Facebook ‘glitch’ that deleted the Castile shooting video: It was the police | Hacker News Reader

Facebook ‘glitch’ that deleted the Castile shooting video: It was the police

theregister.co.uk

218 pointsjgome267 comments

It seems it's communicated with a "black life matters" background. Isn't there a general problem of the police being overly brutal and using its authority in a malevolent way in USA, whether augmented by racism or not?

I live in France, where we've just had terrorist attacks, and I'm afraid we'll meet the same pattern, 15 years later than USA:

- People want the police to do its job (securing the streets, which goes from checking car insurances to being detectives on terrorism),

- So they vote for more police,

- The police doesn't do much more than assaulting easy targets, picking up girls who come to lodge a charge (true story), and walk on cyclist lanes (not much traffic enforcement because it's unpopular and not much detective work because it's risky),

- So people vote even more right-wing,

- Police has more powers, but still doesn't do its job much, and assaults even more weak people,

- Then we get people who kill police (like in Dallas) or burn police cars (like in Paris) because they're abusing their power.

Already, President Hollande made the same talk and took the same path on 13th Nov 2015 as Bush on 11th Sept 2001, so I'm a little afraid there's a trend were.

Now what societal changes could happen that would disrupt a race to the bottom of police brutality, like in USA?

Except in Europe there's no second amendmend, so a possible raise in police brutality is probably more tied to racist conceptions.

I think there are two other historical trends at play in the US (and elsewhere).

- A lot of shitty policing, and covering up of crimes by police has always existed, and we're just much more aware of it because everyone now has a video camera in their pockets. It's possible that police brutality had always been this bad, or worse.

- The general fitness and preparedness level of police has likely declined along with the rest of society. A police officer should be confident that they can handle and control a situation physically, but they are more inclined to rely on tasers or guns if they feel like they could get overwhelmed by a situation. In Sam Harris's interview with Jocko Willink he mentions a video[1] of 3 large cops taking over 5 minutes to subdue a half-naked man in socks. It's hard to watch it and believe that the cops had any adequate training or confidence in how to handle a situation without relying on weapons.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O-QEsv0ZEg&app=desktop

> A police officer should be confident that they can handle and control a situation physically, but they are more inclined to rely on tasers or guns if they feel like they could get overwhelmed by a situation.

This would have pretty dramatic effects on the number of female police officers.

I used to train Judo at a Dojo also used by the local police. Believe me, the female officers could throw me around just fine.

Justifiable or not, 604 homicides by police so far this year is far is rediculous. If my understanding is correct, the vast majority of violent policing is associated to a relatively small percentage of officers. Opening up police data is urgent, is there an effort making any headway? http://killedbypolice.net/

> the vast majority of violent policing is associated to a relatively small percentage of officers

Isn't the vast majority of crime associated with small areas? People rag on Chicago for having lots of murders, but if you look at http://www.heyjackass.com, you end up finding that most of the shootings occur in only a few neighborhoods.

Similarly, most police officers are not patrolling in a war zone.

Where I would love to see the data is a comparison of officers with their peers. If you're an officer with Chicago's Finest, you probably have a group of peers who patrol the same neighborhoods as you. If you're grabbing your gun five times as often as the other guys on your squad, it's difficult to make the argument that random shit is only happening to you.

I'm waiting for when it will be a requirement to wear a bullet proof vest if you're a regular citizens that happens to be black and you are driving anywhere.

Us policies and laws are getting more and more ridiculous every year and enforcement non existent if you're the police so would anybody be surprised if the victim gets blamed for getting shot?

There are laws against buying and owning body armor in some areas of the US.

Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a violent crime from owning or possessing any type of body armor.

Most states explicitly prohibit felons from owning or possessing as well, and many states prohibit it outright for anyone, but I can't seem to find solid stats on which states outlaw it under which circumstances.

I live in France and I'm not worried, France and the US are apple and orange comparison : even when the French Police kills a known felon that was shooting at them it's a huge scandal because he may or may not have faced the cop that killed him (recent story).

Look at the video were the police car was torched and the cop beaten with an iron bar. Do you think the perps would still be alive in the US ? The French cop didn't even think about using his gun and was commended for it.

A recent article, suggested that part of this was the standard for when you can legally use force is very different:

"most European countries conform to the European Convention on Human Rights, which impels its 47 signatories to permit only deadly force that is “absolutely necessary” to achieve a lawful purpose. Killings excused under America’s “reasonable belief” standards often violate Europe’s “absolute necessity” standards."

http://theconversation.com/why-do-american-cops-kill-so-many...

They also suggest very poor training of cops is a big part of it, as well as racism and the prevalance of guns.

  The problem is not just the police in the US to me it is the easy access to heavy weaponry by normal people. If it was hard for normal citizens to have guns police would not be shoot first ask question later mode all the time.

The social and racial divide becomes a problem in itself, which makes it much easier for the police to rationalise the use of excessive force.

The UK had this problem with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and more generally the policing of Northern Ireland with troops. The only way out of it was the restructuring, renaming, and re-populating with affirmative action of the force as the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Another key part of the solution is a willingness to actually prosecute unlawful shootings. The key case here is Lee Clegg, a paratrooper on a roadside checkpoint who shot at a car driven by teenage joyriders that failed to stop. It was ruled that shooting after the car had passed was no longer justified.

The US has got to this point because it is not willing to effectively prosecute the use of lethal force against black men where it is not absolutely required. The US also has a very flexible and expansive idea of "required".

(PSNI are routinely armed, unlike most of the rest of the UK, except anti-terrorist patrols at airports and high security locations.)

Fantastic point, I'd never thought to put this into the context of NI before.

To emphasise what you've said, the root and brach reform that has happened in the RUC/policing in NI over the last decade (or more) can't be underestimated. Among the biggest factors, as I perceive them are both top down and bottom up:

* Engaging the civilian leadership of the effected Catholic/Republican communities in leadership and accountability positions (e.g. Sin Fein/Stormont)

* Making on the ground community relationships with the effected communities a huge priority, through: targeted engagement; community relations and frankly, demonstrating the RUC's value through active/effective community policing and crime reduction.

