the police force itself. We seem to want to solve every imaginable social problem with police/courts/prisons. Drug abuse needs to be viewed as a public health problem, not a criminal problem. Homelessness as a housing and mental health problem, not a criminal one. Many other issues as economic problems not criminal ones. Address the root cause, rather than sending people with badges and guns. I realize this is easier said than done, but it's clear the old approach is no longer acceptable to society.
Who holds police accountable? The DA and IAB are supposed to, but they don't. Instead, other police hold them accountable for having each other's backs through social pressure, professional pressure, and some less-than-legal means. Police back each other up because they're responding to these incentives.
"You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice."
I disagree. That's what makes this so much more difficult. If it required planning and practice, we could find the meeting place and itinerary and correct it.
This is much more subtle. This is the kind of thing you can get when you group like minded individuals together and give them power. Without directly orchestrating, they pick up cues and work together.
It's like when a company hires a new person and there's no rule explicitly saying they have to work overtime, but they see everyone else doing it and soon they are too.
Almost all of them had outright wrong, or heavily misleading titles and/or descriptions with contradictory claims in the comments - and almost none of them provided context to the police actions.
This list is really more about stoking emotions than providing evidence of anything.
This is why any footage of an incident used in court must include the entire interaction. Police body cam footage can be rejected as evidence if it does not start with the officer stepping out of his vehicle. This is why so many iPhone recordings from bystanders gets thrown out in trial.
Are there instances where police abuse their power? Yes. Absolutely. But it doesn't help anyone when people are cherry picking instances where escalation of force was warranted, but they do not show the full context leading up to that escalation.
I would like to see meaningful police reform as much as anyone else. But we need to be pragmatic about any examples we cite as "abuse of force". Let's create a list of absolutely cut-and-dry instances of police brutality, then move from there.
So, for the example you provide the only contradictory claims come from accounts that have very few followers. The few posts saying "she was throwing things" have fewer than 10 followers.
But, also, rubber bullets are less lethal, not non lethal, and so they should be reserved for situations where life is at risk. If she wasn't throwing molotov cocktails or bricks they shouldn't have used rubber bullets on her.
The other claim is that she was pregnant and thus shouldn't have gone. This is incoherent: we want protests to be non-violent, so we want pregnant women and children to be able to attend.
> This list is really more about stoking emotions than providing evidence of anything.
Yet lists like that is all we have to actually quantify the problem because there are literally zero attempts of doing it on a federal level [0].
In that context, I always consider it quite fascinating how the federal US government is allegedly very informed how many protesters are killed by security forces in countries like Iran, yet the same federal US government couldn't tell you how many of its citizens are killed each year by their own police.
same here. I saw a couple out of 20 that looked like gratuitous police brutality. many were labeled as such and didn't seem likely. The deluge of irrelevant examples and confusing commentary confuses the point.
>"the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.
Just to play devils advocate, can't I conclude there is a problem without that problem being the "militarization" of the police force. In other words aren't I allowed to conclude there was a problem prior to the militarization of the police force, and really what we are seeing proliferation of video recordings that are now making us think these acts are new, when the reality is they happened in mass occurred prior to militarization of police...and as scary as it sounds accountability is increasing because of the video?
Then on the extreme end of devils advocate, lets say we all watched 100 videos that made us sick to our stomach...how many millions of police interactions have we not seen that might suggest the bad acts is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall data. Not unlike maybe a few bad actors that have looted or committed arson, or committed murder during the BLM protests, do those acts suggest the entire culture of BLM movement is tainted?
One of the things that really makes me sick about the George Floyd death which doesn't get a lot of attention is that the prosecutors/state attorneys originally swept it under the rug and refused to bring charges. Thank god for the video, even though it didn't stop the act, we all see the tragedy we see the victim we see the cop and attach names and faces...but who knows the names of the prosecutors who watched this video and said "no, nothing wrong here, no charges?" Nameless, faceless people protecting the officers behind the scene enabling offices to act any way they want knowing they will be protected...and maybe if we corrected that problem and officer didn't feel they could act in any fashion they wanted and receive protection perhaps we would see officers act a little differently in the streets.
I see your example of the extreme end a lot, and while I understand why people arrive at it, I think it's useful to question some of the underlying premises.
Oftentimes, I think people say things like "I don't think a few bad police officers ruin policing just like I don't think BLM is evil because of a few violent actors" because they have empathy for police officers who don't do horrible things, and it's sort of a knee jerk reaction against broadly characterizing people.
The problem, however, is that the two groups aren't equivalent. If we granted every person who identified with the BLM movement the same authority as we do police officers, the presence of violent actors inside BLM protests would be an issue. But we don't.
Police officers are given the utmost authority and deterrence in America. They have particular legal protections, they are authorized by the government to give legally enforceable orders to other citizens, etc. Even if the bad acts are a "drop in the bucket," would that be acceptable? And isn't the fact that these bad acts are persistent—regardless of frequency relative to good acts—at the very least suggestive of systemic issues?
In other words, consistent bad acts—even if infrequent—are a bigger deal when the actor is in such a position of authority. Protest groups are clearly not in such a position—hence their protests.
I've watched 30 clips. ALL of them were 30 second clips with no context. All of them from one Twitter thread as well, so not sure why that was not linked instead.
On the other hand, all of the instances of so-called police brutality with context which I've seen elsewhere occur after the police calmly order the protestors to leave a particular area, or to go home because of a curphew order or something else and the protests refuse in a less-than-calm manner.
My question is this: is the police using force to manage a crowd always unjustified in your view?
There is a very American viewpoint that the rest of the world is somehow different. There are police in Taiwan, Australia, Canada and most of Europe.
They are friendly and don’t over exert their force in a frequent manner like the US.
In US the police just take out their gun for absolutely petty reasons. It’s like they just want to escalate the situation rather than calm it down.
So yes, the problem is American police don’t know how to calm a crowd down. They stand like robots rather than be humans and listen and work with the crowd.
In many instances the first shots are fired by the police.
The crowd has been otherwise quite peaceful exercising their first amendment right.
As a non American I am not getting this at all. In many US cities/towns sheriff is elected. In all other cases city mayor is elected. How it happens that all those mayors and sheriffs are still in the office if police brutality is such a big issue?
Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?
One answer is law enforcement is largely a bureaucracy of career civil servants, so they're not as subject to the whims of a mayor or elected officials.
On top of that they're a fairly politically active group, so they have an outsized influence on policies, including those that affect them.
But the biggest issue, as you note, is the sheer disparity in who interacts with the police at all.
Only about 10% of Americans had police-initiated, non-traffic stop contacts.
So 9 out of 10 Americans never see the police, much less have insight as to whether they're too violent.
Blacks 50% more likely than Whites to be subjected to a street stop by police.
Blacks 120% (!) more likely than Whites to be subjected to police force.
And, every single respondent who indicated they were Tasered by police felt it was "excessive" force.
So, yes, fundamentally this is a "rights of the minority" problem - and the minority in this case are younger, poorer, less politically connected, and therefore are underrepresented in discussions about police brutality, effective law enforcement, police training, and other policies which impact them.
The efforts to "defund police" would solve some of the same problems that police currently address through other means. This would weaken the influence of police unions. For example, spending more to treat drug addiction as a disease rather than paying police to address possession as a crime.
I suggest looking for articles in major US publications starting with NPR's site. There's just too much to cover in a comment.
Just as a synopsis, systemic racism became a more subtle segregation. POC (People or Person of Color) were systematically made to appear more violent and criminal-like over time. Combine that notion with an idealized notion of the police as hero figures and you have a recipe for rationalizing violence against POC.
Mobile phone videos allowed us to see from the victim's perspective just how brutal police have become.
"How it happens that all those mayors and sheriffs are still in the office if police brutality is such a big issue?"
To this point, you need to understand about voting districts and how POC voting power has been diluted and prevented over decades.
I did that yesterday, more than 100 of the videos.
Eventually I saw a pattern, surprising since it was common in major cities all across the US and as if there were some single, central training materials. Apparently:
(1) Police are taught to be in control of any contact with a citizen. Recently the police have been taught to act nice initially, but, once it is clear some actual law enforcement is to be involved, be in control.
Being in control can mean that the citizen has been intimidated and made submissive so that they won't resist. Part of this is to demand that a citizen DO some little things, e.g., stand with feet apart, move back 10 feet, or tolerate being falsely accused of something, e.g., "weaving" in the road, being too close to the officer, etc. The officers are looking for things, even trivial, fake things, to object to so that they can object. It's like Captain Sobel in the 101st Airborne training in the series Band of Brothers -- "find some" infractions so that can complain about them and force the soldiers to accept being falsely accused so that they will be more compliant -- the police seem to have borrowed this tactic.
If the citizen does not look submissive, then the officer provokes a defensive reaction from the citizen so that they can arrest the citizen or threaten to arrest them.
Then, finally, maybe arrested, the citizen has been subdued and is submissive, which is what the police wanted to begin with.
(2) The police like to teach citizens, to change their attitude, and do this by hurting them, e.g., hitting them with a club, bending their arms, throwing them to the ground and putting a knee on their neck, spraying them with pepper spray, etc. They regard good police work as meting out "cruel and unusual punishment", with pain and maybe serious injury, without "due process". So, the police want to be absolute dictators on the streets.
(3) In a confrontation with a citizen, the police want some result where they successfully took some law enforcement action, a ticket or an arrest. E.g., in Atlanta, at first they didn't want merely to leave the citizen alone or, if the citizen was drunk, let him call a cab and (ii) later wanted to make sure the citizen was not able just to run away. The reaction to a citizen running away?
"Shoot them and kill them. Gee, they might 'get away'; can't permit that; that would violate due respect for the police; so, shoot the citizen." -- or some such.
