Probably the best article I read this year!
In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
221–230 of 301 posts
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It honestly sounds like they are so self-centered that they only care about their arrest stats/job performance + personal safety. They care nothing for anyone else's safety if it gets in the way of their job performance numbers. That is a horrific concept, honestly. If you think of them as undisciplined teenage boys in over their heads, given a job for which they have not developed sufficient levels of mental matur…
I'm not sure how the idea that we hand undisciplined teenage boys firearms and power over the rest of the population any less horrific than what I described.
I'm not saying it's not horrific, it just to me kind of makes this otherwise surreal state of affairs make sense. A grown man who doesn't know how to responsibly wield power to me seems extremely similar to a teenage boy not knowing how to properly behave with new strength and freedoms. Put a bunch of these similar people together with no responsible authority to control them, and you often end up with toxic and dangerous cultures.
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I .. disagree. Disclaimer: Not my native language, I might miss nuances and misinterpret things - and I certainly come from a different belief system, a different culture. For me though, this article raised important questions - but those were nearly impossibly hard to read due to the constant 'I served in Iraq' analogies. I flagged the submission for that. I don't believe that Iraq was a 'Good Idea™' and I have zero…
> I have zero respect for someone that was there Serving isn't for everyone, and I don't expect you to understand it if you haven't. But either way your attitude is as discourteous as it is pretentious, and you have added zero value to the conversation by shooting your mouth off on the subject. America's fighting forces will continue to carry out their mission, day in and day out, just like they always have. I have a…
> America's fighting forces will continue to carry out their mission, day in and day out, just like they always have.
What is the mission? And why is it taking an infinitely long time to carry out?
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#224Two years ago, I was in the US for a month and volunteered to chauffeur two Chinese students to a Celtics game as an outing (I was working for a homestay/education consulting company at the time). On the way back at night, driving through a small town in central Massachusetts, I passed a cop car, going at the speed limit. The cop immediately pulled out and began tailing me, but did not turn on his lights. I tried to…
So because of one isolated incident you think all cops in the U.S. act this way and therefore will never visit again? You think what you see on TV isn't just handpicked? and is actually representative of the thousands of pull overs cops perform daily? You think every single black person pulled over gets shot?
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rules about every male having a weapon and ammo went away in 2007 or so. There is a lot of regulation there about who can have a weapon or buy ammunition.
Well, Switzerland still ranks very high in terms of gun ownership. (4th place in the world) My point is that the mere availability of guns can't be the only reason. This is most likely a very complex problem with many different issues that have to be tackled. Better police training, preventing ghettos, hopeless economic situation for people of certain race, racism - these are all issues that will have to be tackled t…
> Well, Switzerland still ranks very high in terms of gun ownership. (4th place in the world)
If you're insisting that the situation with firearms in Switzerland resembles that of the US you are either ignorant, obtuse, or dishonest. They are not even remotely comparable.
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, far fewer people own guns in Germany than they do in the US. Police in Germany likely carry weapons to deal with knives and other close range weapons, while police in the US carry weapons to deal with long range weapons.
> To be fair, far fewer people own guns in Germany than they do in the US. Call it 9/10 in the US and 3/10 in Germany[1]. Note that this is number of guns, not number of people owning guns. Not sure how that changes the odds of any one person having access to a gun. Perhaps more interesting is the number of verified homicides commited with a gun[2]: ~4/100 000 in the US, 0.2/100 000 in Germany. So one could guesstima…
>Police in Norway has also been generally armed now, and waltz around with glocks.
Is this due to the Breivik massacre?
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#227Can this be the consequence of liberal gun ownership laws in the US? When anyone police interacts with can carry the gun it makes perfect sense to act as if they did. Hence excessive violence in trivial cases.
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Enough" in that you have people on HN saying pretty much that most of the black people who get shot and killed by police deserved it and that black people are stupid violent criminals so it's no wonder they get killed so often, and that if only they were docile and compliant in the face of police harassment they wouldn't get shot so much. It's fucking weird seeing that stuff on HN, and it's scary to think how those…
There's a difference between the way you phrase it and the objective fact that most people who are killed by police are in fact people with lengthy and often violent criminal histories. Not all, of course. But most.
And yet police forces across Europe come into contact with people with lengthy and violent criminal histories without killing them.
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#229I, for one, get tired of the constant refrain of hero worship while these guys say that there number one job is to get home safely. They are afforded terrible powers to intervene in, and disrupt, someone's life. That trade is made under the assumption that they do a dangerous job. A benefit is afforded to them due to the responsibility that they bear. Obviously, they want to have as much power with as little danger a…
If their "number one priority" is to be safe, they should pick a different line of work.
"I was in fear for my life" has become a justification for just about anything they want to do but it usually factors out to "I got scared so I just started shooting". Its hard to find that heroic.
Re: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
"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…
I should have clarified I'm assuming worst case scenario where a cop shoots a civilian and kills them. The camera malfunctioned so the cop couldn't prove that for X reasons the civilian was a deadly threat then the cop is charged with murder and automatically convicted due to the video evidence not being there to support their claim and due to the civilian automatically winning due to the previous poster's proposition.