* The confrontation and acknowledgement of the previous injustices. Truth and reconciliation is key.

It's been a LONG and painful journey interlinked that isn't finished, but it really could serve as a great lesson to improving minority/police relationships in the US.

It absolutely could serve as a model for community reconciliation, and ending terrorism. Unfortunately it requires the people in power to back down and treat those they regard as inferior with justice and respect, which makes it a hard sell.

Which reminds me, the odious Michael Gove wrote in 2000 against the NI peace process: "it enshrines a vision of human rights which privileges contending minorities at the expense of the democratic majority". But that's exactly why human rights are important: protecting the minority from 'democratic' but unjust treatment from the majority.

I keep trying to bring NI analogies into US gun discussions because when people talk about armed resistance to the government being a constitutional right, that's what it looks like in practice. It's awful.

Mind you, last time I ran the numbers, a random resident of 70s Belfast was less likely than a random resident of 80s Detroit to be murdered. America is a violent country.

> "PSNI are routinely armed"

I think another important point is despite being armed the PSNI rarely use their weapons. I honestly can't remember the last time someone was killed by a PSNI officer.

Certainly. And when they do they are investigated. The system works: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-33085729

Police officer uses gun in inappropriate situation, wounds man, is subject to impartial investigation and disciplinary action.

That's what America needs to do to fix its police race relations problems.

Single data point: I was slightly shocked to see in Gloucester, a Policeman in Tesco supermarket with a pistol in a holster on his belt. Wonder if this was a one off - I hope so.

Gloucestershire (UK) has a number of sensitive sites.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/1...

Correct. This sighting was in Churchdown not far from Imjin Barracks, a couple of miles from GCHQ and Staverton airport. He was climbing into a BMW X5 parked prominently and poised for a quick exit. I believe it was an armed response vehicle.

In general, only Armed Response Units (ARUs) in the UK are actually armed. There are a small number of ARU's in each police constabulary, but it depends on the size of the area covered and the perceived threat from assumed criminals.

Most ARU's are rarely called on to use their weapons, and every time they use their weapon it is seized as part of the investigation. Every bullet has to be accounted for.

Each officer receives an extremely intensive training, and only the best, with a secure psychological profile make it through. They have to follow a rigid set out protocols before they can engage a threat.

I find the British police protocols and training to be an excellent example of how to approach armed policing. That being said it sometimes goes wrong. In those cases the actions of the officers need to be reviewed, and any negligence or deliberate acts of harm need to be punished within the law.

These officers don't have an easy job. On the most cases they've had to make a split second decision based on their training and their immediate situation.

I'll exclude Charles de Menezes from that, since I still believe that he was shot by armed SAS soldiers operating in public on British streets, authorised by the home office, which they'll never admit to, as it would cause a public outcry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menez...

Strictly speaking, the only requirement a police officer need meet to be armed is to be authorised by a substantive Superintendent or higher. Hence the term 'Authorised Firearms Officer'.

All ARVs are AFOs, but not all AFOs are ARV. The difference is about 4 weeks (9 weeks vs 5 weeks), and the majority of that is the additional tactics around search and 'call outs' which an AFO (usually being entirely reactive) would not deal with.

The training is intensive, but there's no specific psychological screening beyond the instructors (and colleagues) realising that an individual officer ought not be trusted with a pen, let alone a firearm. There's more screening to become a sexual offences/CSE investigator than there is to become an AFO.

There are more AFOs than you'd imagine, and the majority of them will be only carrying a sidearm.

>They have to follow a rigid set out protocols before they can engage a threat.

No, the protocols are far from rigid. The training means that an AFO is fluent in the 'National Decision Model', which means that they can make dynamic assessments of risk without being hamstrung by a rigid "if this, then that" set of behaviours.

>I'll exclude Charles de Menezes from that, since I still believe that he was shot by armed SAS soldiers operating in public on British streets, authorised by the home office

Then you've been reading too many conspiracy stories. The whole thing was a fuck up from start to finish, but there's nothing in it that needs the SAS to be involved. If they had been, they would have had their own tactical command and De Menzes would probably still be alive.

The comment about the SAS came from an active AFO, who worked in London at the time. I don't want to give any more information than that. I'm probably risking too much by just saying that.

The comment was quite specifically, "we aren't trained to do that (execute suspect by putting the gun to his head and pulling the trigger), but they are at Hereford".

It's hearsay, but far from your usual conspiracy theory.

>"we aren't trained to do that

Most AFO's weren't. Some were, as part of Op Kratos. That was the problem - there was a massive disconnect in training between two sides of the business (the CT side and the ARV side) which meant that when commands such as "stop him", were given, the expectations of both parties were very different.

Don't forget that a common-or-garden AFO on an armed OCU would have had his five weeks training, with bi-monthly top-ups, whilst the AFOs offering armed support to surveillance teams will have been massively upskilled.

Had an SAS team been deployed on a surveillance job (and I literally cannot imagine the circumstances that would require that), then tactical command would have been taken by soldiers who would (generally) have been clear and explicit about the task ahead. As it's been held that De Menzes was mistakenly identified and that there was only implication that he might have been a bomber rather than any explicit statement that he was, it is unlikely that there would have been the massive cock up in communications that resulted in him being shot.

It's also difficult to prosecute police officers for a variety of reasons. Even when prosecuted, the results are often more lenient. The story below is about Washington state, but all of the US states have problems prosecuting law enforcement.

http://www.policemisconduct.net/the-problem-with-prosecuting...

> Now what societal changes could happen that would disrupt a race to the bottom of police brutality, like in USA?

Robot cops with open-source A.I., verifiable firmware, and a public log of all their decisions.

As long as humans are given any sort of power over other humans, shit will happen. No matter where it is, what era it is.