(4) The expected, usual approach to an arrest is to throw the citizen to the ground, hold them down with a knee to their neck, their arms behind their back, and put on handcuffs.
From the 100 or so videos I watched, it appeared that (1)-(4) are so standard that they have been taught from some standard source. E.g., in all of that, some semi-bright guy had the idea that it was good to put a knee on a neck, and it appears that that is now standard.
Apparently part of (1)-(4) is the associated support for it from the Blue Line, e.g., police unions, Police Benevolent Associations, liability insurance cities buy for their police, the norm of police sticking together, local prosecutors, DAs, and judges who work daily with police and want to cooperate, politicians who want safe streets, etc. And at times maybe there has been more to police power, e.g., confiscating cash, shakedowns, payoffs, etc.
I'm sure that changing (1)-(4) can be done but won't be easy.
I think that you've noticed a very important piece of the puzzle. I spent a decade as a Marine, received quite a bit of training alongside police and other law enforcement. The mandate to "acquire situational control" is inherent throughout that training. A few points that have stuck with me:
Police are expected to acquire control of any situation they are called to through seizing initiative. This means that they don't wait for anyone to take any action, but immediately take verbally or physically dominating actions.
It is nearly impossible to acquire control of US civilians without violating the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Once someone has violated the law, the police are protected in terms of this violation, but because they are trained to acquire immediate control, they most often are violating the rights of people who've broken no laws.
I don't have anything to add, but I just want to give you a shout out because this seems to be the most specifically constructive post in the whole thread.
This is a clear attempt to manipulate opinion, I don't know why HN leaves it up. You could watch 100 videos of disgusting malpractices in restaurant kitchens and begin to think you should never eat in a restaurant again. If after watching carefully select and cut videos on a Twitter propaganda account you believe the police has a systemic issue, you're falling for the same trap. It's the same way media manipulate you with their carefully chosen "interviews" with random people on the street.
If you watched 100 videos of kitchen malpractice within restaurants in which:
- The acts of malpractice had broadly consistent characteristics
- The restaurants in question were all owned under the same organizational umbrella
- That organizational umbrella had the authority and exclusive control of the US government
And then drew the conclusion that maybe there were systemic problems that lead to these remarkably consistent issues, you'd be completely rational.
As for your other comparison between this and "the media" curating street interviews, I don't see the parallels at all.
A news outlet using a random interview with a person on the street as evidence that people are "divided over climate change" is clearly manipulative. In this case, a person is saying "Police are routinely using military equipment and force tactics against US citizens in disturbing ways. Here are 700 videos of it as evidence."
Except that there are rules and regulations and laws about food safety, and restaurants regularly do get shut down by the health inspector if they fail to pass muster, and customers have plentiful ways to share their bad experiences and other customers will take them seriously and the restaurant will lose business as a result of their shoddy practices. In other words, there is no comparision: this system actually works decently well, all things considered. Regular folks can have high trust that, either they are eating at a clean establishment, or if it's not clean, then it will be dealt with.
Compare that to the opaqueness of police misconduct/brutality internal investigations, or how frequently even the bad actors that are known to have done wrong, are still granted their pensions. Where is the equivalent payout for a restaurant owner who doesn't follow health rules? Where do you see other restaurant owners banding together to defend a restaurateur who's had their misconduct exposed? Where do you see something equivalent to "qualified immunity" for the food industry?
In other words, this is a great example of a reasonably well-functioning market. If regulating the police behaved much more like regulating the food industry, that would actually be fantastic. In many ways, that is exactly the goal of the protests, to bring a similar level of transparency and accountability and high standards to policing, as most people already expect and has long been standard for the food industry (in developed countries).
“Restaurants” are not a single institution with centralized authority. If you saw a 100 videos of the systematic malpractice in a single restaurant chain, you can bet that company would be shut down.
>You could watch 100 videos of disgusting malpractices in restaurant kitchens and begin to think you should never eat in a restaurant again.
If you did that, and then decided we needed either better laws concerning food safety, or better enforcement of existing laws... where is the logical issue? If someone was to make the argument that a certain tolerance of bad food handling is to be allowed, then we would need to know the rate to know if we needed to make changes, but if the view point is that no restaurant should be engaging in that behavior then I don't particularly see the issue.
I'd place a $1000 bet that you are either a Republican, or you have a close friend or family member in law enforcement.
The police are uniquely powerful against normal citizens. Not only are these videos clearly representative of a large number of abuses, but their colleagues rarely try to stop those abuses. Few of them will be held accountable. The police are almost always above the law, if not outright immune.
In "cop vs. citizen" when it's just words, cops will always win. Even when there is video, it is difficult to get justice. A cop unjustly hitting someone and a citizen unjustly hitting someone are two different crimes, in my opinion, and the cop committed the far worse of the two.
The fact that everyone watching George Floyd get murdered in slow motion was too scared to tackle that cop is proof enough of the power to kill with impunity that cops have.
>You could watch 100 videos of disgusting malpractices in restaurant kitchens and begin to think you should never eat in a restaurant again
Yeah there's no reason to make a fuzz about it. It becomes a bit different when the food and safety inspection routinely comes in and says yeah that's alright, keep going.
Perhaps not at a national level if there's no clear unison there but at least at a local level.
Like, for example it doesn't get to me much that Philip Brailsford killed a guy. I've been desensitized much by the internet. The fact that he was rehired to get a lifelong 2500$ a month tho gives a different message about accountability in that area.
Living there would make me look differently at the taxes I pay and make me fearfull and distrustfull of police.
I don't think society is looking for police to be an average good. That is, we're not looking to optimize on the statistical mean of police interactions. We are concerned particularly about the tails. The outliers are the problem, particularly when they're not as uncommon as we expect them to be. You may call them propaganda, but that's a strange thing to post on an enumerated list of recorded evidence.
This is an outrageous comment. It makes no sense, you seem to think nothing should improve.. If you see a single food system causing disease over and over, like what happened with mad cow disease, we should stop it.
If you see a single restaurant chain use horrible ingredients for humans, trans fats, far too many preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, over and over, you should never eat there again. I've personally cut out mcdonalds, and the fast food garbage restaurants. It doesn't mean every restaurant is bad, it means some restaurant models are bad. I still eat shawarma, I still eat indian and thai, and my family still owns an italian restaurant where we also don't try to poison our customers with horrible ingredients.
If you're comparing police to restaurants, then let me ask you, then on a scale of Taco Bell to El Buli, where does the current american system police system lie on the scale? I'd argue it's more like at the dumpster outside of your local mcdonalds.
I watched 10. The first 10, not selected 10. Why do I need to watch 100 to find what is claimed - "brutality"? If there are 7 cases of real police brutality make a list of 7, not 700.
The entire point of something like this is to be a gish gallop. If you want to refute it you have to look through 700 or so videos, and even if you do by the time you are done going through and checking everyone has moved on. Trying to refute some does not invalidate the entire list and you will be attacked for downplaying the problem.
Can we begin with the fact that this isn't even remotely in the same universe as a peer reviewed study? There's nothing to compare it to, there's no data on what the timeline is, there's no meta analysis of the different cases, what sparked the incidents, the outcomes, or how often non-violent confrontations or de-escalations happen, etc.
Basically you're looking at a single specific dataset, like "number of children strangled", and deciding to extrapolate from that whatever you feel like, like "a systemic and perpetual abuse of mothers and babysitters power by evil matriarchs".
Honestly, I credited this crowd with more brains. Horror porn is not an intellectual argument.
At least in that case you wouldn't have people arguing that the kids deserved it.
> Horror porn is not an intellectual argument.
This isn't porn, this is filming reality as it happens. I know we're all a bit numbed, but this reminds me of the decisions by the Allied forces to document Auschwitz as well as possible when it was overrun, or how the BBC footage of the Ethiopian famine sparked Live Aid. The act of filming has a habit of cutting through all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit from those arguing in favour of the brutality.
The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month, 700 crane operator mishaps in a month, 700+ food poising by a chain in a month. The also imagine you believe there's no problem.
This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.
As a complete outsider to US reality, to me looking in, it seems like there is a real issue of training regarding de-escalating techniques.
US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training.
Compare that with European forces and you see a completely different reality. In Europe the police is generally seen as peace-keepers, force is absolutely a last resort (probably not so true for crowd control units but certainly true for daily policing).
>This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
A reference I never expected to see on HN.
It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
Neither you or the parent poster explained what "Ba Sing Se" is. I quickly discovered that it is a reference to a city in "The last Airbender" [0].
I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean.
Twitter is probably the worst medium for developing a balanced, well-educated view of anything. Americans don't need more fast-paced social media, they need quality education and journalism that covers all sides of these issues.
But of course that's not going to happen. For modern people with attention span of a goldfish it's too much of an effort to read long texts - thus they'll just keep watching the news, or reading short, one-sided tweets full of hate.
So the absolute truth is on Twitter? How significant is the portion of uninformed Americans? If an American watches TV news and reads Twitter are they half informed? WTF is your point: blame others, hate others, downvoting to remove a disparaging opinion. Do you feel powerful? You might be the cop.
What is the value in going on Twitter and actively looking for information that confirms your bias? This is what most people, of all political inclinations, are doing.
To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is no excuse whatsoever for the multitude of outraging problems in the system, but the comparison isn't straightforward.
I agree, but the more I hear about the defund the police narrative the more an agree. Some of these interaction have 0 reason to be adversarial.
For example the Rayshard brooks shooting. Why was a gun needed to wake a man sleeping in a car. Why are guns needed to hand out speeding tickets.
I get that guns are needed if a bank is being robbed. But this is glorified customer service work. Imagine your car breaks down and the AAA guy who came to fix it had a gun. Like y tho?
