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

How much do we need the police?

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 505 posts

Re: How much do we need the police?

#351

Post by remarkEon »

vncecartersknee wrote: post #138
BurningFrog wrote: post #38

Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police. Steven Pinker describes how that went: > "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the…

How is this a natural experiment? Anarchism isn't just "when there are no police" Obviously looting should be read as exposing underlying ills and unmet needs within society. Like are you suggesting the natural state of people is just to loot and behave completely selfishly? look how many people in just the US riots alone cooperated to form medical stations, to work against police tactics, to make sure protestors had…

>Like are you suggesting the natural state of people is just to loot and behave completely selfishly?

Uhhh Yes? This is the natural state of Man, and has been for 10,000 years. My goodness, we've only gotten over it in the last 1000 years (and that's being extremely charitable). We're thankfully at a point where we've been able to regulate ourselves with some rules here and there. But that natural state of Man is the raison d'être for those rules in the first place.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#352

Post by sarakayakomzin »

zarkov99 wrote: post #113
josephg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s made much more true because that’s the image police forces in America have of themselves. “We’re here to beat up the bad guys”. Police here in Australia are far from perfect, but they are much more seen as part of the community. They don’t even carry firearms any more. In Australia I wouldn’t hesitate to contact the police or talk to them on the street if something happened. (Just like I wouldn’t hesit…

Police in the small US college town I live in is pretty much part of the community. I personally know many of the officers - and they are fine people. Even so, they are still a target for antifa agit-prop tactics. The playbook is always the same, catch the one cop that said or did, or appeared to say or do, the wrong thing, once, and you can tarnish the entire department, the entire profession, forever. And it works.…

>Somehow we lost all perspective and have come to expect that our officers, whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature, will always display the same perfect virtues we carefully signal everyday on Facebook

I don't know about you but I don't have to "carefully" display not killing people who are on the ground unarmed. You're depicting people with 6 months of training as if they were in a fucking warzone every day.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#353

Post by epistasis »

erichocean wrote: post #318
geofft wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To some extent, But, for instance, while private citizens may have guns for self-defense, they're unlikely to have tear gas, rubber bullets, armored vehicles, Stingrays, etc. And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force. I'm not at all saying that this by itself would eliminate racially-disproportionate violence d…

> And community watches that are run by actual community members are likely to have a very different set of priorities from a professional police force. Imagine an armed and dangerous HOA, functioning as its own "community policy force." What fresh hell is this?

Sure, but imagine a situation where this is a huge step up in fairness and justice from what you currently experience everyday! Many people currently live under tyranny and terror worse than an HOA police force.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#354

Post by 082349872349872 »

reificator wrote: post #42
bluedays wrote: post #21

> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…

> If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP. Or you lost a sports game, let's not pretend the bar for rioting is very high... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_rio... EDIT: Sorry, I missed "you just won a sports game" as a reason for rioting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_riot > After the Canadiens defeated the Boston Bruins in the first round of the 2008 Stanley Cup playoff…

Back when the US was doing the Great War on Terror, I was pleased to hear my country's interior minister saying something like: yes, we are taking note of potential terrorism — but we are actively concerned about football fans.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#355

Post by testbot123 »

testbot123 wrote: post #307
tathougies wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a demand for accountants, lawyers, and law enforcement that focuses on egregious offenders and systemic injustice, eliminating the root causes of crime. Not tear gas and tanks. Right, that's another word for police. > That probably has a lot to do with the War on Drugs [0] (have we won yet?) No, but that didn't cause gangs, and you know it.

> Right, that's another word for police. I guess we agree then: more police so we can stop targeting minorities in street-level busts and instead target the big offenders: white collar crime that destroys minority communities and keeps them in perpetual bondage. If you want to haul the rich and powerful out of their homes with tear gas and tanks, who am I to disagree? > No, but that didn't cause gangs, and you know i…

I should also clarify that this history is focused on the Los Angeles area around 1960s-1990s, viewed from the lens of the drug war. Gangs had existed in the country for a long time before the 60s (and in LA, too -- Bloods and Crips), but the proliferation of crack into the US via Los Angeles caused an explosion in the crime rate.