Chappie: No. I can't shoot people. Chappie no crimes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappie_(film)

I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause. Whether real or perceived, the police seem to be much more fearful of black males than other racial groups. If perceived, then I might expect black officers to have a lower incident rate as they may be less likely to feel threatened in a situation. If there is a real statistical threat (also very difficult to tease out and to avoid confounding variables) then this could be more difficult to address and ultimately this would come back to a cycle of institutionalized poverty and incarceration that breaks up families and sends people who have been hardened by jail back into the black community thereby introducing a culture of violence. Either way you cut it a history of racism is to blame.

Officers clearly are fearing for their lives and view potential encounters with black males through a lense of negative intent, which is causing them to react more aggressively. Greater accountability and training will be critical but only if the culture of the police force changes. This could be very difficult as a lot of police officers may take these jobs exactly because they're attracted to the danger and violence (In Canada many of the bouncers I knew were on steroids only had high school educations and many wanted to be cops...).

>Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

[ Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents ... ]

That's a lot to go through this early in the morning, so forgive me if this has been covered already, but did they analyze the risk of police officers being attacked/killed by the particular race that there's a (police shooting) bias against compared to other races in those counties?

I'm curious if there's a correlation between "assault on police officers is X times more likely to occur by someone from race Y" and "police officers are Z times more likely to shoot someone of race Y".

I'm not trying to imply anything (even though I know it sounds that way). I'm just curious.

Good question!

In 2015 26 police officers were killed in the line of duty. Of those, half were black (which is disproportionate, only 12% of police officers are black). I couldn’t find out what percentage of the 26 police officers were killed by black people without reading up on every case.

Wikipedia has a complete list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_office...

>In 2015 26 police officers were killed in the line of duty.

126 actually, according to the list on Wikipedia. Typo?

I'll make a table with the race of the officer and the assailant for all assault incidents (so no accidents, heart attacks, etc). Check back in a bit.

I just saw that I pulled the 26 from an article that was written in September 2015, so it’s out of date.

List from https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015

    Line of Duty Deaths: 130

    9/11 related illness: 8
    Accidental: 2
    Aircraft accident: 1
    Assault: 3
    Automobile accident: 27
    Bomb: 6
    Drowned: 1
    Duty related illness: 2
    Fall: 1
    Gunfire: 39
    Gunfire (Accidental): 2
    Heart attack: 17
    Motorcycle accident: 3
    Struck by vehicle: 4
    Vehicle pursuit: 5
    Vehicular assault: 8
    Weather/Natural disaster: 1

So police officers killed would be 48? (Gunfire: 39 + Assault: 3 + Bomb: 6)

You missed "struck by vehicle", and I think you've assumed all those gun deaths had non-officer shooters.

I think they categorise friendly fire under Gunfire (Accidental)?

Not all officer-on-officer shootings are accidental (the non-accidental ones are often, as is sometimes the case for officer-on-civilian shootings, based on mistaken perceptions of the officer doing the shooting, but still deliberate shootings.)

See, e.g., https://www.hks.harvard.edu/criminaljustice-backup/publicati...

Looks like Struck By Vehicle is accidental, as there's a separate line item for Vehicular Assault.

I'm excluding the deaths by bomb. Those are all from a suicide attack in Afghanistan.

While that threat maybe real, a man in his car with his partner and 4 year old child, is not likely to be a threat on the same scale.

What is a threat is gun ownership. British police do not expect to be threatened with a firearm, or shot on a routine traffic stop. In the US, the police have to expect that as normality.

Now I know there are a lot of US citizens who believe in the right to bear arms, and many more militant NRA members believe that is more about defending themselves from the state, but if you take a step back, they've already lost that fight long ago. The state already tramples over their rights, and there are no armed militias matching on Washington to overthrow the corrupt and over controlling state. I truly don't understand that argument.

Exactly. In most parts of the world, law enforcement has a power leverage because officers are armed, and the public is not.

(Yes, even criminals are usually unarmed unless they are intending to commit a crime. This is because wearing a weapon outs them as criminals, which they naturally try to avoid.)

If you want to deescalate the war between law enforcement and the public, you must not only change the way the law enforcement interprets its duty, you must also disarm the public.

In the UK the vast majority (don't know the hard figure, but guessing something like 95%) of police are unarmed with the exception of maybe pepper spray or the occasional blunt stick (I think even that is less common now). Only a small minority of police in the UK are even trained in firearms, and they are meant to be the elite (physically, psychologically, and morally) with years of experience and countless hours of recurring training. UK police, in principle, try to operate via a community policing and policing by consent principle that assumes cooperation and negotiation as the norm of police work with coercive force as only a very last resort. UK police don't use the threat of force as leverage as explicitly as you are suggesting, and they very very rarely have guns.

Our police force isn't perfect, and is far from having a spotless record with minority groups, but they do represent an alternative model of policing that doesn't have to be about the threat or show of force. Police are meant to be about enabling civilian self-policing; not military occupation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

UK police almost always carry a collapsible metal baton and pepper spray.

YES indeed also UK police does this for years no problems no civil executions.. I hope this will someday become the standard in my country as well.

Disarming the public works so well in Mexico, Belgium, France and other places where shootings happened recently... just like making drugs illegal stopped that ... or alcohol * sarcasm* ... what actually does work is fixing the social problems which cause people to want to shoot others

mental health being #1

lil chart for you

http://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from-...

Most of the people shot and killed in the US were not killed by someone with a mental illness.

On the other hand, about half the people shot and killed by police in the US had mental illness, which suggests US police need better training.

Mass shootings make up about 1% of the annual firearm homicide rate in the US per year. Arguing by using mass shootings as your base is almost exactly the wrong way to go about it.

Even in the context of this thread - police having to fear a citizen being armed - it's not appropriate. A cop fearing a citizen with a gun is fearing for their own safety, not that the citizen will go on a mass shooting spree.

It's also worth noting that France's homicide rate is about 30% that of the US's, and the US homicide rate is 75% due to firearms. US firearm homicide, per capita, is significantly larger than France's homicide rate from all causes.

Did you ever watch Oldboy? Did you notice that the criminals in it- are armed with hammers, knifes and wooden clubs? That is because of a very tight weapons control in south Korea. If a society has weapons not wildly available- criminals don't have them wildly available. And you can sit in your car, waiting for the officer to ask for your papers, only to live in fear that you might be shot for scratching your head, because some poor guy in the trenches prefers coming home at night with lots of paperwork and his face on national TV to not coming home ever again.