And this document uses a very liberal definition of police brutality to say the least. In this document, a lot of references to "police arrests someone", "police pushes back a crowd or clears a street", etc...
I recommend the latest Sam Harris podcast on this subject, he makes a ton of nuanced points that many people miss when talking about "police brutality".
There are ~10 million arrests per year in the US. That google doc includes non-US cases as well (but is also limited by what’s caught on camera). Still, 0.0007% of arrests leading to a case like this doesn’t seem as horrible as the raw total in isolation.
There is one UK example which is actually a counter example where the police allowed a statue to be destroyed instead of intervening and creating a potentially dangerous altercation.
That's one in 30 being arrested in the US every year. How does that compare to other countries? Is that something that could be improved? It sounds like a lot.
> The fact that is even possible is insane. Imagine there being over 700 videos of pilots messing up in one month,
You would easily get this from doctors in one month if they were filmed.
Considerably more in fact. Some studies say medical errors contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year or even more. That's just deaths, not maiming.
To be fair there's way more people filming the police right now than any of those professions so I wouldn't expect the number of mishaps on video to be comparable.
The delusion is on your side if you believe pilots, crane operators or any other profession is as much under surveillance as the police and as active dealing with risky situations that could escalate. Are you just trying to fool yourself with these comparisons or everybody?
If a pilot has a crash, the crash is reviewed by the NTSB, and the FAA. Pilots are under a huge amount of scrutiny. There are voice recorders in the cockpit, blackboxes to capture flight parameters, etc etc.
There's no delusion on his side - there's additionally the acknowledgement that police have a much higher burden for said situations - and the videos show that they are not qualified to manage them.
"Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer.
How about 2,300 vehicular deaths a month? Or 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades.
Oh, but those aren't the same thing, so they're irrelevant? That's fine, because the examples you gave (pilots, crane operators, fast food chains) also have nothing to do with one another. Not the same number of operators, not the same jobs, not the same safety systems, not the same number of potential cases, not the same risk probability, not the same variables. But why be rational about what we can just get emotional over?
The United States has 330 Million people. To come up with 700 cases of police violence, all you have to do is find 700 people out of 330 Million who are being arrested for something. Find the number of arrests, find the number where people resisted, compare it to the number of cases of police arresting or detaining people without incident.
You can't find that data in video clips or the news because nobody reports calm arrests, or non-arrests. I'd be very surprised if anyone cared to find out what the 700 number actually means in context.
This whole document is just horror porn to use for firing up people so they'll get angry and not use their brains. It's a very smart thing to do if you want to push a particular outcome. And I'm not saying that's even a bad thing under the circumstances. But it's quite clearly propaganda.
> How about 2,300 vehicular deaths a month? Or 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades.
Those are 'real' accidents; and if some are not, like DUI, there are laws against them that are enforced. If tomorrow, society stops charging DUI offenders people would protest too.
That's not the case with police brutality. We have seen again and again the police face no consequences for their brutality. That's what the people are protesting against. If every one of these cops were appropriately fired, charged and jailed, this wouldn't be a big of an issue. That simply does not happen.
The second point being, theoretically people trust cops to keep law and order and to ensure safety. So it is rightly expected for them to have higher standard of conduct and the fact that this does not happen is a systemic failure.
If those numbers have been consistent for decades despite the police being given harsher and harsher tools for dealing with them, perhaps those tools aren't doing anything but resulting in harm to people who are not committing those crimes.
> 2,300 gun deaths a month? Because those numbers have been consistent for decades
This is also a stupid, unnecessary, ongoing tragedy that America insists cannot be avoided despite being the only country where mass shootings happen anything like as regularly.
When one 737 Max crashed, some pointed the finger at the pilots.
When a second one crashed, the focus quickly shifted.
It is a common attitude in aviation that even pilot error is really a systems fault. Perhaps opposing buttons are too close together, or some control requires attention to be diverted at the wrong time, or pilots are allowed to fly too many hours without adequate rest, or plenty of other things that could contribute to predictable human failure.
It seems obvious that we can predict human failure in current policing. If two incidents with a 737 lead to an indefinite grounding, what's the right number for this situation?
In the case of the airplane, grounding does not create a public safety issue. And there are, of course, many alternatives that can keep the overall system up and running in the meantime. The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.
The natural follow up to your analogy shows exactly why these protests targeted at police might be a good solution.
A new system, like the design of a whole new plane requires a lot of political will, funding and time. On the other hand, the solution people are more likely to get is minor adjustments to the design of the plane or system to make it compliant, so the 737 Max can fly again, in some capacity.
Changing the demographic of the police forces to eradicate the choke hold of trigger happy white supremacists on it, will take decades. On the other hand, laws for police accountability and monitoring can be enacted faster, and help put the police system back into place in a format that is a bit more functional.
It doesn't solve the core problem. But, it's a start. It makes it so that fewer people will face police brutality for the next few decades, while longer term efforts to reform law enforcement can take hold in the US.
> The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.
a 100%. It goes deep into the American conception of good and bad, punishment and rehabilitation.
> Changing the demographic of the police forces to eradicate the choke hold of trigger happy white supremacists on it, will take decades. On the other hand, laws for police accountability and monitoring can be enacted faster, and help put the police system back into place in a format that is a bit more functional.
There's also the approach that Minneapolis appears to be taking, disbanding their police department. That works pretty much immediately.
US police-caused deaths seem to run at the rate of several airliner's worth of people a year. The problem seems to be the exact opposite of a safety culture: there is no systematic review of what happens, what factors led up to it, what could have been done differently. The police routinely lie about events with no consequences, even when contradicted by video or other evidence.
We cannot even get the police to agree that the deaths represent failures: they will usually dig up or even fabricate anything negative about the victim to imply that he or she deserved to die. You can see this happening in the comments here too.
It is not suprising that people want to ground the police.
I don't mean to be snarky but what police are doing is what humans everywhere do. Network guys always deny it is the network causing the the issue. DBA? It is a hard problem to solve.
Interestingly I was having a conversation about police before George Floyd. I had wondered whether policing should be one of those rotational civic duties. All able bodied people spend some time being a policeman. I think spending years only being called when things go bad makes police less sensitive.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Its a cycle we already saw so many times, I believe with so many movements asking for rights, that this is "weak men" part creating hard times.
Mexico did a while ago what so many people is asking for, disband a security corp, result? The Zetas.
Why people is ignoring statistics? People kill people of the same race.
Many of that videos is just a bunch of violent people being put as victims by others people agenda. Is like your big brother hits you, then you hit back and just you are punished.
Be careful and thoughtful in your judgments. If possible try to look back in history and search an alike situation outcome.
I don't think any reasonable person is suggesting we fully defund or disband the police. They are suggesting that by giving police military style gear it incentivizes them to use it.
Instead of giving the police this crazy gear, we should redirect that money into training for the police. Or maybe some of it should go to schools.
I think you are comparing apples to oranges. Your comparison would be more accurate if all humans were law abiding citizens. I don't think you could put blame on pilots if airplanes could sabotage flights at will.
Of course if all humans are law abiding citizens there would be no issue to begin with. I think every society with lower crime has significantly smaller police brutality issue with some rare exceptions like Hong Kong.
> I think every society with lower crime has significantly smaller police brutality
Crime-rates do not correlate with police brutality and mass incarceration.
Canada locks up way fewer people, has way less harsh sentencing than the US, yet Canadian crime rates are not that different from those of the US [0].
It's also really weird to evoke HK in this discussion when the current police response in the US is way worse than anything reported out of HK. Particularly in the context that for the longest time the HK police actually had a rather splendid international reputation [1].
While US police had a "Dirty Harry" like reputation for several decades now, something that's reached its current peak with the whole "blueline" mentality and the glorification of comic vigilantes like the Punisher as a symbol for law enforcement.
As such a whole lot of this is rooted very deeply in policing and incarceration culture and not some countries being inherently "more criminal" than others.
Over the last week I have been starting to realize that what you said is true in general, and not just of protests. It seems that police inflame and instigate most of the violent situations they are involved in. We are literally paying to be abused. We shouldn't be trying to get that money back; we shouldn't even be paying it in the first place.
One example is civil asset forfeiture. Police can and do stop people at random, see if they have “suspicious” valuables or a little too much money, and seize it. It’s virtually impossible to fight the case and it’s literally free money with zero consequence to the police. If you try to deny them their free money, they just arrest you. It’s legally condoned robbery.
I’ve had friends who’ve been pulled over while passing through Illinois and asked to hand over their wallets just so the cops can count their money. They only had a few bucks and were let go, but I’m sure if it was a little too much, the cops would’ve claimed it was drug money and taken it. The cops didn’t mention speeding or any sort of crime, so their reason for pulling them over was pretty clear. They probably target non-local people because nobody is going to come back just for a hundred bucks or so, and if they need to make up a ticket on the spot, few people will bother to fight it.
I have this idealised vision of a police force that are more like monks. Their main training is mental, meditation, mindfulness, situational awareness, sensitivity training, de-escalation training. They are also extremely well trained in combat and self defence but almost never use it. When they do they can quickly disarm and subdue violent perps without struggle. They exist just to keep the peace between people. People could grow to trust and respect them in a way that they can't for cops.
It would have to be a lifelong pursuit like a real monk, without much financial incentive. The problem is without trust and respect it wouldn't work since no one would enlist. I'm not sure how you would bootstrap something like that.
I think "just don't pay them for the time" is not reasonable or realistic, and thinking you can get consensus on what caused a riot is naive under the best of circumstances.
On the flip side I'd like to point out that this increased OT often has downstream effects as well, most notably in pensions which are typically based on your last n months of pay. Some contracts include OT in this and some do not. So soon-to-be-retired officers could literally be increasing their pay for the rest of their lives based on increased pay due to working a riot.
