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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

And you are five times more likely to be killed at a railroad crossing then by a police officer.[1]

Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism , and while you will be hard pressed to find someone with a bigger animus towards the current USCJS then I, I think we should all be on the lookout for hyperbole, no matter what underlying meme it may be promoting.

[1] http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a3...

[EDIT] The original stats used for this analysis have been changed and edited as different versions of the OP have been posted.

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This extensively documented site (http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2013.html) suggests that 768 people were killed by police in 2013, compared to the 784 people murdered by trains. If my math is correct, 784/768 is not five. Additionally, that site's statistics are only for may-december, so the actual number is probably around 50% higher.

"in 2013": It might be an outlier. We had an abnormally large group of terrorism-related deaths in 2001, but on average it's less, and the same type of thing may be in effect here. That year may have been bad for deaths by police, and better for train safety, than average.

The authorities can already track the location and speed of all people with smartphones.

The location and speed of all trains is also known.

The solution to prevent crashes is thus obvious. Hit the car before the crash with a drone-fired missile.

"The location and speed of all trains is also known."

Just need an app that alerts you to oncoming trains.

Or pay attention to the gates and lights?

You got one inbuilt. It's logic goes something like

    if myself.is_near(train_tracks) and (myself.can_see(train) or myself.can_hear(train)):
        myself.risk_of_oncoming_train = True

risk_of_oncoming_train is a boolean? Sounds more like something that would be representing a chance, so I would be expecting something like a floating point number.

I was thinking that being hit by a train is a situation that I want a 0 probability of. So personally if the probability is non-zero I would immediately act to reduce it to zero. Hence a boolean does the job for me.

Apparently this doesn't work as well as you'd think. I just read a depressing article about the number of people that pose for photos on train tracks, when celebrating big life changes like marriage or graduation, and then get hit by trains.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/taking-ph...

An app would be a further distraction and would perhaps be detriment to what you want to achieve.

yeah, an app for the car.

It seemed obvious to me that your comment was a joke. Please continue this style of humor despite the other comments.

I was, of course, using the "155" number that the OP used in his analysis, so we are both correct.

over 10,000 died in alcohol-related crashes in 2013

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812102.pdf

> Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism

It isn't. Depending on whose numbers you use, the statistic is either actually true or sufficiently close that disputing the difference is pedantry.

The reason the headline is shocking is that people expect there to be relatively few police shootings yet, if the GWoT rhetoric is to be believed, rather a serious problem with terrorism. The fact that the problem of police shootings is larger than the problem of terrorism is a strong, concise, true statement that somewhere along the lines we have our priorities inverted.

In particular, it implies that "fighting terrorism" with more and stronger law enforcement is highly counterproductive.

>It isn't. Depending on whose numbers you use, the statistic is either actually true or sufficiently close that disputing the difference is pedantry.

Sensationalism in this case is saying that 0.00003% > 0.0000009% and expecting people to care. Both scenarios are so absurdly rare as to be disregarded, even if many people are more afraid of terrorists than the police and statistics say it should be the other way around.

The following is also true [0]:

"More likely to trip down stairs and die than be killed by a shark!"

Well.. I'm not about to avoid taking the stairs. Nor am I going to stop being afraid of shark attacks. I know they are both rare and often rarely fatal, at least here in the US [1], but that doesn't mean I'll be less scared of them.

[0] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_attack

Some words.

Again, it does matter: when to reduce the 0.000000009 the government is increasing the already many times larger 0.000003, it does matter.

> Both scenarios are so absurdly rare as to be disregarded

That's the point. The comparison is interesting because it puts the GWoT in the correct context. It's something to point to when some absurd overreaction to terrorism is proposed -- the police are literally more likely to kill you than the terrorists. Spending less money militarizing the police will make us more safe.

Even if the difference in safety is negligible, it takes the safety argument off the table. And the safety argument is the only thing justifying the civil liberties violations and the billions of tax dollars they're wasting.

> > Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism

> It isn't.

> [...] In particular, it implies that "fighting terrorism" with more and stronger law enforcement is highly counterproductive.

If police's only job was to fight terrorism, you would be right.

This isn't the same thing - in the cases of terrorist caused and police caused deaths, there were human beings who acted to intentionally kill someone else. In the case of railroad crossings, there isn't such intentionality.

Many railroad crossing deaths are presumably suicides. Some police deaths might be, but that is probably rare.

Agreed, I worded my statement as "intentionally kill someone else" in consideration of that - largely because the train engineers don't get a choice in the matter of railroad crossing incidents.

For purposes of deciding where money and resources are best spent, I don't think it makes any difference whether there was someone with intent to harm or not.