Just because people currently don't hate the government enough to match on Washington with guns, it doesn't mean that if things get worse they won't ever do it, so the argument for keeping that as an option is still valid.

(N.B. I'm not American, and am entirely against gun ownership being a right, so I don't think the argument is a worthy one regardless)

No, people hate the government (or at least the police) enough to start sniping police officers at random.

I don't think the people advocating guns as a check against the government have thought for a moment what it actually looks like in practice. It looks like Dallas at the moment, only more so.

I think a lot of them think that it will be "militias in the woods against the national guard, winning through guts and woodsmanship" or something, conjuring up images of units v units battles from two centuries ago, rather than the pattern seen all over the world for the past couple of decades - urban guerilla strikes.

The people won't fight the army, because it's not the army that's directing their lives. The police are the most visible authority of the government to the domestic population, so if the 2nd amendment is to be used in it's original intent, it will look like Dallas as you say, and not some paintball woodlands adventure on steroids. Two centuries ago, the government sent units in ships over the sea from a foreign land. In the modern era, the government is composed of the same citizens that dream of fighting it.

Nothing will change, though. Unless a rash of copycat crimes happens, there'll just be the same speeches by the same talking heads, and it won't make a lick of difference.

> I don't think the people advocating guns as a check against the government have thought for a moment what it actually looks like in practice. It looks like Dallas at the moment, only more so.

I am pretty sure they have. I don't think you understand how serious situation will be in America if there is a serious threat to gun rights. I believe this is in part because both the groups (pro-gun and anti-gun) are segregated. So anti-gunners don't comprehend how serious things could turn out.

However they(mostly whites) expect this kind of scenario to happen if there is an Australia style gun grab. Also don't forget that there are black militia groups in America too (esp in Texas) for instance Huey P Newton Gun Club[1]. At least one black militia group has taken responsibility for these attacks[2], and made a call for more people to get guns and join them.

1. https://hueypnewtongunclub.wordpress.com/

2. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/dallas-police-shooti...

I do think there is a segment of gun owners who see themselves as part of some loosely knit "militia". Reading posts on Facebook or comments on stories on my local newspaper's website, there definitely seems to be a belief that if the federal government (or state) goes too far, they will all ban together to "defend their rights". IMHO, even things like "pry my gun from my cold dead hands" plays into this idea.

I agree with you that they have lost that battle. I don't think this is something that, on average, they realize or acknowledge or maybe even understand.

> I agree with you that they have lost that battle.

Considering the group which has taken the responsibility for this attack[1], is a militia organization, I'd say that 2nd amendment is already being exercised by a minority which feels that they are being targeted systematically by the same group of people who are sworn to protect them.

The only difference is that they don't tout second amendment, but founding fathers envisioned precisely these scenarios when they advocated for 2A.

> Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes.< - James Madison, Federalist Papers 46[2]

1. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/dallas-police-shooti...

2. http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa46.htm

It's a triumph of rhetoric over facts, something the UK has shown itself to also be adept at lately.

At this point I don't see how it can ever be solved. Even if the US banned gun sales tomorrow there would still be so many firearms out there. Best case, they can try to limit the sales of assault weapons (though there is no definition of that) and closing the insane loopholes that mean no-one needs a background check if they buy a gun at at a gun show, etc.

> closing the insane loopholes that mean no-one needs a background check if they buy a gun at at a gun show, etc.

It's not that buying a gun at a gun show magically means you don't need a background check. It's that buying a gun from a private individual rather than a dealer doesn't require a background check. Any dealer selling firearms at a gun show has to perform background checks.

I do think at the least the law can be changed so the police require background checks for all transactions at gun shows. But the bigger problem is person to person gun sales and transfers outside of the easy view of the law. How do you require a background check if someone buys a gun from a guy they know or a relative gifts a gun?

A first step would be to make it easy for private sellers to verify that a background check has been done. It should be as easy as getting a credit report.

Yeah I think if you gave private sellers a way to do that, many would do it voluntarily. I just don't know how you require it. Maybe you could hold someone legally responsible if they commit a crime with a firearm you sold them if you didn't perform the check. But to do that you'd need a national registry of firearms which many vehemently oppose.

> Best case, they can try to limit the sales of assault weapons (though there is no definition of that) and closing the insane loopholes that mean no-one needs a background check if they buy a gun at at a gun show, etc.

The problem with both of these proposals is that they're ridiculous.

Around 95% of shootings in the US are with handguns. Prohibiting some rifles based on cosmetic characteristics is not useful. (But still very irritating since they're quite popular with non-murderers.)

The "gun show loophole" has nothing to do with gun shows. Anyone in the business of selling firearms is required to do a background check. What it's referring to is that a private person can e.g. sell a rifle to a hunting buddy without a background check. Which keeps coming up because the statistics make it easy to mislead people.

A significant percentage of firearm transfers end up not requiring a background check because they're private, but it's because there are so many transfers between friends and family, not because there are so many criminals buying firearms at gun shows.

The problem is fundamentally this. Most of the people who commit the mass shootings that make the news would actually pass the background check. The people who don't pass are the drug dealers but the drug dealers get their guns the same way they get their drugs.

Canada has a lot of guns but very few homicides. Mexico has strict gun restrictions and twice the firearm-related homicides per capita as the US. The solution isn't gun laws.

> British police do not expect to be threatened with a firearm, or shot on a routine traffic stop. In the US, the police have to expect that as normality.

Why? It doesn't happen.

Eh, saying this right after Dallas might be the worst possible time.

> Now I know there are a lot of US citizens who believe in the right to bear arms, and many more militant NRA members believe that is more about defending themselves from the state, but if you take a step back, they've already lost that fight long ago. The state already tramples over their rights, and there are no armed militias matching on Washington to overthrow the corrupt and over controlling state. I truly don't understand that argument.