Free will is questionably a thing. If you are trapped, hungry, thirsty, threatened, and you see your neighbors beaten for minor infractions, then some kind of "mayhem" is not an unreasonable choice. Or would you rather they quietly took the abuse and had their next-of-kin file a complaint that will be summarily ignored?
BTW these are all things that protesters experience, as the police as trained in "crowd control" techniques which involve kettling and provoking masses of people so they can exert force to teach them a lesson.
> Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.
No, they should come out of taxpayer funds. The principal is responsible for the actions of their agents.
If the public authority doesn't properly screen, train, supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights, it is their responsibility and the responsibility of the public who chooses that authority.
Absolving the public authority and the public of responsibility just means that there is reduced incentives to address systemic problems.
Expect the push for more funding of the police to be the eventual narrative. This is to allow for more training and putting more officers where they are needed.
Simply put, the defund the police slogans are damaging to the DNC outlooks in November and three major unions basically read the riot act to the DNC and members in Congress that no talk that can come back to collective bargaining being a reason police get away with so much abuse is allowed. Instead it must be that they lack training, the security of their pension system raises anxiety among the forces, and lack of officers incurs overtime furthering anxiety. So the only solution is more money for training, propping up their pension systems, and more money for community policing.
just put it this way, when that was dropped on me from a relative as their new marching orders I thought they were joking.
tl;dr the whole defund the police calling is poison in November and the big influences in politics has called their party to the carpet to change the direction of the debate
That is neither fair, feasible nor practical to be honest. You want to judge them as a group while basically complaining against their practices of profiling.
"The 81st Precinct covers Bedford-Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant Heights. The NYPD Tapes were secret recordings made by whistleblower officer Adrian Schoolcraft in 2008-2009 proving widespread corruption and abuse in the precinct. After voicing his complaints internally, he faced harrassment by fellow officers. High-ranking NYPD officials eventually ordered an illegal SWAT raid on his apartment, physically abducting him and involuntarily committing him to a psychiatric facility for six days. The license plate “54-EDP” references a “10-54 EDP” call, in which a so-called “emotionally disturbed person” is taken to a hospital via ambulance. The quote is the Deputy Chief ’s recorded order to remove “rat” Schoolcraft to the hospital."
NYPD have made it very clear that if you're a "good" cop, the rest of the cops will destroy you.
If this would be the case, the rest would report the violent ones, would testify against them and violent ones would be removed. This would happen in cases where is no video and no public outcry.
That it does not seem to be happening unless there is video and public outcry suggest the issue is cultural and institutional, not just individual. The good cop is not reporting bad cop and is not testifying against him. Maybe the good cop would be retaliated against, maybe nothing would be done, and all of those are reasons why bad cops are empowered.
Watch the videos and pay attention to what the other police do when their colleagues misbehave. They can commit these crimes because no one will stop them.
This is difficult when police literally have a union. If the union were acting in good faith they would be eager to learn & fire. Instead we get the “blue wall of silence” & turn otherwise “good” cops into ones indistinguishable from “bad” cops.
I mean there’s even a “good cop/bad cop” trope that’s got to be the best example of this kind of behavior—I can’t count how many times police are complicit with straight up torture and abuse of rights on Law & Order.
I know politics isn't the usual HN topic, but I think this goes beyond politics at this point. Until I saw this list, I had no idea how out of control this situation has gotten here.
I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.
I believe strongly that George Floyds death and the reactions thereafter are to a majority of the nation, the same as the 16th Street Church Bombing was in 1963, its a turning point in making people aware of the real costs of our problems with policing.
The fact is, I'm a white dude in my mid-30's, I make a tech salary, and I'm afraid of the police, because an officer with a hair up somewhere could ruin my life for a period of time, if not for good.
Same here. When I see police, I just think, don't go near them or bother them at all. I actively avoid police if I can unless there are a bunch of other people around (concert, sporting event etc.).
The fear I think is more along the lines that police can detain you, arrest you and so on. So I just figure, why chance it? I optimize for lowest risk and I view police as an unnecessary risk.
One of the threads that was eye-opening for me was Greg Doucette's (a lawyer in North Carolina among other things) ongoing Twitter thread with Pics/Video of police brutality as it relates to peaceful protesters/bystanders.
Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified.
I'm not saying the police doesn't do wrong, they absolutely do. We have examples of rapes, unjustified murders and beatings, entrapment. They are extremely rare. I think last year the police in the US killed 9 unarmed black men and 21 unarmed white men.
> All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years.
These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks.
That is a startlingly high number, made worse once you actually start digging into the individual incidents, because you realize they're not just isolated. A lot of these videos aren't, "a single police officer does something shifty", they're, "an entire police unit starts firing tear gas at protestors who are kneeling on the ground." And then you start to read the responses from police unions, some of which outright lie about the incidents or contradict the videos. This isn't a problem with individual officers, it's a problem with high-level commanders and police union leaders -- it's a problem that spans entire units.
I personally went through about 200 incidents for a separate project I was working on, some more in-depth than others. I think people are looking at these lists and thinking, "oh sure, but if you zoom in and examine each incident, it gets better." It really doesn't. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to seeing people tear-gassed, those videos don't even make me blink now. But even with that, I was regularly shocked while I was combing through videos with incidents that I wasn't prepared for.
"Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas, holy heck that police officer just body slammed a protestor! Tear gas, tear gas, holy crap they just punched a reporter in the face!"
And again, 4 weeks. Not years. I would challenge anyone who's saying that these are extremely rare or over-dramatized to sit down and devote an evening to just watching the videos in series. It weighs on you. And it quickly becomes obvious that these are not individual rogue officers, these are police units operating in an environment where they know they will not face consequences for hurting protestors.
> Is it out of control though? The police has 700K members in the US. Millions of daily interactions with people of all kinds. All you could find is 400 cases from ALL the years. And I guess the claim is brutality wasn't justified in every single case. In reality there are not 400 cases on that list, and in many cases the violence was justified.
400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
Just imagine you or a beloved one is the victim of police brutality in one of these cases. Take a second to think about it, and see if you're still on the same ground.
There needs to be a psychology study done with cops to understand why they act the way they do. I believe there's an underlying problem in how they are trained or something else because police brutality is kind of a global phenomenon. When someone kills or severely hurts the people they are supposed to protect, it seems like there's something else going on. I've been in a few protests and I can easily say that I have never seen more hatred in someone's eyes other than the cops that were beating up people.
> because police brutality is kind of a global phenomenon
No it's not. Police in Europe is, on average, very kind. When they stop you, you don't have to be afraid of anything, and more often than not you stop them to ask for help, even if it's just to ask for directions.
You don't have to worry about getting killed, even though that's changing slowly [0][1], but many of them are authority abusive pieces of shit that have no place in the police.
I've been stopped on my motorcycle for no reasons by officers in an unmarked car, they kept me 30 min on the road under full summer sun and didn't provide me any reason for stopping me whatsoever. "don't do crimes and the police will leave you alone" doesn't exist
My dad got a ticket for using his mobile phone in a stopped car (engine off, parked) even though he didn't own a mobile phone. I can't come up with a single good interaction me or any member of my family had with the police and as far as I can tell I'm far from the only one.
A quick look at the yellow vests protest will tell you that French riot police are just the same as the American one. They killed a grandma by shooting a tear gas canister into her 4th floor flat [2].. Dozen lost hands, eyes, & c. The only reason it isn't worse is because they're less equipped and have more legal constraints
I know it's tempting to do the whole ”oh that's a problem over in terrible USA” (a very common european way of thinking) but I'd be careful about it.
Granted I think european police is less violent than US (a low bar), but to say that we don't have a problem with this at all is pretty naive. Just look at how french or swedish police have responded to black lives matters protests for example.
I don't think thats the right angle to look at it.
It's not a problem of policeman brutally beating/killing people (its a issue alright but). Its about the organisation protecting and turning blind eye on their misdeeds.
There will be bad apples in any organisation. Be it police fore or church. The problem starts when the perpetrators are protected insted of being ousted.
That emboldens other to do similar and openly advertises to anyone 'Join our org and you can to X, Y, Z with no repercussions'.
.. if you're of the "native" white ethnicity or a white tourist, yes. The London BLM protests aren't just copycats, there's a long history of poor race relations from the Met.
Well, you are correct. The average officer outside of the US is not scary. Especially European cops. The first time I visited the US after living in Australia for years, was quite a shocker for me. But when I said "kind of" I meant that there are countries that make an exception but other than western Europe and Australia, most countries have a police brutality problem. But that's only one side of the police force. When protests break out and the big guys come out, even the European cops are quite brutal. Protests in Germany, France can be a good example of that. So, maybe I can rephrase my comment as Police brutality is a global phenomenon but it extends to the average officer in the US which makes it a bigger problem there.
I generally agree. "The left" in Germany does disagree completely, though, so I think it's pretty controversial and not really as simple as you make it out to be.
I lived for a number of years on a caribbean island–modern, mix of people, pretty crowded, but a police force that was just cool af. They just didn’t get aggressive unless it was absolutely, positively, unquestionably a life or death situation. They weren’t invisible, but they weren’t anywhere near as pervasive as we see in US cities.
And I never felt unsafe there. I would walk through the worst parts of the cities at night and no one bothered you. Sure, there was crime, but basically the same shit you see in US cities where the cops everywhere and hyper-aggressive.
There is something going on with our cops and it’s a large and very deep cultural problem.
Other places have police who are drastically scaled back and the quality of life is so much better.
I’m guessing unless we alter our policing structures to where our police understand they need to make the overall community’s day to day quality of life better, these massive cracks are going to continue to widen.
Again, there were far less police and the world did not fall apart, the daily quality of life was significantly higher.