You can spend money to construct safer railway crossings, you can spend money to hire more cops or NSA operatives, you can spend money to educate cops, or you can make rule that all cars must have safety devices that stop them if they intend to cross railway when a train is coming, which will make cars more expensive, and so on and so on.

Never the less to prioritize these, statistics are important.

It isn't hyperbole that US cops are far more violent and unstable than the cops of other developed countries. Look at how many people Germany kills per year. Now look at how many people China kills per year. Now look at the US...

Does Germany have an equivalent to South Chicago or North St. Louis? Because we've got one of those in just about every major U.S. city. It seems relevant.

Maybe the question you should ask yourselves, is why you have those. Why are inequalities so high in your country ?

It's an interesting question. I think there are two things which are in play, at least:

Guns are readily available and we have "a right to guns" so police have to presume civilians of any kind are potentially armed.

Second, we are not the only country with wealth disparity, nor the one with the largest, but... We sell people on the idea that everyone can achieve the dream of living a middle class lifestyle. When people see this opportunity unrealized they feel someone must be actively working against the promise. In some cases there is some truth to that, in other cases it's wishful thinking, but in the end, and on the whole thankfully people don't just assign their station in life to divine assignment and do feel disenfranchised, unlike other places where people might just accept their "fate" as predetermined, to great extent.

So lack of opportunity by itself don't create strife. It's lack of opportunity coupled with a dissonant promise unrealized that creates strife in our cities.

I agree, but if the cops in the US are put in a naturally more violent environment, then it is unfair to solely call out their policing tactics as the cause for the violence, when the underlying problem is much deeper.

Obviously! I'm only pointing out that the police are operating in this environment, as it exists today, too.

Compare the US to the EU, not any of the countries within it.

* the war we wage on drugs

* the war that drugs and alcohol wage on the impoverished

* a large population that came out of the slave class and the long-lasting effects of poor integration

* poor education spending and allocation

Even if we put all our resources into fixing these issues, we're talking several years. You can't use that discussion as a talking point to deflect the violent realities that police in those environments face.

Something about this argument bothers me. It allows criminals to be victims of "the system". In certain areas the economic machinery has certainly sputtered out, but this question seems loaded to imply that some fat cat banker or politician pushed a button that instantly sucked the jobs out of an otherwise flourishing area. This argument is just a way to inject a well trodden political viewpoint into what might have otherwise been an interesting discussion.

Nope, the question is indeed inviting to a political discussion, but is not suggesting any answer. It is you that attribute that intention to the parent comment; I guess to avoid an otherwise interesting political discussion

>"Maybe the question you should ask yourselves, is why you have those. Why are inequalities so high in your country ?"

In my experience, anything that follows "Maybe the question you should ask yourself" is usually a statement not a question.

Inequality is the cool thing to be frustrated with right now, especially with an election year coming up. Yes there is lots of inequality, yes it sucks, yes it's unfair. As far as blaming every social problem on the 1% or .1% that is where I'm ready to jump off the bandwagon.

An interesting discussion would be something like "why did Detroit get left in the dust as globalization took off and what incentives could be used to help the next rust belt city from collapsing into an economic black hole?", or "what affect would offering more attractive small business loans to impoverished areas have?"

An uninteresting discussion would be "If it wasn't for inequality we wouldn't have so many problems, our system sucks".

Germany has a ton of migrant labor, mostly from Turkey.

Yes, it seems relevant as an effect of the government approach to its citizens, which includes (but is not limited to) the (compared to other developed nations) ultraviolent American policing.

I understand that that's a feeling that you have, but I don't think there's any evidence for your claim

I love watching European cop shows where the lead detective goes into the house where he suspects he will find the killer, and pulls out his flashlight.

Police forces don't operate in a vacuum, they are composed of the citizens of the places in which they serve. Police, like prisons, should be viewed as a reflection of society.

If Americans are going to be serious about eliminating police brutality and killing, they need to take a hard look at their own culture of guns, violence, and racism.

Germans don't cross an empty street against the light, hardly comparable.

Brits do and our police shootings count is pretty low as well.

I understand what you mean but it is not just the absolute level of the thread, it is also our reaction to the thread. We have sacrificed freedoms, hundreds of thousand of lives and trillions of dollars to mitigate the terrorism thread.

"Headlines like these are obviously created for sensationalism"

As is almost every terrosit related article in the media.

Railroad crossing deaths don't involve willful acts backed by billions in government funding.

Another interesting fact, you're also 8x more likely to be killed by a police officer than by furniture.

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/youre-8-times-more-l...

5 years ago this wouldn't have made it to the front page, let alone have so many comments defending it as intellectually honest.

Notice how no one ever laments how "HN is turning into Reddit"?

There used to be a statement specifically about saying this in the HN guidelines.

No one says this anymore because the full Reddit-ification of HN happened a while ago.

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