Taking up arms against the government is a measure of last resort. The human cost would be extraordinarily high if people decided to solve political and legal problems with violence on a national scale.

Right now there are a number of problems with citizen rights getting trampled in the US on but we're not at a point where working through our political systems is totally worthless, nor are we at a point where the whole system should be burnt down and started over.

The existence of the 2nd amendment means that those with power have to respect the fact that they are vastly outnumbered and outgunned (100 million gun owners vs. maybe 2-3 million law enforcement and military combined). Would be tyrants would have a lot more to think about with an armed populace, than an unarmed populace.

Now of course Americans pay a high cost for the 2nd amendment and that shouldn't be discounted. But it is a last ditch deterrent against an abusive government.

> Now of course Americans pay a high cost for the 2nd amendment and that shouldn't be discounted. But it is a last ditch deterrent against an abusive government.

I still think this is a fallacy. Most people are willing sheep in a system where they can be controlled and manipulated. It will never come to the last ditch deterrent.

A great example was the Nazi propaganda machine. During the Nuremberg Trials, Gustave Gilbert the American psychologist, talked to many high ranking Nazi's including Hermann Göring. In his Nuremberg Diaries, he outlines a conversation with Göring, that shows just how any population can be propelled to accept almost anything as long as they perceive that their own freedom and well-being is under threat.

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

This last comment is so apt to the world we live in today. The war against terrorism. The militarisation of our police forces.

If you take this further, the 2nd Amendment, regardless of the actual threat of an abusive government, can easily be neutralised by effective propaganda.

Joseph Goebbels said much the same:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

He also said this about the press:

"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."

The Nazis enabled an entire nation, with but a handful of dissenters, to go to war with the rest of Europe. At the time the German public believed that they were doing the right thing to protect their own sovereignty, however warped those reasons might seem today.

The thought that the American public could ever be persuaded to rise up against their own government, with the vast array of tools that they (the government) currently wield, is a false hope (in my opinion).

> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone...

I've met quite a few people that that was the explicit reason they joined the military or police. It's not enough to assume default goodness in people. Police officers, being in a position of public trust and wielding an extreme level of lawfully sanctioned violent power, must be held to a higher standard.

> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause.

I don't.

Most of the cops I know were bullies in high school. They enjoy violence and commanding physical authority over other people. The ability to carry and potentially use a gun is a big draw of the profession for them.

Police violence won't be fixed until we stop giving thugs a badge and gun.

All the police officers I know are nice, level-headed guys, but that speaks more about my friends than it does police officers. That said, I talked to a psychiatrist about a relative in the service. She has a term "shiny-shoe syndrome" where people with personality disorders gravitate toward jobs that give them power over others. What were missing is a good psych eval as a requirement for a badge.

I'm not familiar with the US system, so I have to ask: are you saying that nowhere during his training a cop is evaluated by a psychiatrist before receiving his badge?

I don't know if it's universal, but it's at least extremely common for there to be a psych eval prior to receiving a badge. Not sure why the parent thinks otherwise.

The operative word there is _good_. Remember that we're talking about multiple systems that are run differently all across the country. Some systems are better than others. It's not a one-size fits all comparison.

I've served on multiple commissions whose sole purpose was to interview police applicants (and serve on one currently). In every instance there was an in depth background check including interviews (former significant others, neighbors, teachers, etc), financial background check and credit reports, and a psychological evaluation. At many instances the candidate could be removed from the process.

The flip side is that it's Civil Service, meaning everything is scored and at the end of the day the hireable pool of applicants is typically 2-5 vetted and certified applicants for a given position, so the official hiring body (typically the township supervisors or council) has very little decision-making power. In my state they're legally required to hire one of the top 3. If a veteran is #1, the hiring body must hire them unless they can find a disqualifying feature in the interview. These requirements vary a lot by state, this is just my anecdotal experience.

Even in the smallest local police forces - the smallest I worked with was 8 officers, mostly part-time, in a borough of ~1,000 households - it would be unheard of not to get some sort of psychiatric or psychological opinion on the candidate.

Different departments have different standards. The LAPD has hired some pretty famously dangerous assholes in it's day, so they have become pretty picky.

A dude from my high school, whose father was a SWAT lieutenant, tried to join but was denied. They had interviewed a bunch of his friends, and during the interview he was asked "why do you yell at your girlfriend so much?"

A smaller department, lets say Bakersfield PD, might not be so picky.

But in the meantime, I'm perfectly good with requiring police officers to have their guns locked in their cars until they can justify taking them out.

Will it lead to a small increase in the number of shot police officers? Probably. I would rather have that than the current situation.

Something tells me you would be answering differently if you had someone close to you that was a police officer.

I'm not the parent commenter, but I agree with them. The truth is that the number of officers killed in the line of duty this year is below 60 (the source hadn't updated since last night) and many of those are accidents, not malicious.

My reasonably-well-liked cousin, and his wife. A few friends.

So, no, you're wrong.

I would imagine that guns are for those immediately life threatening emergency situations where there really is no other option. If an officer could make it back to his car, grab his gun, bring it back again and face the suspect, my guess is that would not qualify as the sort of immediately life threatening circumstance that warranted the use of deadly force

OTOH, police officers in the US need some personality traits; assertiveness, courage, and the ability to defend themselves with force in case of a gun being drawn on them - which happens regularly.

> in case of a gun being drawn on them - which happens regularly.

I don't believe this is true.

It does not happen anywhere close to regularly.

There is way too much variation in the size, wealth, environment, political priorities, etc. of police departments to believe it is useful to make generalizations about police culture without identifying the department you're talking about. Even precincts vary wildly.

It changes widely by district I find. For example in Toronto, out police are relatively professional, level-headed and nice. But just step over east a few km to Simcoe County and suddenly the cops there start acting like power mad tyrants

I imagine it depends alot on how the upper management enforces discipline and the attitudes they pass down to subordinate officers

Exactly how many police officers do you know?

There is a giant difference between bullying and shooting. Furthermore, the consistently true cop stereotype is they hate paperwork.

test hiasdfasdfa

In my opinion you're viewing this from the opposite angle (bottom-up versus top-down).

