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My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

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Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#141

Post by rayiner »

cliffy wrote: post #102
treis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has an order of magnitude more crime than Europe but is policed by roughly the same number of officers. That, justifiably or not, leads to short cuts where extrajudicial and unjust tactics are used to enforce compliance.

[flagged]

> What kind of crime? Violent? Non-violent? Probably the majority is non-violent crime related to drug possession or property theft. Offenses designed to grease the gears of the prison industry. Modern day slavery. A veritable poverty & minority oppression engine.

You don't have to "probably." You can look this up. Baltimore had 3 times as many homicides as the entire country of Sweden last year, even though Sweden has 10 million people and Baltimore has under 600,000. And it's not "drugs" or "guns" because Sweden has plenty of guns and a harsh anti-drug regime.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#142

Post by uoaei »

pdonis wrote: post #90
fallingfrog wrote: post #31

The protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder are currently tapering off, but I don’t see any evidence at all that substantive changes have been made, which means that this is all going to happen again, and soon, and the protests will be bigger, the police response more violent. The black lives matter organization in my city presented a list of demands to the city council and every one of them was ignored, instea…

> The black lives matter organization in my city presented a list of demands to the city council and every one of them was ignored What were the demands?

https://www.joincampaignzero.org/

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#143

Post by hef19898 »

kleiba wrote: post #37

It's crazy but from a European perspective, stories like this sound more like what I imagine police forces to behave like in dictatorships, not in a democracy. After living in Europe for six years now, my wife is still puzzled sometimes by the differences between Europe and North-America when it comes to the police: how they are experienced by the population and how they see and present themselves and which role they…

Usually police in dictatorships, at least the more successful ones, tend to be much more professional, polite and non-brutal. Until they are very professional, very cruel and very brutal. The latter usually against very well defined groups, in very well defined ways.

Simple reason being, that random police violence just results, ultimately, in the kind of uproar and civil unrest the US experience now. Basically the last thing dictatorships want.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#144

Post by abandonliberty »

ixtli wrote: post #4

I've lived here a long time and come to the realization through observation that the NYPD operates like a private security force for capital. Their primary concern is to defend private property, the people themselves come second. The "community outreach" they do is just enough to keep us from getting accusatory.

Public legal record shows that the police are there to protect society rather than any person. Their job is to maintain law and order sufficiently so that society doesn't collapse, people keep working, etc.

"the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#145

Post by uoaei »

dragonwriter wrote: post #131
trowawee wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is completely irrelevant. It's like responding to "It's raining today" with "It was sunny last week". At best, it's a non-sequitur, at worst it's an active attempt to distract from the conversation at hand. And it ignores the facts that A) black-on-black crime does not happen at a substantially higher rate than white-on-white crime, B) the explanation for why most crime is intra-racial in a segregated country is p…

> It is completely irrelevant It's irrelevant to the real issue, but not to the upthread claim that blacks view police as the greatest threat. In the latter context, it is not irrelevant to point out that such a view does not seem to be in line with the evidence.

"Blacks view police as the biggest threat" seems to be perfectly in line with what Black people are and have been saying for decades if not centuries.

If only folks would listen to Black voices, they wouldn't be gumming up the conversation with irrelevance.

White on white crime is also much more prevalent than crime across racial boundaries. A priori you are much more likely to be a victim of crime by someone you know or in your immediate community. Because America is so segregated still, the conclusion follows pretty immediately.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#146

Post by dragonwriter »

vangelis wrote: post #94
jf22 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is people don't deny black-on-black crime is a problem. Society is in agreement that we don't want that. Bring up racism and police brutality though and people strongly deny it's a problem.

Weirdly, it only seems to come up when you mention police brutality!

That's because no one outside of the Black community listens to Black voices about Black social issues unless (1) it's positive attention to a rich Black person blaming the the moral failings of Blacks for the problems of Black communities and absolving White and wealthy society, or (2) it's attention (usually, historically, negative, but there are moments when that flips on one issue or another) to Black people questioning a trusted (by Whites) social institution and it's contribution to Black social problems.

Everything else is beneath notice of the wider society. It's talked about, but no one outside of the community is listening. Which is fine, except when they base their response to the issues on which they do pay a little attention to assumption that what they aren't hearing on other issues is because it's not being talked about.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#147

Post by renewiltord »

greenhatglack wrote: post #130
renewiltord wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're better at it than American Police are, as evinced by the crime rates. Certainly not as good as some other countries but it sort of points to the fact that you can be better at stopping crime than American police and nicer at the same time.

I'm sure that helpful for the person getting stabbed, that the people who failed them had some marginally better numbers than their American counter-part. It's pretty binary, either you do a good job of keeping people safe, or you give them the option of doing it themselves at an affordable price. The US offers the latter, the British fails at both. Compare violent assaults with serious medical injuries in the UK wit…

Marginally? The crime rates are half. And the police there are cheaper.

And I'm not arguing that there's perfection, so there's no reason to rebut that.

They are cheaper than American Police, twice as effective, and far more integrated.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#148

Post by simonh »

jeffdavis wrote: post #44
pjc50 wrote: post #22

> “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.” Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police. (Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the…

I looked at the numbers in another comment[1], and it seems that for every one black person killed by police (justifiably or not), over 20 black people are murdered by other blacks. So either there's something wrong with my analysis, or the fear of police is somewhat misplaced. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23579467

Most violence perpetrated by criminals is against other criminals, so that doesn't necessarily have much to do with the fears of law abiding mothers for their law abiding children.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#149

Post by austincheney »

uoaei wrote: post #127
austincheney wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there evidence that indicates police are more corrupt than anybody else?

This is a nonsensical question. How does one measure "corruption" and how do you quantify it? IMO these sorts of questions are kneejerk reactions without any significant fore- or after-thought. They only serve to disrupt the conversation.

Corruption is a provable violation of ethics which is measurable.

In so many of these police related threads on HN lately people make absurd claims and then are upset when asked about data or objectivity, which suggests people are looking to complain about something and don’t want their complaint validated with data, which is strange.

Re: My family saw a police car hit a kid, then I learned how NYPD impunity works

#150

Post by kedean »

dantheman wrote: post #108
cliffy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Public education has plenty of funding; maybe enable parents to choose where their kids go so failing schools and teachers can be shutdown and fired. I like how state abuse is considered capitalist greed - prisons and police forces are run by the state.

> Public education has plenty of funding; maybe enable parents to choose where their kids go so failing schools and teachers can be shutdown and fired.

That will make things worse, not better. School inequity right now stems almost entirely from the practice of funding schools with property taxes, leading to schools in wealthier districts getting good budgets and schools in low-income areas getting shoestring budgets. The distribution of funding needs to be made equitable before you start shutting down schools and firing people.

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