Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then they shouldn't have a gun at all
So they should allow innocent people to be killed?
They should not kill innocent people. If a possible criminal gets away as a result, so be it.
George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
781–790 of 855 posts
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#782There are lots and lots of mishaps in many professions, sometimes with deadly consequences. The United States is a country of 330 million people. Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average! Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1]. There are millions and millions of daily interactions betw…
> Suppose an event is so unlikely it only has 1 in a billion chance of happening--it will happen once ever 4 days on average! Ok, the EU has 445M citizens[1] which means, by your logic, there should statistically be 40% more police "mistakes" than the US. Except there isn't. It is radically lower[2] (1536 for the USA in 2019 vs 51 for the EU in 2018/19). [1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/figures/living_en…
That's an interesting and valid point.
First, a disagreement. Your base assumption that police activity should scale linearly with population. This is just obviously not correct. There are huge, huge differences in countries and crime rates. You can look at differences in homicide rate, for example [1]. The united states has a pretty shockingly high homicide rate for a developed country (4.96 per 100k). This is 5x higher than France or Germany. On the other end you have Japan, which is about 5x lower than France or Germany (25x lower than United States).
But that aside, the important question is: is crime driving police activity, or are the police widely malicious and corrupt? I'll admit that I'm not knowledgable enough to give a good answer to this question, but I'm very skeptical of jumping to a conclusion based on selective evidence on social media or recent news coverage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cops kill about 1600 people total (justified and non-justified combined) per year in the US. There are about 16,000 murders per year in the US. Out of the ~1550 people killed by police in 2019, about 40 were unarmed. You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.
> Cops kill about 1600 people total (justified and non-justified combined) per year in the US. There are about 16,000 murders per year in the US. Out of the ~1550 people killed by police in 2019, about 40 were unarmed. > You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer. There's a lot wrong with your comment, and one issue is your conclusion obviously does not follow from your (unso…
Sorry for the lack of citation, my stats come from the Washington Post Police Shootings Database [^2]. As far as I know, it's the most comprehensive one currently, though unfortunately it has a paywall.
> Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].
The question at play as I understood it is whether, being in a dangerous situation as a bystander, you should call the police knowing that they may respond with lethal force. If someone, even someone you know, is posing a threat to you, then the police pose much less of a threat by several orders of magnitude. Yes, police are imperfect and occasionally kill bystanders, but they kill less bystanders by far than people killed through criminal acts.
This then comes back to our question of de-escalation. If someone is unarmed and behaving violently.. the police will probably successfully de-escalate them and indeed, de-escalation is the correct approach. However, if someone is threatening lethal force, then de-escalation is no longer the correct approach.
Which brings us to the Philando Castile case, in which he was not threatening anyone. He was stopped for a traffic incident.. not waving a firearm around, not because someone was panicking. The police officer who shot him was wrong, and that's why he was charged and faced trial.
> Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply
It's hard to justify shooting an unarmed person. If we are interested in those cases where the police acted wrongfully instead of just those cases in which they acted at all, then that number is important. Yes, there are cases where someone armed is unjustly shot, those cases are obviously more rare.
[^2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#784Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you report your fellow in company that e.g. goes late to work? Or uses corporate assets (printer, laptop) for personal things? This is similar, if you know someone you have less incentive to report on one. The better you know them, the higher is the bar for reporting.
No, someone showing up late to work and someone else violently beating or murdering a citizen is not the same thing. At all. Those two scenarios are so far apart, attempting to draw a comparison is disturbing.
OK, let me make it more clear.
Let's assume two cases:
1. A programmer, his work involves programming (obvious), going to meetings, printing some reports/codes etc.
The biggest problem he can do is introduce bugs in code by mistake (yes, lives can be lost that way), would you expect his peers to tell on him that he was the guy that introduced a bug that killed 300 people in a plane crash?
2. A cop, his job involves preventing crimes, event violent ones, so he sometimes need to use his gun to prevent some of it, and sometimes he has to shoot a criminal.
His mistakes might be killing innocent person. Same thing can happen to his colleagues, so they protect him (just like any sane community would, like your family) - at least unless he turns out to be some sick sociopath.
Do you see relevance now? If you play with code you can just break code, if you play with guns you can break lives.
A side from that I don't get it why there are so many people that trash cops, but don't say a bad word about looters.
Cops protect us from crimes, small and big. They provide order, there are always black sheep, but there are less of those than you think - good guys also make mistakes.
Without a force that provides protection from crimes we would turn into vendetta like justice - have you been to countries that just went out of war? e.g. after the fall of Yugoslavia, there was no police there only tribe and vendetta justice.
Each utopia turns into dystopia sooner or later (CHAZ).
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't throw all police officers into one bucket. You have some outliers that are violent and the rest just does their job - keeping the city more safe. Also don't assume all cases of police officer shooting a person are cases of police brutality - this is for court to prove.
Why don’t the good ones arrest the bad ones then? Or even testify in court?
The world is not black and white.
There is some evil that is done by good guys, and a tribe/community protects them. This is normal human behavior.
Sociopaths are a minority.
Would you protect your child if he/she did a hit&run? Would you report him/her right away?
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#786There needs to be a psychology study done with cops to understand why they act the way they do. I believe there's an underlying problem in how they are trained or something else because police brutality is kind of a global phenomenon. When someone kills or severely hurts the people they are supposed to protect, it seems like there's something else going on. I've been in a few protests and I can easily say that I have…
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in Berlin. Police gets indicted for drawing a gun, let alone use it. And that’s the way it should be. Not all incidents are the same, but so is the feeling of being above any law that Us police officers enjoy and enforce
I presume you meant "investigated" not "indicted".
Yep, I meant an investigation is started, so yes. Sorry
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#788Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you can't answer 4 simple questions. So you pretend to be overwhelmed. Got it.
The answer to your questions is that those are not examples of police brutality, so long as the police respond with reasonable force. Along with reading your other comments here, I viewed these 4 questions as a bad faith attempt at steering the conversation off topic. When people complain about police brutality, we are not talking about the times when police have to legitimately defend themselves or disarm someone. T…
"Bad faith" is the copout people use when they don't have a good counterargument.
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
Risk management. Allowing htem to tear it down vs. intervening with force to safe a piece of metal on a piece of rock. The latter can be put back up. The former carrers quite a risk for everyone involved. Sunds like a reasonable call to me.
If this were a one-time event, I suppose that might be true. ...but the unfortunate reality is that allowing mobs to destroy property become a feedback loop because they then realize that mobs can destroy anything they like with impunity. That's no way to run a civilization.
Safely allowing protests to take place and let people have their say without fear of rubber bullets in their faces is a fantastic way to run a civilization.
Re: George Floyd Protest – police brutality videos on Twitter
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people. A reference I never expected to see on HN. It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
So the absolute truth is on Twitter? How significant is the portion of uninformed Americans? If an American watches TV news and reads Twitter are they half informed? WTF is your point: blame others, hate others, downvoting to remove a disparaging opinion. Do you feel powerful? You might be the cop.
>refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.
Twitter as another resource was an example. But yes, you can look on Twitter and find many different perspectives about a topic. I would think someone who knows how to spend some time understanding multiple perspectives of an issue knows how to look in many different places for them.
As far as the rest of your comment, I think you're going way off-base here. Sorry.