To me, much of the root cause (it's not just black males per se; think of all the dogs shot mostly unnecessarily by police for instance -- https://puppycidedb.com/) is the over-aggressive militarization of the American police force. Which occurred for many reasons, but primarily was due to various moral panics such as the "war on drugs", and the need of our oversized military industry to dispose of excess military equipment. (See Balko's book on this: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...)

Ultimately, the problem I can see with such policies is that the "war" paradigms too many police departments are obsessed with divide people between The Good Guys and The Enemy. The police force should be about community first (protect and serve etc.). But when the motif is more Good Guys vs. The Enemy, this probably does allow things like racial bias to play an oversized role. And when the motif is more War War War, it probably encourages hair-trigger responses.

In my opinion, American police violence (and we do IMHO have the most over-aggressive culture of any rich world nation I've seen) won't be fixed until this attitude changes. This is less a police officer issue (officers can be trained to any culture) and more of the type of culture encouraged at a legislative level.

I think they're two sides of the same coin.

An overly aggressive and militarized culture will tend to attract those with a penchant for violence and an excess of testosterone, while those with thug-like attitudes will tend to create an aggressive culture and to advocate for more military equipment/training.

> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause.

I fail to see any evidence to justify (or at least motivate) that assumption.

That's a big assumption. There are a couple things at play here.

One is the demonization of blacks through the way the war on drugs has been prosecuted. Blacks are far more likely to be arrested or incarcerated for drug crimes, despite an equivalent or in some cases lower incidence of drug use than whites. Blacks are more likely to be disciplined in school, regardless of behavior. This leads to an adversarial relationship and it creates what seems to be a trend of blacks always having run ins with the law (significantly because of unequal application of the law and policing towards them).

Another is the aggressiveness, militarization, and tendency to escalate in the police, much of it brought about by the war on drugs. No knock raids and a propensity to look at every encounter between law enforcement and a civilian, especially a black civilian, as a hostile situation always on the tipping point of violence, and the training to match, has created an epidemic of police encounters that are far more violent than they ever should have been. Police go through training to dominate, to shoot at a twitch if they feel the situation warrants it, and we see the bloody results.

But there's something even darker. And that's the increasing willingness of police forces to commit summary executions on the street of people they feel are, or should be, outside of the protections of the law. Many police have very little qualms about deploying lethal force against "the bad guys", and the public too has been quick to defend the use of lethal force against "bad guys". Rapists, murderers, violent thieves, "scum". And the line on what sort of behavior is allowed has shifted significantly. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 there have been a total of around 1400 legally sanctioned executions in the entire US, for an average of about 35 a year. Police fatally shot nearly a thousand people in 2015 alone. An execution rate nearly 30 times the legally sanctioned rate, and increasing since a low in around the year 2000. This while the rates of both violent crime and of shootings of police officers have been falling. Today the rate of fatal shootings by police is as high as it was during the height of the crack epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when violent crime and street murder (by civilians) were at record highs, several times higher than they are today.

Unquestionably the police have shifted toward a stance of committing summary executions during arrests. Sometimes this happens by accident, where the aggressiveness of the police put them closer to suspects and more likely to be in danger, and thus more likely to provoke a situation requiring deadly use of force. The problem here is that for too long we as a society have been willing to look away (as we were willing to look away when our nation began to adopt torture) from these horrors because we thought that only "bad guys" were being affected. But as we've seen, these patterns of behavior easily bleed over and pretty quickly you start seeing routine traffic stops pushed up against the knife edge of life or death circumstance for no good reason, and good, honest citizens are dying as a result.

This last one is very hard to solve, because, as we've seen, it requires a very stunning reversal of perspective for those in law enforcement. It's difficult to come to terms with the concept that you might be a bad guy yourself, that your actions and your training may be horrifically dangerous to civilized life. So people will naturally shy away from questioning their own training, motives, and actions.

For those who didn't read the article: This is not a story about NSA-style backdoors to Facebook. They took her phone, which was already logged in, and manually deleted it.

Is that even legal ?

No.

Background info here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/07/facebook_drops_feed_...

They killed him and then deleted the evidence before calling an ambulance?!

And detained the girlfriend.

That's actually the thing that gets me the most. There was no need to handcuff her.

There was no need to shoot the guy either.

I really hate to state the obvious, but this shouldn't have happened in 2016 in a civilized country. The shooting that is. If the police took the phone, logged on FB, deleted the video, well ... that shouldn't happen in any year in any country. It's mind-boggling honestly.

Why is it mind-boggling? The guilty will always want to cover their tracks.

I know, and I don't want to sound naive, but weren't they supposed to protect us? (not an US citizen)

It depends who you define 'us' as. It has been empirically proven that that United States is not a democracy[0]. 'Us' is now corporate interests and for profit prisons. To further illustrate take a look at some of the talk about Donald Trump (and Bernie Sanders as well) for example, now let it be clear I don't support the man but one of the major criticisms is that he is a populist. You hear it time and time again on CNN, FOX News, etc. How is that a criticism in a democracy? Shouldn't all politicians be populists? At least ones that want to be elected anyway.

[0]http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

In a perfect world? Sure. In the real world? Ahahaha!

Law Enforcement (in the USA at least) has no requirement to act to prevent or interfere in an actively occurring crime. Their role, strictly speaking, is cleaning up the mess after a crime has happened. They investigate, and, ideally, capture those responsible, after the fact.

A cop has no legal requirement to help you if you are actively being attacked. Let that sink in for a minute.

This is one reason that many law-abiding citizens make the (rational) choice to conceal-carry a firearm for personal protection.

But you won't hear about that from the mass media because it's not the agenda they want to push.

Unbelievable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BugWAiIHTOw

Not for the faint of heart or those that can't deal with blood.

Deleting evidence in a situation like this should be in a special category all by itself.

Note that the couple's four year old daughter was also present.

Destroying evidence is indeed a crime, and a severe one at that - but if they just withdrew it, unpublished it without deleting it, then it's a grey area at best. It's unlikely that anyone will face anything for this - just as unlikely that the officer who shot him will face any charges.

