The problem is the people are going to look at this the wrong way. Its not that you should be scared of police; its that you shouldn't be scared of terrorists.
There is a lot of police brutality news lately in the media so I suspect a lot of availability bias is going on. Things like shark attacks, airline crashes and terrorism tend to get a lot of mental coverage because it sells. And it tends to get a lot of people worried despite their actual nominal probabilities in the grand scheme of things.
Sure. The actual rarity is why it has been hard to convince people that reform is needed. The majority will simply not be affected, so anything they're made aware of is easy to pass off as happening to "others".
But regardless of how much it happens, if justice were being achieved then we would expect any case we do become aware of to end with the victims being made whole after the fact. Not just for spectacle cases where someone dies, but in all cases, even if someone is simply arrested yet never sentenced - "You can beat the wrap but you can't beat the ride" is antithetical to due process.
Such compensation not happening routinely is a fundamental problem with the justice system, and I am glad the issue is finally getting attention.
Just because some people are able to get justice when their rights are violated, it doesn't automatically mean that the system works. It just means that some people are able to get justice.
They can fuck with you. You can beat the charge, but not the ride. They will not get comeuppance for sending people on rides.
Some "power" that is.
9/11 was an extraordinary terrorist event: it killed more people than the previous decade of terrorist attacks worldwide. An attack on the scale of 9/11 is simply impossible in the current security climate.
And "ordinary" terrorist attacks are simply too isolated to ever be a realistic threat to any one person. Even in Israel, where terror attacks are commonplace, the number of civilian deaths is very small relative to the population. Or to put it differently, more people died on 9/11 than have died from terrorism in the entire history of the modern state of Israel.
You're more likely to win the lottery while being struck by lightning than you are to be killed by a terrorist.
The FBI counted 460 deaths at the hands of police officers in 2014 -- and reporting is voluntary, so over half of the nation's police departments aren't included in that number. Unofficial numbers from citizen watchdog groups are closer to 1,000 people nationwide in 2014, and those numbers have reportedly spiked in 2015.
Obviously you mean their "terrorist" attacks on us. Clearly, more people have been killed by either sides "terrorist" attacks. When we drop bombs on 3rd world villages, or fund armies to do it for us, those villages consider it a "terrorist" attack, regardless of whether "we" refer to it differently in the press - protection of interests, operation freedom, operation democracy spreading.
Please don't be so closed minded that only "they" are terrorists and "we" are the good guys, everytime without fail. The use terror tactics has been a part and parcel of our militaries since the time the military was created.
We are all as bad as each other
Billions of dollars of yearly agency budgets are justified with terrorist scare narratives. Saying that we shouldn't be scared of terrorists is a good beginning. I just wonder if anybody will listen.
Ludicrous. Hospitals are where the sick and dying go for treatment. Police are there to Protect and Serve. Terrorists try to kill you. Why do the former do more damage than the latter?
I agree that the headline is sensationalist, but if you don't think we've got a real police problem, your head is in the sand. Fortunately, the solution isn't that difficult (body cams), and is essentially around the corner.
Personally, I think disarming the police would have a lot more effect than body cams.
Cops already function as defacto surveillance machines. The bodycam doesn't capture any more than the cop does with his/her own eyes and the cop has the authority to act based on that alone, the bodycam is at least an impartial representation of the cop's (or citizen's) allegations.
However, the problem with technology is the scale. You can't systematically collect everything a cop sees in a database; with a camera, you can.
Only the state: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/04-278.ZS.html
http://www.hospitalsafetyscore.org/newsroom/display/hospital...