Police have been quitting in droves in the last year • Hacker News Board

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#161

Post by happytoexplain » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #10

Sounds like 'defund the police' is stupid, self-defeating sloganeering that makes no sense given what its apparent settled-upon meaning (only settled upon many months after becoming popular).

It seems like most of the people still arguing about what it means are the far edges on either side, or simply those interested in slandering people with the opposite political identity. However, their noise is a permanent source of confusion on many topics, and we should strive to not allow them to affect rational conversation.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#162

Post by _ha6w » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

bmmayer1 wrote: post #44

Am I the only one who thinks that police officers should be paid more, not less? These should be highly specialized and trained jobs that are hard to get and easy to lose if you're bad at them / criminal -- seems like the reality right now is that they're easy to get and hard to lose.

Yes, but the accounting is not as clear as you'd think. It's a complicated relationship between understrength departments with unfilled vacancies, and overtime budgets.

Police officers throughout the country, but especially in cities, tend to supplement large portions of their income through overtime work. It means they're chronically underpaid for what they do throughout the country. And the way they bring themselves to what they want to be making is through exhausting themselves with overwork.

In Baltimore, some officers doubled their salaries. Others approached 50%. They averaged 12+ hour shifts per day for weeks. In fy 2019, a BPD sergeant made $260,000. The department went $50 million over budget for overtime. There are virtually entire books written on this, piecemealed in small budget stories throughout USA.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#163

Post by thrwthatway1 » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

treis wrote: post #125

I don't think enough people are talking about the huge change in the crime landscape. Here in Atlanta, violent crime is up 50, 60% while arrests are down 40%. We're down hundreds of cops and morale is terrible. Cops aren't doing their jobs because they fear politically motivated prosecution. And for good reason given that a handful of them faced politically motivated prosecution. We're still below the worst days of v…

Calling the previous century's reductions in crime a "recovery" is a flat out lie.

The world was a much more violent place, and it's been steadily getting less violent.

There's no reason we couldn't instantaneously recover from to the recent increases in violent crime.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#164

Post by slowhand09 » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

bradklein wrote: post #27

Here are some facts from the City of Vallejo, a city of 120,000 people located 30 miles north-east of San Francisco: - Recently featured in ABC's 20/20 show for a "Gone Girl" case were the Vallejo Police Department accused a couple of faking a kidnapping. The woman was sexually assaulted during her kidnapping, and the VPD staged a news conference claiming the whole thing was made up. The city paid the couple millions…

One word: California

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#165

Post by lmilcin » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

_fat_santa wrote: post #3

Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society, I honestly couldn't event imagine the stress. Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis. I've always had respect for cops becau…

I don't want to say policing is not hard, every first responder has hard job because they are not sent to people who are completely fine -- usually the situation involves some kind of crime or distress or both.

But, the dangers, though present, are IMO largely overstated. There are 700 thousand officers in US and on any given day some of them must necessarily come into trouble. The statistics list about 360 officers getting killed in line of duty, annually. That is 1/700000 chance of getting killed every day, over 30 year career that would amount to 1 in 70 chance of getting killed on duty or about similar as dying from all other types of accidents, including car accidents.

Is that small? No, I don't think so, that is nothing to sneeze at. But is still a lot less than dying from some easily preventable diseases. So if you are Police officer and keep eating shit food it might be that the shit food is actually more dangerous to you than your job.

Going through Covid is statistically more dangerous than lifetime of being police officer. At least as an officer you are doing this (hopefully) for public good and you know and accept risks.

It is also less than probability of dying on some other types of duties.

The difference being, that policing is typically done when something already interesting happens with potentially a lot of cameras present on scene, then being investigated.

If you go to be a police officer or fireman or military, you understand your choices and the dangers you are facing. It should not be a surprise, nor it should be a reason to kill any person not to your liking, on sight.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#166

Post by lolsal » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

jjcon wrote: post #89

Analemma_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the majority of those are traffic accidents. If you limit it to homicides it drops many more places.

Untrue at least for USA, only 28% are road related deaths. https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf

This is your source:

> SOURCE: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 1995.

Notably from 1995.

Doesn't your source say that only 47% of police deaths are homicide? That's less than half of the statistic used for this ranking. Am I reading that table correctly?

I don't have my own stats or sources; I don't particularly have a dog in this hunt. This seems like not a useful source at all in my opinion.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#167

Post by tzs » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

MereInterest wrote: post #116

blacktriangle wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except "so many unarmed black people are shot" is a lie. A larger per-capita percentages of unarmed whites are shot than blacks.

The data do not support your statement. Using the search term "per capita police violence deaths" on DDG in private mode, the links below were results #2 and #4. (Results #1 and #3 were comparisons by country, and are not included here from irrelevance. This is not a case of cherry-picking results.) https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-cle... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123070/police-shoo…

Blacktriangle was specifically talking about unarmed people shot by police. Your links are about shootings that include both armed and unarmed people.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#168

Post by roenxi » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #122

roenxi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a consensus committee that announces what 'the community' thinks? Because in my experience the community is quite divided on most topics and tends to come to a consensus using the literal meaning of words. There is always a risk that people chanting "defund the police" mean they want to, simply and literally, defund the police. If they want something different they should be chanting that instead.

"There is always a risk" I think there's an easy way to figure out what people mean when they chant a slogan. Talk to them. "In my experience the community is quite divided on most topics and tends to come to a consensus using the literal meaning of words" Well, even if your experience is correct, so what? Defunding the police -as it currently exists-, in its entirety, and directing those funds to different agencies,…

> Talk to them.

They'll all have different opinions on what, in the detail, the phrase means. Large political crowds generally can't handle complex ideas.

That is why the slogan matters, it is the bit that coordinates what the goal is.

> Defunding the police -as it currently exists-, in its entirety, and directing those funds to different agencies...

There are a few options. Major ones include:

1) This project is renaming the police.

2) This project is changing what they do.

It probably isn't going to be 1, because then it wouldn't be worth the fuss. So the question is, which responsibilities of the police are we jettisoning here? Because the slogan suggests all of them. "Better funding for mental health" uses quite different syllables from "defund the police".

I'm sure there are people with some great ideas in the crowd. But the ones in charge might be the people who believe, literally, that the point here is to defund everything the police do. There is a real risk people mean what they say.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#169

Post by fighterpilot » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #30

nradov wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law enforcement can be dangerous but it's only #22 in occupational death rates. Lumberjacks and roofers are far more likely to get killed. https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...

Potential for death is a very limited way to measure dangerous occupations/activities.

Not sure why you're downvoted. Chronic stress should be considered. Police have a much lower life expectancy than regular people. This could be either selection bias or the impact of chronic stress, and it has little to do with dying as an immediate proximate consequence of the occupation.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#170

Post by Supermancho » Thu, Jun 24, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #34

nradov wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law enforcement can be dangerous but it's only #22 in occupational death rates. Lumberjacks and roofers are far more likely to get killed. https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

> Law enforcement can be dangerous but it's only #22 in occupational death rates.

The original post has been edited to no longer make the claim about policing being the most dangerous, but a direct refutation is not whataboutism.