One of the major hurdles we need to get over is the rather large amount of people (and many of the police also belong to this group) who just don’t understand that people have different interests. A bad analogy, but this is a group of people who rage out when someone has pink or green hair. It’s not enough for them to personally choose to have a buzzcut, they’re furious that everyone else doesn’t also have one.
I could probably come up with a better analogy, but I think one of the answers is in there. I’m not sure how we convince those people to live and let live, because at the heart of our policing emergency is that thought process.
The rate of police killings is vastly higher in the US than any other Western country. So something is going on there that is not a universal phenomenon.
I was very surprised to hear a cop in the US only gets 3-6 months of training.
Here in the Netherlands _basic_ education is 3 years; and then you have another few years to specialize into a specific topic (abuse, fraud, forensics, narcotics..).
I recently learned of Dave Grossman and his police training courses that appear to encourage murder[0]. I'm not sure how prolific his teaching is, but it says a lot about the fearful mindset these officers have.
My theory is that they are bored. Violent crime is rapidly declining in both the US and Europe. To few real criminals to act out on so they take out their anger on peaceful protestors instead. Like what would developers do if there was no bugs to fix or features to implement? They would refactor the shit out of the code base.
I am afraid that it is not limited by police. You can see it everywhere. For example, downvoting a post with an alternative opinion and trying to have one opinion is a sign that you will be a good policeman. People like diversity only if it is a minor deviation which in this sense only confirm the dominance of one opinion. And this behavior is visible almost everywhere: police, governments, protests against police, forum moderation etc.
Especially compared to other countries, the US police seem to show quite the restrained considering most countries do not allow to carry weapons. It is a significant risk for safety of course. But if you look at the data, the often believed stereotype of US police being glorified cowboys seems to be quite untrue.
Frankly I am a bit cynical about politicians declaring the need for police reform. In my country protests are regularly "subdued" with excessive violence but the decision to handle it this way comes from the top, not from police officers.
I think clearer legal rules would help. Also maybe teaching people how to behave in case law enforcement conducts a search. The ability for surveillance and raiding homes should certainly be under intense scrutiny. Because I think the fear of decision makers is the main driver we might see some problems.
> I've been in a few protests and I can easily say that I have never seen more hatred in someone's eyes other than the cops that were beating up people.
That can be true for protesters and criminals too. I am aware of the irony of mentioning them in the same sentence. But the "psychology" study should show, that police is just often required to just do the dirty work and some might adjust to the crime they see in their daily routines. The systematic problems are programs like war on drugs or excessive militarization.
> Especially compared to other countries, the US police seem to show quite the restrained
There have been multiple instances where the us police shot someone and fired more bullets in this situation than the while german police in a whole year.
And i don't mean big standoffs but shooting a single person.
/edit: in 2018 the german police fired a total of 54 bullets on persona killing 11.
There's also a Github repo [1] which was posted a while ago containing various instances of police brutality as well as other sites using said data to better illustrate the problem.
- Less immunity, and discharge without pension for blatant violations, for example being caught on camera hiding a badge, or deliberately bumping into someone to be able to argue that they were "assaulted".
- Longer police traning. A 6-12months is how long you should train to be an unarmed mall security guy. Two or three years for a policeman seems like a minimum if you want qualified officers.
- Federal overview of all police and common frameworks for what is allowed and expected by police officers.
- Only qualified policemen should be allowed to be managers anywhere in the hierarchy (e.g. running for a Sheriff should require police traning and N years of experience).
- More training focus on deescalation, dialog and avoiding dangerous situations.
- Mental health screening. You don't want anyone who would become violent when in the wrong situation.
All great, but the problem with police is the same reason we don't use the military as our law enforcement agency. If all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail.
-Traffic cops, patrolmen, and escort/guard details do not need to carry guns. They should not be pulling people over to fish for reasons to search and detain, they should not be arresting people. It's simply not necessary, and we should not use the same people that do SWAT raids for everyday things.
Aside from mass shootings and hostage situations, there are very situations in which shooting is reasonable. Let the criminals get away with the diamonds- imagine you're on the highway when a UPS truck flies past you and the air is suddenly filled with bullets. You're terrified; any one of those could end your life. Then you realize the police are the ones endangering you. Police should be trying to get to safety and get others to safety when guns are fired.
Dominance and submission have zero place in policing and should be legally punishable. The whole concept assumes that criminality is a single entity that will stop doing crimes if the police are dominant enough. It's ludicrous; the police should never be using law as a weapon.
Add to that a concept of shit rolling uphill. My CEO is very serious about SOX compliance because if his subordinates mess up, he can go to prison. If cops have a history of malfeasance and are not removed, their superior should be removed. If systemic issues exist, the top should be removed. Then we will see some changes because incentives start to align.
In Germany there is a job called "Bäckereifachverkäuferin", which basically is a person specially trained to sell bread at a bakery. The training takes 3 years. This is not a joke.
I'll add one I forgot: outlaw any incentives to do "more policing" or more incarceration than nacessary. Fines should never end up in the hands of a local department. Any benefits provided by e.g. private prison companies to local police departments should be investigated as organized crime.
If there is an incentive program doing measurements it must never be measurements of "number of arrests" or similar. It should be measurements of job approval instead.
I would also like to see either a narrowing of the scope of the kinds of things the police are expected to handle or a broadening of the kinds of professionals employed as police.
There are plenty of calls where a mental health professional should either handle the situation entirely or at least be the one calling the shots.
I think people are sick of departments getting more funds and buying mine protected vehicles instead of sending officers to deescalation refresher classes.
Readit News
At a minimum, watch 100 videos. I did last night, only took about an hour, it's easy to find some to nitpick, some which are ambiguous ... and plenty that are totally horrifying.
If you can watch 100 videos in a row from Greg Doucette's list and say, "the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.
Otherwise you're not speaking from an honest grappling with what these videos contain.
There are way too many cases where a cop provokes a confrontation, often by stopping to allow someone else nearby to run into them, and every other cop in the group responds by beating anyone nearby and shoving back anyone with a camera.
You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice.
This is absolutely true, but the problem goes much deeper than just the police force itself. We seem to want to solve every imaginable social problem with police/courts/prisons. Drug abuse needs to be viewed as a public health problem, not a criminal problem. Homelessness as a housing and mental health problem, not a criminal one. Many other issues as economic problems not criminal ones. Address the root cause, rather than sending people with badges and guns. I realize this is easier said than done, but it's clear the old approach is no longer acceptable to society.
I disagree. That's what makes this so much more difficult. If it required planning and practice, we could find the meeting place and itinerary and correct it.
This is much more subtle. This is the kind of thing you can get when you group like minded individuals together and give them power. Without directly orchestrating, they pick up cues and work together.
It's like when a company hires a new person and there's no rule explicitly saying they have to work overtime, but they see everyone else doing it and soon they are too.
Almost all of them had outright wrong, or heavily misleading titles and/or descriptions with contradictory claims in the comments - and almost none of them provided context to the police actions.
This list is really more about stoking emotions than providing evidence of anything.
I mean look at this one...
https://twitter.com/jayjanner/status/1267111893753307137
A large volume of misleading hyperbolic claims by a biased collector/poster don't get more meaningful through volume of posts.
Are there instances where police abuse their power? Yes. Absolutely. But it doesn't help anyone when people are cherry picking instances where escalation of force was warranted, but they do not show the full context leading up to that escalation.
I would like to see meaningful police reform as much as anyone else. But we need to be pragmatic about any examples we cite as "abuse of force". Let's create a list of absolutely cut-and-dry instances of police brutality, then move from there.
But, also, rubber bullets are less lethal, not non lethal, and so they should be reserved for situations where life is at risk. If she wasn't throwing molotov cocktails or bricks they shouldn't have used rubber bullets on her.
The other claim is that she was pregnant and thus shouldn't have gone. This is incoherent: we want protests to be non-violent, so we want pregnant women and children to be able to attend.
Yet lists like that is all we have to actually quantify the problem because there are literally zero attempts of doing it on a federal level [0].
In that context, I always consider it quite fascinating how the federal US government is allegedly very informed how many protesters are killed by security forces in countries like Iran, yet the same federal US government couldn't tell you how many of its citizens are killed each year by their own police.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-year-after-ferguson...
same here. I saw a couple out of 20 that looked like gratuitous police brutality. many were labeled as such and didn't seem likely. The deluge of irrelevant examples and confusing commentary confuses the point.
Just to play devils advocate, can't I conclude there is a problem without that problem being the "militarization" of the police force. In other words aren't I allowed to conclude there was a problem prior to the militarization of the police force, and really what we are seeing proliferation of video recordings that are now making us think these acts are new, when the reality is they happened in mass occurred prior to militarization of police...and as scary as it sounds accountability is increasing because of the video?
Then on the extreme end of devils advocate, lets say we all watched 100 videos that made us sick to our stomach...how many millions of police interactions have we not seen that might suggest the bad acts is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall data. Not unlike maybe a few bad actors that have looted or committed arson, or committed murder during the BLM protests, do those acts suggest the entire culture of BLM movement is tainted?
One of the things that really makes me sick about the George Floyd death which doesn't get a lot of attention is that the prosecutors/state attorneys originally swept it under the rug and refused to bring charges. Thank god for the video, even though it didn't stop the act, we all see the tragedy we see the victim we see the cop and attach names and faces...but who knows the names of the prosecutors who watched this video and said "no, nothing wrong here, no charges?" Nameless, faceless people protecting the officers behind the scene enabling offices to act any way they want knowing they will be protected...and maybe if we corrected that problem and officer didn't feel they could act in any fashion they wanted and receive protection perhaps we would see officers act a little differently in the streets.
Oftentimes, I think people say things like "I don't think a few bad police officers ruin policing just like I don't think BLM is evil because of a few violent actors" because they have empathy for police officers who don't do horrible things, and it's sort of a knee jerk reaction against broadly characterizing people.
