Hacker News Reader

Comment by moheeb | Hacker News Reader

Your Canadian experiences mirror all my US experiences.

When I was a teenager I was in the room when police bust into a place with guns drawn. This was in a white/affluent area where mostly kids were playing Warhammer 40k. Someone thought the hard-cases people were using to transparent their minis looked like gun-cases and called the cops. American police are ridiculous.

so someone suspected something wrong going on and called police. police acted on a tip. i can see why it might be ridiculous by whoever called police, but why police itself is ridiculed for that?

Because P(gun|tip*neighborhood) is very small.

The criticism is due to the fact that they burst into the room with guns drawn. It was an over-reaction to a completely unknown situation that was about 99.9% benign.

The police's mantra of "overwhelming display of control and power" can certainly be blamed for that.

In addition, the original poster didn't indicate whether or not a warrant was served before entry -- is the police required to present a warrant while acting on such tips?

we don't know what police been told. if neighbor told "they got machine guns and looks like are going to slaughter our neighborhood" - this is enough to break door with guns drawn in my opinion.

> The criticism is due to the fact that they burst into the room with guns drawn. It was an over-reaction to a completely unknown situation that was about 99.9% benign.

The cops received a report about armed individuals- that warrants an armed, yet retrained response, no?

Not necessarily, if the report has a high chance of being false.

So, choose a different approach because it's an expensive, white neighborhood?

Expensive, yes. White, irrelevant. The solution to racial inequality isn't to punish white (or Asian, or any other "lucky" race) more.

On any given day, the odds that I will use one of my fire extinguishers is very very small, ditto the gun I carry concealed almost every time I walk out the door (have never used either, in decades). The odds that cops with such a referral will encounter weapons is a whole lot higher.

I suspect you're right, sadly. The reason it is especially likely is because of the same laws that allow you have your gun.

The chances of someone being armed and dangerous in general goes way up.

I'm not as sure. One could argue that if you removed guns from the equation while still retaining a population prone to violence the police would be in an even worse posture, because up close edged weapons are very dangerous and they don't wear stab vests (which I suppose they could switch to, but I'm told they're even more uncomfortable than soft ballistic body armor, which is bad enough). Prone to violence in that as I recall our edged weapon murder rates exceeds most of "the developed world's".

Watch Tueller Drill video, then factor in the police having to close with someone with an edged weapon, an option I as a civilian can almost always avoid. I say worse, because the public generally doesn't realize the danger people armed with knives poise.

The experience of Brittian is suggestive, it:

Started getting serious about gun control a century ago (fear of the Left, becoming panic with the Bolshevik's win).

Effectively outlawed the use of guns for self-defense in the '50s (courts) and '60 (statutory law).

Then went almost all the way to banning guns that might be useful for self-defense a few decades ago.

Hasn't helped violence, hasn't made much of a dent in "gun violence" as I recall, but could be wrong, and now the obsession is with knife control.

Which suggests a people problem, not an object problem.

(Then again, when the police are nationally centralized and used as a weapon to punish areas that vote "incorrectly" by mostly withdrawing their protection, you've got bigger problems, but again people problems.)

Trust, but verify.

To be fair, I've seen some of those miniatures cases up close, and they do kind of look like gun cases. The response was over the top, but I can understand someone getting confused and calling the police about them.

Really? I'm a Canadian who had an awful experience with US police. I was attending a music festival that had a noise complaint, officers came in with guns drawn. I've never seen this approach in Canada.

I'm an American who's only had good experiences with US police.

I'm not gonna spill all my interactions with the police on the internet, of course, but I've been to college parties where the cops just told us to shut up. I've been speeding once or twice and had the officers bump the ticket down or give me a warning.

Perhaps we have good cops over here in Washington?

Heh I was just about to say that we shouldn't conflate one experience to "all cops in the US", but then realized all of my experiences have also been in Washington, so maybe we just have kinder police.

I'm an American who's had very mixed experiences with the police.

I've had police give me arbitrary orders. I've had police in a state of ever-escalating anger while I'm being completely cooperative and saying not much more than "Yes sir, no sir!" I've had police rant and rave at me outside my car window. I've had police bury incidents of threats and physical intimidation against me as a favor to their friends. I've had police tell me bald-faced lies about the District Attorney's office that the District Attorney told me were complete fabrications.

I've also had very good interactions with the police.

I'm an Ivy League graduate and have often been a highly paid professional -- which was my status for most of the above interactions with the police. I have no police record of any kind. I am rather small in stature and have a meek personal demeanor and a clean cut appearance. I am, however, not "white." My interactions with the police have been astonishingly varied.

Being a teenager is a similar offense. In my teen days we drew the attention of 8 police officers (who circled the building) by sitting nearby a police officers wife who apparently didn't like our language. Mostly just frisked for drugs and whatnot; it became a running joke.

> Perhaps we have good cops over here in Washington?

My first year in college (in WA), campus police (actual po-lice with a campus jurisdiction) conducted a coordinated raid on pot dealers in the dorms which they treated like a raid on a meth lab : guns drawn, doors kicked in, loud noises, innocent bystanders thrown to the ground, etc.

Obviously, this isn't analogous to a party - and cops do in fact have a SOP they follow when it comes to drug raids - but I still feel like it was handled in an unnecessarily heavy handed and tone-deaf way that's somewhat symptomatic of a larger problem.

It depends alot on you. People that assert their rights, particularly their right to remain silent, often find themselves confronted with a power-tripping neanderthal armed with a loaded weapon and arrest powers. If you simply cooperate with them - answer questions etc. - you will likely have more pleasant interactions with them, however you dramatically increase your chances of having legal issues because of whatever you say or do not say to them.

This video [1], of course, should always be mentioned when discussing police interaction. In short, don't ever talk to the police. US Police are trained to make exercising the myriad rights we have both uncomfortable and counterintuitive. But you have to remember that by the time you are in front of a police officer, it's too late to talk your way out of whatever situation you are in. You can only make it worse by talking to them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

Because Police are trained state-by-state, county-by-county... and even city-by-city. Some cops are awful, other cops are fine.

That is crazy to me. I'm an American and in the probably twenty or so times I've interacted with police at various times in my thirty plus years, I've never once had a gun drawn on me nor had the threat or implied threat of having a gun drawn on me. I can't think of a single person I know well who's ever had a cop pull a gun on them either.

Are you white? There's your answer. Not even joking.

If the police barge in guns drawn does that mean they peek in the window first before they go in to check what the people look like?

You don't have to look into a window to know whether you are in a black or white neighborhood.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

Every single time this topic comes up here there are always one off incidents of how violent the police are, or are not. These one off's really aren't useful either way.

Also another reason why police arrive here with guns drawn when they've been called to some kind of incident/argument/disturbance is there is a much higher chance that someone here has a gun and could do them harm. I'm not sure why everyone glosses over that fact when the USA has 300 million guns vs. some place like London.

>there is a much higher chance that someone here has a gun

valid point.

I'm an American who had my windows smashed in by police supervisors because I asked them to identify themselves. In Winnipeg.

Don't think we're too far off from our friends down south.

I could imagine the SQ doing that.

I guess you have been a lucky duck!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com