I accidentally started a movement – Policing the Police by scraping court data

That makes no sense and I'd be interested in examples supporting it that are not some person on the fringe shouting opinions.

What should the goal of the police department regarding killing innocent people? Should they aim for a dozen per quarter? Per-capita weighted?

Incremental changes have been hard because it gets down to the police policing themselves, and that has shown to be a failure.

Again, one of the "simplest" reforms would be to have other professionals deal with mental health crises.

A bigger reform with much more value would be ending the War on Drugs but that's way higher up the food chain. It is germane though, in that the whole point of said war was to give police more opportunities to oppress "others" (i.e., "minorities" and "hippies").

We need to take another try at involuntary institutionalization of the mentally ill.

It should be cheaper than prisons and more humane as well. The homeless crisis begs for this.

Just got to work out trivial details like how to not have that power be abused...

Oh wow, that profile I created 10 years ago and have never once revisited has a BTC wallet address. You sure got me.

Downvotes aside I think I'm more worried about this. The preferred native approach, that's the risk that undermines things like this.

Despite the downvotes your example is good I think it's safe to say the 95% male to female ratio is likely to be down to males more likely to be involved in violent incidents than females. No one really has a problem with this until skin colour comes into it. As a society though tackling the cause of why males get into violent confrontations seems like a no brainer.

I do see some evidence of that (good!), but your comments so far also pattern-match to a class of accounts we frequently end up having to ban, because they use HN more for political battle than for curiosity. The pattern-match may be wrong in your case, but given the GP comment, I thought I should try to nudge you in the intended direction of the site.

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Your phrase 'uncommon background' made me want to write down some more general thoughts for a bit, but just ignore it if it's not of interest.

We don't have any problem with uncommon backgrounds—we welcome them. Conversation gets better when it happens across differences—so long as people can remain curious. The trouble is that curiosity comes under strain as backgrounds diverge, differences increase, and people have less in common. The risk of the connection 'snapping' and the thread degenerating gets higher. This risk is greater online than it is in person, where there are more channels of information to draw on and also more constraints on how we treat each other.

When things 'snap' and then degenerate, we have no choice but to intervene as moderators, not to take a side on the topic, but literally to moderate the kinetic energy that breaks out. The alternative would be to let it destroy the forum, and that wouldn't do any good for anyone.

The person with an uncommon background—the one who holds a deviant or contrarian view, relative to the majority—inevitably comes under additional pressure when expressing themselves. Their risk of being misunderstood is higher, the likelihood of someone showing up to support them is lower, and there's a good chance that they'll attract a flurry of shallow majoritarian responses. This doesn't happen because people have bad intentions—it happens because of statistical mechanics. But it feels like the others have bad intentions; we're not designed to feel statistical mechanics.

When that happens, it's hard not to snap. The person with the minority view, being under additional pressure, often lashes out at the rest in a way that is against the rules of the site and that we have no choice but to moderate. They get labeled as the 'bad' one, but that's not really fair—the snappage is as much a consequence of the pressure differential as of any personal lapse. Most people would 'lapse' in such a situation. It's really a shared problem, but the majority gets to feel angelic while the other holds the bag.

I see this a ton on HN across every sort of 'minority' you can imagine—the obvious demographic minorities, of course, but also a long tail of less obvious subgroups. It's like a massively parallel greatest hits album of social psychology experiments.

Dismayingly often, we end up having to ban the account that lashes out for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines, even while sympathizing with their situation because of the dynamics I've just described. Then often then lash out at the mods for siding against them, accuse us of bias, and so on. In reality we may well personally agree with them, and even if not, we sympathize with their position—but it's not possible to communicate that.

Some of this, of course, is what minorities have always known—they're held to a higher standard in an unfair way. But it's interesting that one can derive this from the mechanical conditions of an internet forum.

The open question is whether there's a way out of the unfortunate tradeoff here, which is that moderating to keep kinetic energy at tolerable levels—that is, moderating flamewars so the forum doesn't burn to a crisp—means favoring the mediocre majority with its predictable views. HN is a good place to look for a way out, because both poles of the tradeoff—flamewar and lameness—are bad for curiosity, and curiosity is the one thing we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).