For brevity's sake, I'm also ignoring a lot of other serious issues related to police relations with the citizens of LA (e.g., Watts riots in '65, Rodney King in '92), which should be considered to paint a full picture of the antagonisms that have led us to where we are today. The drug war didn't create gangs (they existed before), but it poured fuel on the fire which led to a lot of the violence in that area in the 80s/90s.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#356

Post by 082349872349872 »

coliveira wrote: post #78
bluedays wrote: post #21

> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…

Contrary to popular belief, pacific demonstrations have very little power. That's why riots are an essencial tool for demonstrations like the ones we're seeing these days. People like to give examples such as the civil rights' movement as the effectiveness of pacific demonstration, but that was just a good tactical decision made by Dr. King and other organizers, since they knew that police was ready to kill them at a…

Why King (like Kennedy) made himself enemies:

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/ive... ... the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it. (Yeah) [Applause] We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles; we don't need any Molotov cocktails. (Yes) We just need to go around to these stores (Yes sir), and to these massive industries in our country (Amen), and say, "God sent us by here (All right) to say to you that you're not treating His children right. (That's right) And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment where God's children are concerned. Now if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."

Obviously Dr. King didn't realise that economic sanctions are a form of violence monopolised by state level actors?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#357

Post by frostburg »

remarkEon wrote: post #347
elliotec wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so obvious. Defund the police, and regulate their roles. Prioritize rape/violence/home invasion, deprioritize protests/drugs/etc., and as you say punish offenders. This is obvious.

>This is so obvious. Defund the police, and regulate their roles. >deprioritize protests/drugs/etc Yeah, already done that. And it's miserable . My parents came to visit (from the midwest and right before the pandemic) and were absolutely appalled at seeing needles on the street when we went out to dinner. I don't blame them, really. I blame the people who pretend that shrugging at enforcing drug laws is some sort of…

Drug addiction is best treated as a public health issue, not a criminal one. You're just observing the effects of a lack of rug sweeping.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#358

Post by usrusr »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #179
usrusr wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of power removal and accountability will change the "nails" perception if the only job they have is hammering. > The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline. Only if your idea of a perfect society is one where everybody is incarcerated. I'd rather have one where as few people as possible need to be incarcerated to keep order.

> No amount of power removal and accountability will change the "nails" perception if the only job they have is hammering. Providing the police with conflicting responsibilities isn’t going to solve that problem. At best it’s a waste of resources, and at worse it makes everything worse. You can’t expect the police to earnestly participate in improving a community when at any moment their responsibilities may obligate…

Thanks, you helped me a lot in understanding why the US are in so deep troubles.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#359

Post by remarkEon »

frostburg wrote: post #357
remarkEon wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is so obvious. Defund the police, and regulate their roles. >deprioritize protests/drugs/etc Yeah, already done that. And it's miserable . My parents came to visit (from the midwest and right before the pandemic) and were absolutely appalled at seeing needles on the street when we went out to dinner. I don't blame them, really. I blame the people who pretend that shrugging at enforcing drug laws is some sort of…

Drug addiction is best treated as a public health issue, not a criminal one. You're just observing the effects of a lack of rug sweeping.

At what point does "treating it like a public health issue" start to impede on public safety?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#360

Post by kolinko »

mythrwy wrote: post #282
JPKab wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd hate to break it to you but if you look at the actual data collected on police shootings you will see that while black Americans are overrepresented (they are 13% of the population but represent 24% of people killed by police), there are many many cases where the person killed is the same race as the officer. The majority of people killed by police in the USA were white. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/national…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... I don't know if this includes deaths by things like choking or beating. If this is correct, death by cop is actually pretty rare. Not bitten by shark rare, but maybe in the magnitude of fatally falling off a ladder rare. Which of course isn't to say harassment or abuse by cop is also rare. Nor to say there isn't racial disparity because the chart clearly…

Depends on your benchmark. US Police kills 1000 people a year, in 40M Poland our Police kills 1-2 people per year. In 70M Germany it’s around 6-10.

So it’s around 20-100x more per capita than it could be.

Post reply on HN