The problem, however, is that the two groups aren't equivalent. If we granted every person who identified with the BLM movement the same authority as we do police officers, the presence of violent actors inside BLM protests would be an issue. But we don't.
Police officers are given the utmost authority and deterrence in America. They have particular legal protections, they are authorized by the government to give legally enforceable orders to other citizens, etc. Even if the bad acts are a "drop in the bucket," would that be acceptable? And isn't the fact that these bad acts are persistent—regardless of frequency relative to good acts—at the very least suggestive of systemic issues?
In other words, consistent bad acts—even if infrequent—are a bigger deal when the actor is in such a position of authority. Protest groups are clearly not in such a position—hence their protests.
On the other hand, all of the instances of so-called police brutality with context which I've seen elsewhere occur after the police calmly order the protestors to leave a particular area, or to go home because of a curphew order or something else and the protests refuse in a less-than-calm manner.
My question is this: is the police using force to manage a crowd always unjustified in your view?
They are friendly and don’t over exert their force in a frequent manner like the US.
In US the police just take out their gun for absolutely petty reasons. It’s like they just want to escalate the situation rather than calm it down.
So yes, the problem is American police don’t know how to calm a crowd down. They stand like robots rather than be humans and listen and work with the crowd.
In many instances the first shots are fired by the police.
The crowd has been otherwise quite peaceful exercising their first amendment right.
Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?
On top of that they're a fairly politically active group, so they have an outsized influence on policies, including those that affect them.
But the biggest issue, as you note, is the sheer disparity in who interacts with the police at all.
From a 2015 Bureau of Justic Statistics report
https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf
Only about 10% of Americans had police-initiated, non-traffic stop contacts.
So 9 out of 10 Americans never see the police, much less have insight as to whether they're too violent.
Blacks 50% more likely than Whites to be subjected to a street stop by police.
Blacks 120% (!) more likely than Whites to be subjected to police force.
And, every single respondent who indicated they were Tasered by police felt it was "excessive" force.
So, yes, fundamentally this is a "rights of the minority" problem - and the minority in this case are younger, poorer, less politically connected, and therefore are underrepresented in discussions about police brutality, effective law enforcement, police training, and other policies which impact them.
The efforts to "defund police" would solve some of the same problems that police currently address through other means. This would weaken the influence of police unions. For example, spending more to treat drug addiction as a disease rather than paying police to address possession as a crime.
https://time.com/5848705/disband-and-replace-minneapolis-pol...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/poll-pr...
> Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?
Yeah, basically. Especially that last part.
Just as a synopsis, systemic racism became a more subtle segregation. POC (People or Person of Color) were systematically made to appear more violent and criminal-like over time. Combine that notion with an idealized notion of the police as hero figures and you have a recipe for rationalizing violence against POC.
Mobile phone videos allowed us to see from the victim's perspective just how brutal police have become.
"How it happens that all those mayors and sheriffs are still in the office if police brutality is such a big issue?"
To this point, you need to understand about voting districts and how POC voting power has been diluted and prevented over decades.
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Eventually I saw a pattern, surprising since it was common in major cities all across the US and as if there were some single, central training materials. Apparently:
(1) Police are taught to be in control of any contact with a citizen. Recently the police have been taught to act nice initially, but, once it is clear some actual law enforcement is to be involved, be in control.
Being in control can mean that the citizen has been intimidated and made submissive so that they won't resist. Part of this is to demand that a citizen DO some little things, e.g., stand with feet apart, move back 10 feet, or tolerate being falsely accused of something, e.g., "weaving" in the road, being too close to the officer, etc. The officers are looking for things, even trivial, fake things, to object to so that they can object. It's like Captain Sobel in the 101st Airborne training in the series Band of Brothers -- "find some" infractions so that can complain about them and force the soldiers to accept being falsely accused so that they will be more compliant -- the police seem to have borrowed this tactic.
If the citizen does not look submissive, then the officer provokes a defensive reaction from the citizen so that they can arrest the citizen or threaten to arrest them.
Then, finally, maybe arrested, the citizen has been subdued and is submissive, which is what the police wanted to begin with.
(2) The police like to teach citizens, to change their attitude, and do this by hurting them, e.g., hitting them with a club, bending their arms, throwing them to the ground and putting a knee on their neck, spraying them with pepper spray, etc. They regard good police work as meting out "cruel and unusual punishment", with pain and maybe serious injury, without "due process". So, the police want to be absolute dictators on the streets.
(3) In a confrontation with a citizen, the police want some result where they successfully took some law enforcement action, a ticket or an arrest. E.g., in Atlanta, at first they didn't want merely to leave the citizen alone or, if the citizen was drunk, let him call a cab and (ii) later wanted to make sure the citizen was not able just to run away. The reaction to a citizen running away?
"Shoot them and kill them. Gee, they might 'get away'; can't permit that; that would violate due respect for the police; so, shoot the citizen." -- or some such.
(4) The expected, usual approach to an arrest is to throw the citizen to the ground, hold them down with a knee to their neck, their arms behind their back, and put on handcuffs.
From the 100 or so videos I watched, it appeared that (1)-(4) are so standard that they have been taught from some standard source. E.g., in all of that, some semi-bright guy had the idea that it was good to put a knee on a neck, and it appears that that is now standard.
Apparently part of (1)-(4) is the associated support for it from the Blue Line, e.g., police unions, Police Benevolent Associations, liability insurance cities buy for their police, the norm of police sticking together, local prosecutors, DAs, and judges who work daily with police and want to cooperate, politicians who want safe streets, etc. And at times maybe there has been more to police power, e.g., confiscating cash, shakedowns, payoffs, etc.
I'm sure that changing (1)-(4) can be done but won't be easy.
Police are expected to acquire control of any situation they are called to through seizing initiative. This means that they don't wait for anyone to take any action, but immediately take verbally or physically dominating actions.
It is nearly impossible to acquire control of US civilians without violating the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Once someone has violated the law, the police are protected in terms of this violation, but because they are trained to acquire immediate control, they most often are violating the rights of people who've broken no laws.
If you watched 100 videos of kitchen malpractice within restaurants in which:
- The acts of malpractice had broadly consistent characteristics
- The restaurants in question were all owned under the same organizational umbrella
- That organizational umbrella had the authority and exclusive control of the US government
And then drew the conclusion that maybe there were systemic problems that lead to these remarkably consistent issues, you'd be completely rational.
As for your other comparison between this and "the media" curating street interviews, I don't see the parallels at all.
A news outlet using a random interview with a person on the street as evidence that people are "divided over climate change" is clearly manipulative. In this case, a person is saying "Police are routinely using military equipment and force tactics against US citizens in disturbing ways. Here are 700 videos of it as evidence."
Compare that to the opaqueness of police misconduct/brutality internal investigations, or how frequently even the bad actors that are known to have done wrong, are still granted their pensions. Where is the equivalent payout for a restaurant owner who doesn't follow health rules? Where do you see other restaurant owners banding together to defend a restaurateur who's had their misconduct exposed? Where do you see something equivalent to "qualified immunity" for the food industry?
In other words, this is a great example of a reasonably well-functioning market. If regulating the police behaved much more like regulating the food industry, that would actually be fantastic. In many ways, that is exactly the goal of the protests, to bring a similar level of transparency and accountability and high standards to policing, as most people already expect and has long been standard for the food industry (in developed countries).
What's the analogous conclusion from this to police brutality videos? You watch 100 and begin to think you should never talk to a cop again?
Sure you can post up a bad conclusion to draw and then attack it. I'm pretty sure there's a name for this sort of thing.
If you did that, and then decided we needed either better laws concerning food safety, or better enforcement of existing laws... where is the logical issue? If someone was to make the argument that a certain tolerance of bad food handling is to be allowed, then we would need to know the rate to know if we needed to make changes, but if the view point is that no restaurant should be engaging in that behavior then I don't particularly see the issue.
What about just thinking that restaurants need serious reform and accountability?
The police are uniquely powerful against normal citizens. Not only are these videos clearly representative of a large number of abuses, but their colleagues rarely try to stop those abuses. Few of them will be held accountable. The police are almost always above the law, if not outright immune.
In "cop vs. citizen" when it's just words, cops will always win. Even when there is video, it is difficult to get justice. A cop unjustly hitting someone and a citizen unjustly hitting someone are two different crimes, in my opinion, and the cop committed the far worse of the two.
The fact that everyone watching George Floyd get murdered in slow motion was too scared to tackle that cop is proof enough of the power to kill with impunity that cops have.
Yeah there's no reason to make a fuzz about it. It becomes a bit different when the food and safety inspection routinely comes in and says yeah that's alright, keep going.
Perhaps not at a national level if there's no clear unison there but at least at a local level. Like, for example it doesn't get to me much that Philip Brailsford killed a guy. I've been desensitized much by the internet. The fact that he was rehired to get a lifelong 2500$ a month tho gives a different message about accountability in that area.
Living there would make me look differently at the taxes I pay and make me fearfull and distrustfull of police.
At least this one comes clearly labelled and backed by some evidence.
If you see a single restaurant chain use horrible ingredients for humans, trans fats, far too many preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, over and over, you should never eat there again. I've personally cut out mcdonalds, and the fast food garbage restaurants. It doesn't mean every restaurant is bad, it means some restaurant models are bad. I still eat shawarma, I still eat indian and thai, and my family still owns an italian restaurant where we also don't try to poison our customers with horrible ingredients.
If you're comparing police to restaurants, then let me ask you, then on a scale of Taco Bell to El Buli, where does the current american system police system lie on the scale? I'd argue it's more like at the dumpster outside of your local mcdonalds.
And also people like lists.