Isn’t even accessing her phone without a search warrant illegal? Surely it had nothing to do with the crime being committed (obviously, since the only crime that took place is the murder of an innocent man by the police)

You'd think, but I'd wager the offence that they do write up is driving with a broken tail light, which is apparently a capital offence.

It'd be nice to imagine that they'd look into the illegal search they carried out, but rather, they'll likely fixate on how he was actually definitely guilty of a crime and this was absolutely justified.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-p-sherouse/the-problem-wi...

Police in the US are above the law. As evidenced by recent unjustified police killings, they are allowed to execute people in the street with no repercussions. So I don't think accessing a phone without a warrant and deleting evidence is even going to register.

Anyone is isn't poor or works toward a corporate interest is above the law. The for profit prisons don't want to see community policing. That will cut into their bottom line.

I don't know about "destroying evidence" but accessing Facebook under someone else's account without their permission sounds like a contravention of the CFAA.

IANAL (obviously!) but I would think that this would rest on whether they thought they were permanently deleting the video, and therefore thought they were destroying the evidence. I'd say yes, but proving it? Difficult, I'd think.

Jesus... did you notice how that girl manages to keep cool while the maniac with the gun is completely melting down? Scary.

Yes. Surreal. She is absolutely incredibly composed during the whole thing.

She's in shock.

I'd agree with you but she is composed enough to film the whole thing.

Some people are totally cool when crap hits the fan and don't freak out at all. Training and experience helps but it's not odd for someone to be able to pull it off naturally (see "bystander does something heroic" type stories).

x2 on the shock and fear thing as well.

If she freaks out, swears or makes any sudden movement she will be shot immediately. That's why she is "composed" - she is frozen in fear.

If you are black then you've lived under constant fear of police your whole life and you have plenty of experience in "assuming the position"

This just isn't true and should not be part of a productive discussion.

Edit: Do the downvotes really mean HN thinks the above is an accurate description of every black person's life in America? That would be surprising to me.

As a black person you are more likely to fear the police. This is fact.

Ignoring whether you are right or not, your statement is quite different from the one I replied to.

"People X are more likely to fear Y" is nowhere near the same assertion as "Every person X has always lived in fear of Y their whole lives".

Or do you think the two are equivalent?

Honest discussions don't require hyperbole.

Yes, I'm afraid it's true. I mean I don't think Obama lives in fear of being pulled over for a broken tail light - so if you wanted to you could invalidate everything I said because you can falsify it with one observation. Then you could believe that everything is okay and that it will be fixed soon.

Chris Rock was talking about how the very rich like him live in a completely different world. But he hasn't forgotten what the situation is.

It is perfectly normal for middle class African American parents to tell their children to keep the hell away from police. Innocence means nothing.

There are plenty of stories of upper class blacks being arrested and even beaten and killed without cause. Surely you are aware of this.

I am honestly surprised you aren't aware of how widespread this problem is. It's been going on since the days of slavery.

Why would it be logical to not fear the police ?

> Yes, I'm afraid it's true.

The idea that every black person has lived in fear of the police their entire lives is not true at all. I have friends who disagree with this vehemently, and even you point out counterexamples.

> if you wanted to you could invalidate everything I said because you can falsify it with one observation. Then you could believe that everything is okay and that it will be fixed soon.

This is a non sequitur. Just because there are counter examples doesn't mean I think everything is okay or will be fixed soon, it simply means I don't think the blanket 100% statement is true or useful to assert in this discussion (or any discussion). Why do you think me disagreeing with 100% means I think it is 0% (or close to it)? Maybe I think it's 99%. Maybe I think it's 1%. Maybe I'm in the middle. I don't think it's 100% though.

> I am honestly surprised you aren't aware of how widespread this problem is.

Why do you think I'm unaware of problems? I didn't say or imply I was...

> Why would it be logical to not fear the police ?

Who said otherwise?

Who are you arguing with?

And much more likely to be shot by another black person (not the police officer). That's also is fact.

Hah how is that relevant to the present conversation?

I find it very revealing indeed that whenever you say "black people disproportionately get shot by the police" someone always jumps out with "but they're more likely to be shot by another black person!". That knee jerk reaction suggests defensiveness. The question is: Why?

More likely is not equivalent to a blanket "constant fear".

She also had her child with her. That can change one's demeanor when you're trying to also not panic your child further. I think in one of the interviews with her she partly attributes her demeanor to this.

I think there's some sort of primal human psychological defense mechanism that takes over.

I'm normally a very high strung person, but when my mother collapsed in front of me with congestive heart failure, I was unbelievably calm (until the situation was under control, after which then I started to freak out). It was a unique experience. I would have expected myself to start freaking out in a situation like that.

I like to think that most people, in a real crisis situation, know that freaking out won't actually help.

I doubt that. You just have to look at plenty of footage that exists from plenty of horrifying situations. Most people in a real crisis freak out.

Cops are not racist, they just have poor training. They are simply trained to shoot once they feel threatened; rather than making quick on the spot judgement on whether to shoot. The poor training removes any thought and makes it automatic. Black man + gun = shoot.

There are many videos of this, including one where a cop at a gas station asked a black man to show his license and then proceeded to shoot him because he thought he had a gun.

On the other hand shooting police officers only reinforces this kind of training. It's an explosive situation of mistrust, emotion and idiocy.

Anger is such a useless emotion.

Are you kidding me? "Black man + gun = shoot" is the very definition of racist when there are numerous cases of "white man + gun = deescalate", and especially when "black man = probably black man with gun = shoot"

Look up the definition of racism sometime.

I'm not sure how an ingrained belief that black men are more threatening or more violent or whatever than white men by default doesn't fit every definition perfectly.

> Cops are not racist...Black man + gun = shoot

Your statements are contradictory.

His point is that the training instills that formula.

That's not what racism means. I'm saying they are trained to be that way, not because they hate or think they are superior to black people.

If coming to conclusion that a man is dangerous merely on the basis of their race isn't racism, then what exactly then do you think racism is? Do you presume racism is something that cannot be learned?

