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

propublica.org

161–170 of 650 posts

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sure worth handing guns to everyone for defense. If everyone is armed that really makes the world a safer place. How else could you e.g shoot somebody to defend your parking spot? /s But seriously.. do you have been to Europe? You need to visit some very extreme areas to be in real danger. What you describe is pure hyperbole.

Most working class in Europe live in "extreme" areas also "not-wanted-to-be-officially-known-as-no-go" zones. Lol, I love how you question if I've live/d there, like the complete inability to take in information that might not be fit to your world view.

I don't know of any no-go zones. Sure, some areas in larger cities tend to be more dangerous than others. But still far from no-go zones. No idea where this information comes from.

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

#162
post #114
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…

> from their point of view the police are the people most likely to assault or kill them or their children on the street, more so than random criminals That point of view is just factually incorrect. It’s like thinking that the way to get rich is to become a movie star. Sure it might happen but that’s not the normal way.

Do you have data points to disprove it? I'm not aware of any data on how often police engage in physical altercations with civilians. One of the points the article makes is that the NYPD actively misrepresents such altercations that could cast the department in a bad light.

Stop and frisk policies amount to codifying assault, in my opinion.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is valid or true, but I sometimes think that the 1990s through early 2000s pop culture depiction of black culture embedded itself strongly in the psyche of many white Americans. It sounds silly to say that gangster rap, and The Wire, and such things are responsible for racial stereotypes, but for many of my white friends, I think this is absolutely true. One sad part of this is that some of the m…

The relevant stereotypes are older than independence and deeply embedded in American culture, they don't stem from 1990s to early 2000s popular culture.

I agree there are stereotypes much, much older than this, of course - and 90s pop culture does not explain away the longer term discrimination. Still, if the question is about how white Americans perceive black Americans as a group, especially those white Americans who do not know many black Americans personally, I think you have to consider portrayals in pop culture as a factor. At least, that is my perception, as a white American who has only a handful of black friends, but who has a number of white friends who are/were into this kind of pop culture. At the least, it reinforces any existing fears that might have been initially planted by other sources (e.g. racist family members).

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

#164
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What ethics? And how can you prove anything if cops always defend their own? In an ideal world where we have an oracle telling us which cops are good and which are bad your comment makes sense. But the nature of corruption is to obfuscate its dealings. You can't just say "well we need independent oversight" then because there are so many institutional pivot points where cops can hide their abhorrent behavior before i…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

In practical application ethics violations are knowable breaking of rules or demonstrable malicious intentions.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How familiar are you with the bail and plea bargain system? Police regularly get no punishments for murdering civilians, as they are trained to give the "I was fearing for my life" line in courts. Whereas if I'm a Black individual, especially in a poor area that's over policed, I won't be able to pay for bail, and won't be able to afford a good lawyer if I'm pinned for murder. Over 90% of cases are settled by plea ba…

If people only knew how many cases are closed with incarcerating innocent people who were at the wrong time in the wrong place ... And being black qualifies them to be guilty. It’s so sad, it’s not only police but a whole system form police to prosecutors to judges... We need reform!!

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

#166
post #35
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.” https://www.cjr.org/analysis/capital-b-black-styleguide.php

Well I'm going to capitalize Brown but not white or black. This is the world we live in now, I guess!

We don't live in a static society, it is wild to me that so many grown adults are blind to this. Don't want things to change? Too bad.

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

#167
post #2

The NYPD has a budget for spying on people in other countries. State power is weird.

For those curious who didn't know about this (like me): >With offices in 11 foreign capitals and an unpublished budget, the ILP’s far-flung counterterrorism cops operate outside the authority of top U.S. officials abroad, including the American ambassador and the CIA station chief, who is the nominal head of U.S. intelligence in foreign countries. >The ILP is supported by private donors through the New York Police Fo…

So the NYPD privatized secret policing? Nice one!

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

#168
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.

> "[...] justifiably or not [...] extrajudicial and unjust tactics are used" ...how could this be justifiable?

Let's assume that Europe's cops are at 100% capacity to handle their crime justly. That means the US cops can do the same for only 10% of the crime they see. Leaving 90% of the crime to go unpunished. Or they can do shady tactics and respond to more crime at the cost of Injustice.

Obviously the ideal solution is to 10x the capacity of the criminal justice system but nobody's paying for that.

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

#169
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Corruption is a provable violation of ethics which is measurable.

Police do everything they can to keep ethics violations from being measured. That is what the story is about. In light of that, your objection to psychometry's comment calling for oversight is quite absurd.

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering we're not allowed to see officer disciplinary records, even though they work for us (the taxpayer), it's impossible to get the data you want.

You can subpoena for that in the public interest otherwise that is an employer related privacy violation of an employee.
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