Basically you're looking at a single specific dataset, like "number of children strangled", and deciding to extrapolate from that whatever you feel like, like "a systemic and perpetual abuse of mothers and babysitters power by evil matriarchs".
Honestly, I credited this crowd with more brains. Horror porn is not an intellectual argument.
At least in that case you wouldn't have people arguing that the kids deserved it.
> Horror porn is not an intellectual argument.
This isn't porn, this is filming reality as it happens. I know we're all a bit numbed, but this reminds me of the decisions by the Allied forces to document Auschwitz as well as possible when it was overrun, or how the BBC footage of the Ethiopian famine sparked Live Aid. The act of filming has a habit of cutting through all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit from those arguing in favour of the brutality.
This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.
US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training.
Compare that with European forces and you see a completely different reality. In Europe the police is generally seen as peace-keepers, force is absolutely a last resort (probably not so true for crowd control units but certainly true for daily policing).
A reference I never expected to see on HN.
It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_...
But of course that's not going to happen. For modern people with attention span of a goldfish it's too much of an effort to read long texts - thus they'll just keep watching the news, or reading short, one-sided tweets full of hate.
I don't blame them, Twitter is it's own special hell and widely regarded as a bubble.
Personally, I’m not convinced cops need to go for a 100% apprehension rate all the time no matter what with 100% control of every situation.
Mostly because of the rate at which crimes happen without a cop around and then go unresolved.
For example the Rayshard brooks shooting. Why was a gun needed to wake a man sleeping in a car. Why are guns needed to hand out speeding tickets.
I get that guns are needed if a bank is being robbed. But this is glorified customer service work. Imagine your car breaks down and the AAA guy who came to fix it had a gun. Like y tho?
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"Unfortunately we get the intellectuals we deserve".
You would easily get this from doctors in one month if they were filmed.
Considerably more in fact. Some studies say medical errors contribute to more than 250,000 deaths per year or even more. That's just deaths, not maiming.
In one month where the world is filled with hurricanes and every airstrip is flooded.
"Oh well I guess its just really hard." Is NOT an answer.
Oh, but those aren't the same thing, so they're irrelevant? That's fine, because the examples you gave (pilots, crane operators, fast food chains) also have nothing to do with one another. Not the same number of operators, not the same jobs, not the same safety systems, not the same number of potential cases, not the same risk probability, not the same variables. But why be rational about what we can just get emotional over?
The United States has 330 Million people. To come up with 700 cases of police violence, all you have to do is find 700 people out of 330 Million who are being arrested for something. Find the number of arrests, find the number where people resisted, compare it to the number of cases of police arresting or detaining people without incident. You can't find that data in video clips or the news because nobody reports calm arrests, or non-arrests. I'd be very surprised if anyone cared to find out what the 700 number actually means in context.
This whole document is just horror porn to use for firing up people so they'll get angry and not use their brains. It's a very smart thing to do if you want to push a particular outcome. And I'm not saying that's even a bad thing under the circumstances. But it's quite clearly propaganda.
Those are 'real' accidents; and if some are not, like DUI, there are laws against them that are enforced. If tomorrow, society stops charging DUI offenders people would protest too.
That's not the case with police brutality. We have seen again and again the police face no consequences for their brutality. That's what the people are protesting against. If every one of these cops were appropriately fired, charged and jailed, this wouldn't be a big of an issue. That simply does not happen.
The second point being, theoretically people trust cops to keep law and order and to ensure safety. So it is rightly expected for them to have higher standard of conduct and the fact that this does not happen is a systemic failure.
This is also a stupid, unnecessary, ongoing tragedy that America insists cannot be avoided despite being the only country where mass shootings happen anything like as regularly.
When a second one crashed, the focus quickly shifted.
It is a common attitude in aviation that even pilot error is really a systems fault. Perhaps opposing buttons are too close together, or some control requires attention to be diverted at the wrong time, or pilots are allowed to fly too many hours without adequate rest, or plenty of other things that could contribute to predictable human failure.
It seems obvious that we can predict human failure in current policing. If two incidents with a 737 lead to an indefinite grounding, what's the right number for this situation?
In the case of the airplane, grounding does not create a public safety issue. And there are, of course, many alternatives that can keep the overall system up and running in the meantime. The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.
A new system, like the design of a whole new plane requires a lot of political will, funding and time. On the other hand, the solution people are more likely to get is minor adjustments to the design of the plane or system to make it compliant, so the 737 Max can fly again, in some capacity.
Changing the demographic of the police forces to eradicate the choke hold of trigger happy white supremacists on it, will take decades. On the other hand, laws for police accountability and monitoring can be enacted faster, and help put the police system back into place in a format that is a bit more functional.
It doesn't solve the core problem. But, it's a start. It makes it so that fewer people will face police brutality for the next few decades, while longer term efforts to reform law enforcement can take hold in the US.
> The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.
a 100%. It goes deep into the American conception of good and bad, punishment and rehabilitation.
There's also the approach that Minneapolis appears to be taking, disbanding their police department. That works pretty much immediately.
We cannot even get the police to agree that the deaths represent failures: they will usually dig up or even fabricate anything negative about the victim to imply that he or she deserved to die. You can see this happening in the comments here too.
It is not suprising that people want to ground the police.
Interestingly I was having a conversation about police before George Floyd. I had wondered whether policing should be one of those rotational civic duties. All able bodied people spend some time being a policeman. I think spending years only being called when things go bad makes police less sensitive.
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Mexico did a while ago what so many people is asking for, disband a security corp, result? The Zetas.
Why people is ignoring statistics? People kill people of the same race.
Many of that videos is just a bunch of violent people being put as victims by others people agenda. Is like your big brother hits you, then you hit back and just you are punished.
Be careful and thoughtful in your judgments. If possible try to look back in history and search an alike situation outcome.
Instead of giving the police this crazy gear, we should redirect that money into training for the police. Or maybe some of it should go to schools.
Of course if all humans are law abiding citizens there would be no issue to begin with. I think every society with lower crime has significantly smaller police brutality issue with some rare exceptions like Hong Kong.
Crime-rates do not correlate with police brutality and mass incarceration.
Canada locks up way fewer people, has way less harsh sentencing than the US, yet Canadian crime rates are not that different from those of the US [0].
It's also really weird to evoke HK in this discussion when the current police response in the US is way worse than anything reported out of HK. Particularly in the context that for the longest time the HK police actually had a rather splendid international reputation [1].
While US police had a "Dirty Harry" like reputation for several decades now, something that's reached its current peak with the whole "blueline" mentality and the glorification of comic vigilantes like the Punisher as a symbol for law enforcement.
As such a whole lot of this is rooted very deeply in policing and incarceration culture and not some countries being inherently "more criminal" than others.
[0] https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/world/asia/24iht-hkpolice...
This triggers riots and protests, which require the police to work overtime.
They get paid for causing all these problems, and well paid. Their overtime costs must be tremendous. And who ends up paying? We do.
We should claw back police overtime pay for any protests or riots that are caused by the police themselves. I think that's fair and equitable.
I’ve had friends who’ve been pulled over while passing through Illinois and asked to hand over their wallets just so the cops can count their money. They only had a few bucks and were let go, but I’m sure if it was a little too much, the cops would’ve claimed it was drug money and taken it. The cops didn’t mention speeding or any sort of crime, so their reason for pulling them over was pretty clear. They probably target non-local people because nobody is going to come back just for a hundred bucks or so, and if they need to make up a ticket on the spot, few people will bother to fight it.
"When a nation hoards weapons, troubles arise from within and from without.
When its leaders try to be cunning and clever, the situation spins further out of control.
When they try to fix things by passing more laws, they only increase the number of outlaws."
民多利器、國家滋昏。
人多伎巧、奇物滋起。
法令滋彰、盜賊多有。
It would have to be a lifelong pursuit like a real monk, without much financial incentive. The problem is without trust and respect it wouldn't work since no one would enlist. I'm not sure how you would bootstrap something like that.
On the flip side I'd like to point out that this increased OT often has downstream effects as well, most notably in pensions which are typically based on your last n months of pay. Some contracts include OT in this and some do not. So soon-to-be-retired officers could literally be increasing their pay for the rest of their lives based on increased pay due to working a riot.
It’s not wise to tear gas the people who are going to pay for your retirement.
Free will is a thing, and the police cannot make you go out and commit vandalism, mayhem, and murder.
BTW these are all things that protesters experience, as the police as trained in "crowd control" techniques which involve kettling and provoking masses of people so they can exert force to teach them a lesson.
Their abuse is literally publicly subsidized.
Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.
No, they should come out of taxpayer funds. The principal is responsible for the actions of their agents.
If the public authority doesn't properly screen, train, supervise, and discipline police to protect civil rights, it is their responsibility and the responsibility of the public who chooses that authority.
Absolving the public authority and the public of responsibility just means that there is reduced incentives to address systemic problems.
It does not appear that this is money well spent.
Simply put, the defund the police slogans are damaging to the DNC outlooks in November and three major unions basically read the riot act to the DNC and members in Congress that no talk that can come back to collective bargaining being a reason police get away with so much abuse is allowed. Instead it must be that they lack training, the security of their pension system raises anxiety among the forces, and lack of officers incurs overtime furthering anxiety. So the only solution is more money for training, propping up their pension systems, and more money for community policing.
just put it this way, when that was dropped on me from a relative as their new marching orders I thought they were joking.
tl;dr the whole defund the police calling is poison in November and the big influences in politics has called their party to the carpet to change the direction of the debate
You have some outliers that are violent and the rest just does their job - keeping the city more safe.
Also don't assume all cases of police officer shooting a person are cases of police brutality - this is for court to prove.
