Your reaction is extreme. Working professionals from rich countries that come to the US on short term Visas are not subjected to intense scrutiny. No one is prosecuted for the name on their Facebook account.
You need to be a bit more careful with sweeping generalizations like "no one." Here are two cases just off the top of my head that almost perfectly contradict what you wrote. http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/04/23/Feldmar/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-before-you-tweet-why-two-...
I actually thought about being more careful with that but decided that replies complaining about it would probably strengthen the point.
In Switzerland almost every adult male also doesn't have any ammunition for his rifle at home. So realistically the worst police officers can expect is to be being hit over the head with that rifle.
Disclaimer: I'm from the neighboring country to the north. I know nothing. I _thought_ that you're supposed to have some ammunition at home though? 'Taschenmunition' or something? Like, say, 20 rounds? Let's ignore the standards for storing those, but my impression is that a) ~a lot~ of people in CH have rifles _with_ ammo b) ~a good number~ of kills at home in CH happen using said rifle ("Cheating wife? Thank the mi…
Also from the north but Taschenmunition hasn't been a thing since 2007.
While those incidents are obviously outrageous, refusal at the border isn't the same as prosecution and certainly nobody was sentenced to life imprisonment.
I grant part of that. But now _you_ have to tell me: How do you claim to know that no one was arrested and suffered life imprisonment? The point you seem to be missing is that you have no way of knowing! This is the "wonderful" thing about the Patriot Act: Even as an American citizen, you could be disappeared and shipped to a foreign country for torturing... and there's a good chance no one would find out, for years,…
>The border guard then escorted him to his car and made sure he did a U-turn and went back to Canada.
>To their surprise, however, when they arrived at L.A. International, they were not only detained and questioned at length by U.S. authorities, but were swiftly -- after a night in the cells, naturally -- plonked back on a plane back to England, and barred from entering the United States again.
I'm not sure what you mean. They were each returned to their respective countries.
I once used to believe that the problem in the US is that guns are so widely available, but today I'm not so sure about that anymore, because there are many very safe countries that rank high in number of guns per capita like Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Canada and Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_c... In Switzerland every male has a military type machine gun and two magazi…
Here in Sweden at least the high number of guns are hunting rifles.
The issue is in USA only police kill if you don't obey them (follow their verbal commands), possibly due to reduced middle class.
Here is a hypothesis: to lower the issue, either the US citizens increase gun ownership or police don't carry guns; till parity.
Data point: Stanford experiment. More middle class and power balance. Then they'd be polite, like in the rest of the world.
On you tube, you can see police outside of USA interactions... and there is 'pushing' and such involved and sometimes their feelings get hurt. In USA, if you don't obey or hurt their felling: you are dead.
I don't think the amount of bullets used by the police in different places can be meaningfully compared without knowing the number of bullets fired at the police. Edit: a sister comment cites numbers according to which almost 8 times as many police officers are killed in the US than in Germany per capita. Of course the real question is how many are attacked ; if the police is better at gunfights than the criminals it…
Don't overlook the very likely strong coupling between the bullets fired 'at' and 'by' police and how it likely goes both ways. 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 en…
People want to shoot at police because police shoot at
people so often is probably just as true as the converse.
Could you add some more detail on this point? I'm having difficulty thinking of a situation I could be in that would be improved by me shooting at the police?
I mean, even if they're honest good guy cops surely they'll call in backup and arrest you and make a really enthusiastic effort to put you in jail for a long time? And that's the best case - if they're bad cops it can only be worse?
Admittedly, my status as a british middle class white guy might mean I don't know what dealing with the police is like for other people.
This article doesn't add up. Even highly-paid local government servants (i.e. the police in this case) aren't usually this stupid. What it's claiming is: if someone calls up the police to report that a squatter is occupying a neighboring apartment, there's a SWAT raid on that apartment? Nope. This was either in a very high-security zone, or there was some other extenuating circumstance. Here's my guess at why they di…
Nothing in the article indicates that a SWAT unit was dispatched. It was likely a couple of patrol units.
Don't overlook the very likely strong coupling between the bullets fired 'at' and 'by' police and how it likely goes both ways. 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 en…
People want to shoot at police because police shoot at people so often is probably just as true as the converse. Could you add some more detail on this point? I'm having difficulty thinking of a situation I could be in that would be improved by me shooting at the police? I mean, even if they're honest good guy cops surely they'll call in backup and arrest you and make a really enthusiastic effort to put you in jail f…
People don't think like that so much if someone close to them is dead.
Huh, why don't criminals in Germany exploit this, always threaten confrontation and have their run of the city? EDIT: Granted there's a big difference between trying to deescalate when possible and raiding a sleeping guy's apartment on bad info. EDIT 2: This was an honest question and I felt like I got good answers despite the downvoting. Big thanks to everyone who took it at face value or applied the principle of ch…
Remember that the police have far more resources available. Once someone demonstrates that they're actually a threat, the police still have the option of applying superior force but they have far more options for controlling when and where that happens and ensuring that innocent bystanders aren't needlessly exposed. One example where the U.S. seems to be getting it right is high-speed chases, which seem to be becomin…
"One example where the U.S. seems to be getting it right is high-speed chases"
If true, that may be because they are usually video recorded by news channels. If a civilian is injured during the chase, there's lots of dramatic footage for the prosecution lawyer to show the jury, before asking the officers in charge to answer under oath why they made the decisions they made.
Sounds like pretty strong evidence in favor of mandatory police body-worn cameras, along with a right of citizens who are on the receiving end of a police encounter to obtain and review the footage. There's always the worry that the camera would be 'accidentally' turned off by the police, or that the footage would be lost if it showed anything embarrassing to the police, so to make them effective, you probably need a change in the law such that any discrepancy between the officer's version of events and the citizens is AUTOMATICALLY decided by judge/ jury in favor of the citizen if the 'mandatory' video footage is for some reason unavailable.
I read these type of people walk the fine line that separates criminals, the propensity for violence and murder while wearing a uniform doesn't fix psycopathy. Not to say all police officers are built this way, and certainly there are elements that I can observe as an outsider that makes American style policing to be particularly and overwhelmingly lethal and excessive. I have a hard time buying the liuetenants response that this is the norm. What kind of fucked up policy allows guns drawn officers with questionable safety margin to kick out a suspected squatter? It raises even more questions like, what if the author was African American? Or maybe he had tattoo on his face? If people wearing a uniform are free to choose a response in their own thinking, how much of past fatalities by police force were caused by trigger happy and blood thirsty individuals that are clearly psychopaths? How can the public trust enforcers who more than coincidentally use excessive force before the usual buckshot is laid out? It must be truly terrifying to be American, and stories like this makes me inclined to keep my Canadian citizenship. Not taking the higher ground, we've had exactly such police brutality, but almost in most cases they've resulted in criminal conviction. On the other hand a super lax and incompetent police force like those in Korea or Japan is equally frightening, but much less than a trigger happy, God knows what type of disorder suffering badge wearing individual will react in high stress situations, especially one that is escalated entirely by themselves.