In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me

It's interesting to compare the different fears people are cultivating nowadays. We have many people fearing that if a child is not near its parents or a teacher at all times, the kid is at great risk of getting snatched by predators, to the point that parents that know this is nonsense and let their kids get out of their sight have concerned strangers calling the police, and child welfare services investigating their fitness as parents.

And as you also noted, we've got upper middle class and above people thinking that someone is going to be coming for them in their homes.

In a comment on another thread a few days or a week ago, someone linked to an article explaining how it is reasonable for a woman, any time she is in a place with men, to fear sexual assault or rape. The author did some hand waving math to show that statistically a woman encounters several rapists per day. Every man had to be treated as potentially her rapist and so she should plan accordingly (keeping in public places, making sure someone knows her plans and can call the police if she is late, and so on).

Here on HN, the impression I get is that the first fear (child predators everywhere) is believed to be greatly overstated, the third (rapists everywhere) is a reasonable thing to fear, and the middle one (not safe in our homes) has not been discussed enough (that I have seen) here for me to figure out what the majority thinks of it.

I took a brief look at the numbers for the child predators everywhere fear and the sexual predators everywhere fear. It's kind of annoying, because different sources give different data, but from what I could find it looks like (1) the probability of some random child being abducted for the purpose of sexual molestation in a given year is about the same or a bit higher than the probability of a given random woman being sexually assaulted in that year, and (2) the probability of #1 where the abductor is a stranger is about the same or a bit higher than the probability of #2 where the sexual assault is a rape.

For comparison, both of the above are higher than the probability that a given random person in the US will be injured in an automobile accident in that year, but only by a factor of around 2 or less.

I think we have too many people living in fear over things whose risks they have greatly overestimated.

People want to shoot at police because police shoot at people so often is probably just as true as the converse.

This is likely both true at the macro and micro level. That is, police behavior escalates individual situations into shootings which otherwise, with better training, could have ended peacefully.

_And_ with the culture of police quick to use force, people are more inclined to acquire weapons and use them during criminal activity.

Police positions on the usage and scale of force is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A violent, forceful police will create a violent, forceful criminal.

Which side you believe has more to do with your internal bias. Do you believe that police are violent because criminals are or do you believe criminals are violent because police are?

It's neither, though. It's a systematic problem with a systematic solution. Placing the blame isn't important, finding the solution is. You can do a little by trying to help people out of the situations where they're motivated to crime. You can do a lot by helping police nudge the outcome of interactions towards peaceful solutions.

The media whipping everyone into a frenzy over every contentious interaction doesn't help anybody.