I was falsely arrested

this is so depressing. I hope Janeil brings a suit to the state for their blatant disregard and misconduct

There really seems to be a disparity between perceived and actual justice in the United States. I bet 95‰ of the population of the US thinks all people in prison deserve to be there and the miscarriages they hear about are the only ones that occur. I dread to think how many innocent people are actually in US jails.

I'm happy that this guy finally got out of jail. Here's hoping he doesn't let this terrible tragedy hurt him the rest of his life.

I support any reasonable thing the public can do to help folks like him out. We live in a security state, and video cameras everywhere are beginning to show how rotten it is in places.

Having said all of that, I do not want to see us become self-indulgent with pity. There are 300 million people in the U.S. There are tens of thousands of cops. You could run a video like this everyday and statistically there still wouldn't be much incompetence or corruption going on.

It presents us with an interesting problem, which I'm seeing in not just police incompetence/corruption cases, but all across the political spectrum: when you have large numbers of people, even if an extremely small percentage of them do bad things, it's easy to paint a picture of them all doing bad things. That's true whether it's cops, members of political party X, members of group Y, or so on.

Note that I'm not saying it's an insignificant problem. I'm saying that this type of presentation, while powerful, provides us with zero context to gauge the size of the problem at all. When we consume such content, especially when it's highly emotionally manipulative, we should remember this.

> With that said, I can't agree with the statement "If the cops had done their job, two people wouldn't be dead." That line of reasoning, when extended, can be applied to pretty much anything.

Not really. The cops have a responsibility to the public. "Pretty much anything" does not have a similar responsibility. I agree that we shouldn't go all Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with regards to culpability, but it's definitely the case here that the cops failed in their duty here, and this failure seems to have had predictable bad consequences.

Why are you bringing it up if you don't think it applies in this situation?

I always get nervous when people say stuff like this because it's like... he says he doesn't think it's a small problem, but then the only thing he's talking about is how we have to be careful making claims about scale... Why would he bring that up except to question the scale of the problem?

But I must be missing something, because you explicitly said you're not doubting the scale of the problem. Maybe you can help me understand what you are trying to say about this story.