Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 339 posts

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#311

Post by tdeck »

Shivetya wrote: post #28

The equipment issue isn't going to solve anything, this is just lip service to the real problem. Police Unions have effectively created a system by which officers are nearly immune from prosecution and even if successfully prosecuted their record cannot travel with them in many cases. Now one fix that removing some of the equipment will do will reduce the amount of psychological impact it has on those wielding it, as…

There is research to support the idea that the equipment is a meaningful factor:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...

> The US Department of Defense 1033 program makes excess military equipment, including weapons and vehicles, available to local LEAs. The variation in the amount of transferred equipment allows us to probe the relationship between military transfers and police violence. ... >

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#312

Post by aaronmdjones »

rconti wrote: post #309
stuaxo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty weird from the UK POV that they would do it with the car, pretty sure that's not what happens here ?

I googled it; sure enough, can't find UK police vehicles with one. Perhaps it's a policy decision where clearing a road is left to tow trucks, which would take longer to arrive. Obviously there's separate liability there in allowing the police to do the "pushing". And perhaps, in a country of more compact dimensions, the added 1+ft in vehicle length is considered to be not worth the benefit.

Generally yeah, tow trucks or specialist wreckage recovery vehicles do this here (UK), however, in an emergency, it's not uncommon for fire trucks to ram things out of the way too.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#313

Post by TomSwirly »

sandworm101 wrote: post #84
Shivetya wrote: post #28

The equipment issue isn't going to solve anything, this is just lip service to the real problem. Police Unions have effectively created a system by which officers are nearly immune from prosecution and even if successfully prosecuted their record cannot travel with them in many cases. Now one fix that removing some of the equipment will do will reduce the amount of psychological impact it has on those wielding it, as…

5) Change the uniforms. Dress for the job you want. If they all dress like storm troopers some of them will act like storm troopers. NY state patrol uniform: Grey with purple ties. https://northcountrynow.com/sites/default/files/images/Zone2... NYPD (new york city ) police: Black on black with black ties. https://media.timeout.com/images/103899055/image.jpg It seems meaningless, but having interacted with a few polic…

YES, absolutely.

I moved to Europe three years ago. Here, police outfits are designed to be seen in the dark, so they're day glo and neutral. In the US, police officers are terrifying creatures.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#314

Post by TomSwirly »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #246
namelessoracle wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having gone through police training in another life, you are absolutely correct. I think it's deeper than just what you wear, it's the attitude of the higher ups and overall culture. The leadership team for police that wants you dressing all paramilitary and in all black is going to have a focus on you acting a different way during training and in what your day to day is like than the other group. There's also the br…

This is important to introduce into the discussion. I have felt that in the vast majority of controversial police shootings, especially in the mistaken identity cases, they were likely the result of a hair-trigger reflex and being on high alert, with your conditioning telling you that if an adversary either gets the jump on you or even gets into a strategically advantageous position, today is the day that you are goi…

All other police forces have the same problems.

So why is the United States police unique amongst all other developed countries for its kill rate then?

> Part of the training also drills in the fact that an untrained opponent with a sharp object like a knife is at a strategic advantage versus someone with a holstered firearm if they are closer than 21 feet away.

And yet I've seen police officers here in Europe deal with people with knives without ever pulling a gun. Why can we do this and you can't?

The idea that a man with a knife 20 feet away from a man with a gun has the advantage! - it just seems like a justification for the incompetent policing that the US is notorious for all over the world.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#315

Post by syshum »

1123581321 wrote: post #205
arminiusreturns wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of this that I don't see addressed: huge numbers of LEO's are sent to Israel to train. I don't even have to say anything further. It speaks for itself.

Israelis excel in the defense industry and their mandatory military service means few people with physical and perceptual aptitude are untrained. I assume you are implying an Israeli cannot be a good police trainer because they occupy Palestine, but I disagree.

>>Israelis excel in the defense industry and their mandatory military service

Exactly, this means they are training police in MILITARY tactics, the entire point of this conversation was that the police need to be DEMILITARIZED, having them trained by the IDF is exact what we SHOULD NOT be doing

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#316

Post by TomSwirly »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #279
c2471 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that the two are coupled. It is not clear why 0 false negatives is the aim. In almost all hard problems, you cannot have 0 false positives and 0 false negatives. Normally, getting to 0 false negatives requires a large number of false positives. E.g. if I wanted a 0 false negative pregnancy test, the only feasible way would be to tell some very large proportion (maybe all) test takers they are pregnant. I…

I want to disengage from the false positives/negatives discussion, it’s too abstract to be relevant, and demonstrably false anyway. There exists a system with 0% false positives. I find point (a) interesting. You posit that they have control over which situations they enter. But one of the major criticisms I hear, after abuse of force, is that “the police didn’t do anything”. It would seem that these are incompatible…

> When is the last time anyone rioted, protested, or even remembered when an innocent police officer was killed?