"The 81st Precinct covers Bedford-Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant Heights. The NYPD Tapes were secret recordings made by whistleblower officer Adrian Schoolcraft in 2008-2009 proving widespread corruption and abuse in the precinct. After voicing his complaints internally, he faced harrassment by fellow officers. High-ranking NYPD officials eventually ordered an illegal SWAT raid on his apartment, physically abducting him and involuntarily committing him to a psychiatric facility for six days. The license plate “54-EDP” references a “10-54 EDP” call, in which a so-called “emotionally disturbed person” is taken to a hospital via ambulance. The quote is the Deputy Chief ’s recorded order to remove “rat” Schoolcraft to the hospital."
NYPD have made it very clear that if you're a "good" cop, the rest of the cops will destroy you.
That it does not seem to be happening unless there is video and public outcry suggest the issue is cultural and institutional, not just individual. The good cop is not reporting bad cop and is not testifying against him. Maybe the good cop would be retaliated against, maybe nothing would be done, and all of those are reasons why bad cops are empowered.
I mean there’s even a “good cop/bad cop” trope that’s got to be the best example of this kind of behavior—I can’t count how many times police are complicit with straight up torture and abuse of rights on Law & Order.
We've had children "protesting" here in the UK too despite the police not generally participating in brutality.
I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.
The fact is, I'm a white dude in my mid-30's, I make a tech salary, and I'm afraid of the police, because an officer with a hair up somewhere could ruin my life for a period of time, if not for good.
The fear I think is more along the lines that police can detain you, arrest you and so on. So I just figure, why chance it? I optimize for lowest risk and I view police as an unnecessary risk.
It's currently at 500+ instances of police brutality. https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1272306977872453634
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I'm not saying the police doesn't do wrong, they absolutely do. We have examples of rapes, unjustified murders and beatings, entrapment. They are extremely rare. I think last year the police in the US killed 9 unarmed black men and 21 unarmed white men.
These aren't from all the years, they're from approximately May 26th of this year. It's 400 cases in the last 3-4 weeks.
That is a startlingly high number, made worse once you actually start digging into the individual incidents, because you realize they're not just isolated. A lot of these videos aren't, "a single police officer does something shifty", they're, "an entire police unit starts firing tear gas at protestors who are kneeling on the ground." And then you start to read the responses from police unions, some of which outright lie about the incidents or contradict the videos. This isn't a problem with individual officers, it's a problem with high-level commanders and police union leaders -- it's a problem that spans entire units.
I personally went through about 200 incidents for a separate project I was working on, some more in-depth than others. I think people are looking at these lists and thinking, "oh sure, but if you zoom in and examine each incident, it gets better." It really doesn't. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to seeing people tear-gassed, those videos don't even make me blink now. But even with that, I was regularly shocked while I was combing through videos with incidents that I wasn't prepared for.
"Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas, holy heck that police officer just body slammed a protestor! Tear gas, tear gas, holy crap they just punched a reporter in the face!"
And again, 4 weeks. Not years. I would challenge anyone who's saying that these are extremely rare or over-dramatized to sit down and devote an evening to just watching the videos in series. It weighs on you. And it quickly becomes obvious that these are not individual rogue officers, these are police units operating in an environment where they know they will not face consequences for hurting protestors.
400 ... where there are videos. We know that until a video emerges these get swept under the rug, so I'm willing to bet that there are a fair few more than 400 examples of police brutality.
No it's not. Police in Europe is, on average, very kind. When they stop you, you don't have to be afraid of anything, and more often than not you stop them to ask for help, even if it's just to ask for directions.
I've been stopped on my motorcycle for no reasons by officers in an unmarked car, they kept me 30 min on the road under full summer sun and didn't provide me any reason for stopping me whatsoever. "don't do crimes and the police will leave you alone" doesn't exist
My dad got a ticket for using his mobile phone in a stopped car (engine off, parked) even though he didn't own a mobile phone. I can't come up with a single good interaction me or any member of my family had with the police and as far as I can tell I'm far from the only one.
A quick look at the yellow vests protest will tell you that French riot police are just the same as the American one. They killed a grandma by shooting a tear gas canister into her 4th floor flat [2].. Dozen lost hands, eyes, & c. The only reason it isn't worse is because they're less equipped and have more legal constraints
Potentially nsfl, lost of yellow vests injuries with pics: http://lemurjaune.fr
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Adama_Traoré
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lexpress.fr/actualite/socie...
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.leparisien.fr/amp/faits-div...
Granted I think european police is less violent than US (a low bar), but to say that we don't have a problem with this at all is pretty naive. Just look at how french or swedish police have responded to black lives matters protests for example.
It's not a problem of policeman brutally beating/killing people (its a issue alright but). Its about the organisation protecting and turning blind eye on their misdeeds.
There will be bad apples in any organisation. Be it police fore or church. The problem starts when the perpetrators are protected insted of being ousted.
That emboldens other to do similar and openly advertises to anyone 'Join our org and you can to X, Y, Z with no repercussions'.
I generally agree. "The left" in Germany does disagree completely, though, so I think it's pretty controversial and not really as simple as you make it out to be.
I lived for a number of years on a caribbean island–modern, mix of people, pretty crowded, but a police force that was just cool af. They just didn’t get aggressive unless it was absolutely, positively, unquestionably a life or death situation. They weren’t invisible, but they weren’t anywhere near as pervasive as we see in US cities.
And I never felt unsafe there. I would walk through the worst parts of the cities at night and no one bothered you. Sure, there was crime, but basically the same shit you see in US cities where the cops everywhere and hyper-aggressive.
There is something going on with our cops and it’s a large and very deep cultural problem.
Other places have police who are drastically scaled back and the quality of life is so much better.
I’m guessing unless we alter our policing structures to where our police understand they need to make the overall community’s day to day quality of life better, these massive cracks are going to continue to widen.
Again, there were far less police and the world did not fall apart, the daily quality of life was significantly higher.
One of the major hurdles we need to get over is the rather large amount of people (and many of the police also belong to this group) who just don’t understand that people have different interests. A bad analogy, but this is a group of people who rage out when someone has pink or green hair. It’s not enough for them to personally choose to have a buzzcut, they’re furious that everyone else doesn’t also have one.
I could probably come up with a better analogy, but I think one of the answers is in there. I’m not sure how we convince those people to live and let live, because at the heart of our policing emergency is that thought process.
The rate of police killings is vastly higher in the US than any other Western country. So something is going on there that is not a universal phenomenon.
Here in the Netherlands _basic_ education is 3 years; and then you have another few years to specialize into a specific topic (abuse, fraud, forensics, narcotics..).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Grossman_(author)
Here is a bit more info:
https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2020/06/05/killology-is-not-a-...
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I am afraid that it is not limited by police. You can see it everywhere. For example, downvoting a post with an alternative opinion and trying to have one opinion is a sign that you will be a good policeman. People like diversity only if it is a minor deviation which in this sense only confirm the dominance of one opinion. And this behavior is visible almost everywhere: police, governments, protests against police, forum moderation etc.
Frankly I am a bit cynical about politicians declaring the need for police reform. In my country protests are regularly "subdued" with excessive violence but the decision to handle it this way comes from the top, not from police officers.
I think clearer legal rules would help. Also maybe teaching people how to behave in case law enforcement conducts a search. The ability for surveillance and raiding homes should certainly be under intense scrutiny. Because I think the fear of decision makers is the main driver we might see some problems.
> I've been in a few protests and I can easily say that I have never seen more hatred in someone's eyes other than the cops that were beating up people.
That can be true for protesters and criminals too. I am aware of the irony of mentioning them in the same sentence. But the "psychology" study should show, that police is just often required to just do the dirty work and some might adjust to the crime they see in their daily routines. The systematic problems are programs like war on drugs or excessive militarization.
Imagine being legally allowed to own and carry a gun and getting killed because you legally own and carry your gun. How is that logic?
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2017/06/22/philando-castil...
There have been multiple instances where the us police shot someone and fired more bullets in this situation than the while german police in a whole year. And i don't mean big standoffs but shooting a single person.
/edit: in 2018 the german police fired a total of 54 bullets on persona killing 11.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffengebrauch_der_Polizei_i...
Not most. Ireland, Norway, Iceland, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Maldives have police officers work unarmed. Are there others?
[1] https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality
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- Less immunity, and discharge without pension for blatant violations, for example being caught on camera hiding a badge, or deliberately bumping into someone to be able to argue that they were "assaulted".
- Longer police traning. A 6-12months is how long you should train to be an unarmed mall security guy. Two or three years for a policeman seems like a minimum if you want qualified officers.
- Federal overview of all police and common frameworks for what is allowed and expected by police officers.
- Only qualified policemen should be allowed to be managers anywhere in the hierarchy (e.g. running for a Sheriff should require police traning and N years of experience).
- More training focus on deescalation, dialog and avoiding dangerous situations.
- Mental health screening. You don't want anyone who would become violent when in the wrong situation.
-Traffic cops, patrolmen, and escort/guard details do not need to carry guns. They should not be pulling people over to fish for reasons to search and detain, they should not be arresting people. It's simply not necessary, and we should not use the same people that do SWAT raids for everyday things.
Aside from mass shootings and hostage situations, there are very situations in which shooting is reasonable. Let the criminals get away with the diamonds- imagine you're on the highway when a UPS truck flies past you and the air is suddenly filled with bullets. You're terrified; any one of those could end your life. Then you realize the police are the ones endangering you. Police should be trying to get to safety and get others to safety when guns are fired.
Dominance and submission have zero place in policing and should be legally punishable. The whole concept assumes that criminality is a single entity that will stop doing crimes if the police are dominant enough. It's ludicrous; the police should never be using law as a weapon.
If there is an incentive program doing measurements it must never be measurements of "number of arrests" or similar. It should be measurements of job approval instead.
There are plenty of calls where a mental health professional should either handle the situation entirely or at least be the one calling the shots.