When I lived in the United States, on the very rare occasion that a police officer was killed, our community would memorialize him.

But the fact is that police officers kill others at at least _twenty times_ the rate that police officers get killed by non-police officers.

More, if someone kills a police officer, they are almost always caught, and then gets decades in jail. When a police officer kills someone else, nothing happens to them, even when the police officer.

I lived for thirty years in the United States, and I saw the most terrible behavior from police officers - not just brutality, but gross incompetence and corruption (as in "bundles of cash being handed to cops").

Now I live in Europe, and police here are competent and friendly (and also very effective at dealing with violent drunks, I actually laughed to see someone just lifted up from behind by two cops struggling away in midair, hurting no one, not even himself). It's like night and day.

> Another police chief was found dead outside of a looted pawn shop last night.

I wasn't able to find even _one_ police chief who was found dead.

I did find a story about a retired police captain who was found dead, but no one else.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#317

Post by TomSwirly »

potta_coffee wrote: post #208
mstade wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you’ve never driven in the US of A. ;o) Facetious commentary aside – and I do apologize for the tongue in cheekness – as a European I’ve always been struck by just how many wrecks and other debris are littered by the side of the roads in the US. Mileage varies I’m sure (no pun intended) but I covered 6660 miles on a road trip through in the US last year and it seemed almost universal to me that you’d see at l…

I don't think many truckers intentionally ignore blown out tires. It's likely they just haven't noticed.

If a truck driver stops to deal with a blown-out tire, they lose money. Delivery windows are incredibly short - there are bonuses for on-time deliver, and penalties for failure.

So at least some truck drivers will ignore a blowout, particularly if it's in the last couple of hours of a trip.

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#318

Post by TomSwirly »

jeffbee wrote: post #114
nds43242 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you engender an idea of a UK/Canada-type cop in a country where there are more guns than people? I assume cops here are trained to see all citizens as armed threats, which systematically produces cops who are always on edge and ready to kill. The whole thing feels like a deeper problem than just training cops to be nicer.

The incident that has sparked the current stretch of American decline involved police using force other than firearms against an unarmed man. It's clear that sending police to respond with violence to an incidence of passing counterfeit currency was perhaps not the appropriate response. Violence in American society has various structural root causes. It's not as simple as saying there are a lot of guns. Inequality, l…

Hear, hear. It's particularly ridiculous since some large portion of the people who end up with a counterfeit bill have no idea that it's fake...

Once I pulled out a bunch of cash in a bar and exactly one bill, a $5, glowed brightly under the black light in the bar. I'd already handed it to the bar owner and I said, "Oh, that one must be a fake, I'll take it back" and he said, "No, it's fine." I was surprised!

(Under my fingers too, it was an obvious fake, but I didn't react in time.)

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#319

Post by TomSwirly »

bananabreakfast wrote: post #228
jeffbee wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a list of occupations that are more dangerous than police officer. https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/the_deadliest_...

This is an excellent example of lying with statistics. Of course police deaths are low across all police everywhere. The aggregate death statistics are meaningless. Pull up a stat comparing deaths of cops only in downtown Chicago or Detroit or how about Minneapolis and then it will be more meaningful

The reason you don't pull up those statistics is that they in fact completely contradict your claims.

You might ask yourself why you feel the need to make things up?

Re: Lawmakers begin bipartisan push to cut off police access to military-style gear

#320

Post by matwood »

klmadfejno wrote: post #63
matwood wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see some statistics before discriminating against veterans. My intuition says combat vets would make better police officers because they would likely be better trained, and are used to dealing with high pressure, dangerous situations. The military's RoE are also very strict with severe consequences for violating. Contrary to what some think, soldiers are not running around shooting every person they s…

Just posted this to a different adjacent thread but since you're asking for this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30281075/ Study suggests ex-military cops are 2.9x more likely to be involved in a shooting if they had been deployed, and still 1.9x if they were ex-military but not deployed. It's worth considering that people who leave the military to join another high risk of violence job may simply be violence seekin…

Thank you! As you mentioned, while not perfect it does point to some issues.
Post reply on HN