From a technical/operations perspective:

That the police used her phone to delete it via vanilla facebook app is 100% plausible, but what's far more implausible is whatever mechanism was used to restore it.

What are the options?

Facebook allows you to undelete a video an hour later? Not to my knowledge.

Is there another automated/normal way for a video to undelete an hour later, especially with a modified content setting?

Is there an option that means something other than "someone on facebook staff saw that it was deleted and explicitly restored it without instruction from the user"?

If it was viral, maybe someone saved it before it was deleted and sent it to her to reupload?

That's a good point. It's not clear yet if it's THE original video (same content ID, old comments/likes, etc)

What you can do and Facebook engineers can do are unrelated.

To handle the huge amount of media it handles, Facebook has a content distribution network that stores many copies of the media in many places. When you upload it goes to an initial storage location, and when you view it the server you're talking to will fetch a copy if it doesn't already have it. (I don't work at Facebook, but this is a typical large-scale caching system.)

When you delete a posting, nothing actually gets deleted, at least not right away. A flag is set which tells the system not to display the post anymore. The caches of the media files eventually expire and they get deleted. The initial storage location will probably stay until the posting is really deleted. That could be forever, not for any nefarious reasons but because of cross-referencing between database records.

Your posting has a unique id, and when someone likes it, or adds a comment to it, or shares it, the id is used to cross-reference their action/content with yours. If your post is deleted there would be dangling cross-refefences, and database systems usually don't like that. It's often better to leave the record in the database but flag it as "deleted" so it won't be displayed to anyone (except maybe admins and you.)

Right - that's a good explanation, but I'm clear on the persistence of the media after deletion.

What I'm wondering about is how it explicitly became genuinely available (as opposed to a lingering cached copy here and there) after it was (allegedly) marked for deletion, in the absence of that functionality on facebook's front end.

Facebook's deletions are surely soft-deletions, at least initially. You and I can't undo it, but Facebook undoubtedly can. Maybe it's purged for real after 90 days or something, but I'm sure they can provide deleted death threats against the President to the Secret Service and whatnot.

11 police officers shot during protest march about this shooting and another one:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/0...

This is really getting out of hand.

It has been getting out of hand for quite a while now: https://www.reddit.com/r/GunsAreCool/comments/4qyfsx/here_ar...

  MASS SHOOTING CASUALTIES IN THE U.S. - JUNE 2016

    52 verified mass shootings
    104 people killed
    226 people wounded

  These people were victims strictly of mass shootings. Not included
  are victims of shootings where three or fewer people were shot. On
  average, 91 Americans are killed and more than 200 injured with guns
  every day.

Yes, but this goes way beyond that. So, first we have the police shooting two people, now (during a protest against police violence triggered by those shootings) we have 11 police officers shot by snipers. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to see this spiral out of control into full scale riots.

I don't recall anything like the killings of those police officers happening at a demonstration, we're talking organized targeted response here.

> So, first we have the police shooting two people,

US police have shot and killed over 500 people this year.

So far 58 officers died "in the line of duty". 26 of those died by gunfire.

In 2015 130 officers died in line of duty, 39 of those died by gunfire. (I don't know how many of these were killed by other officers).

If you're referring the article that was linked on this page, that number is intentional gunfire. The accidental number was 2 (presumably the officer accidentally killing themselves or being accidentally killed by another officer).

Note that "snipers" doesn't mean people with a sniper rifle like in the movies. Apparently one of the shooters walked around with an assault rifle, but nobody said/did/could do anything because Texas is an open carry state.

I know police made an early mistake.

Police initially suspected someone who was walking around with a rifle, but he turned himself in and was later released.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-36743033

Was one of the killers walking around with a rifle?

"Four Dallas Police officers and one Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer were killed by “snipers” perched atop “elevated positions,” officials said."

You can carry around assault weapons?

Yeah its the "bear arms" part.

Yes, because "assault weapons" is a made up term that includes large numbers of perfectly legal semi-automatic firearms. The same rifle can have two different configurations, depending on cosmetic variations which do not affect its underlying capabilities, one of which is "scary" looking enough to trigger the "assault weapon" label, while the other appears to be an innocuous hunting or target-shooting rifle.

Well, US law has a legal definition, but I think people used the term before congress decided to make that up.

In this case, was it a large weapon? Did the "snipers" carry around their guns openly?

If by "US law" you mean "federal law," no it does not. It has a legal definition in some US states but they all differ[0] and in every case rely in part of cosmetic features of the weapon.

And I'm not sure what the physical size of a weapon has to do with anything.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_weapon#Differing_state...

Couldn't the police admit only unarmed people to the Dallas event, and have a word with anyone who looked like a sniper in an elevated position?

If state law in Texas is like Georgia, then it's much harder to stifle the 2nd amendment in a public space at a public event. If it were a registered protest, maybe, or if the organizers of a private event asked people not to carry.

A lot of the argument for the 2nd amendment is that if you put people open carrying, the gov/police will show more restraint, allowing for 1st amendment practice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSwys0dm_EA

> Apparently one of the shooters walked around with an assault rifle

This man was accused as a suspect on twitter, but he turned his weapon into police and went into them lying to him saying they had evidence and witnesses. While, on social media, we had clear video of him walking the protest and hitting the deck when shots broke out.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/articl...

This comment is a hostage to fortune as we currently have no information about the alleged shooters (which in itself is making me suspicious), but at this stage I'd say it was 50/50 that the shooters were white supremacists trying to escalate the situation.

I'm not aware of anyone since the Black Panthers trying armed politically organised retaliation against police violence. But I could be very wrong.

Edit: well, this turned out to be wrong.

> at this stage I'd say it was 50/50 that the shooters were white supremacists trying to escalate the situation.

One of them is apparently dead so I figure this will be known quite soon.

And I really wonder why you'd make that assumption on a 50/50 basis with 0 evidence, is there something specific that makes you write that?

False-flag conspiracy theory appears to be debunked by the latest releases from the Dallas police chief. Dialog from their hostage negotiations with the shooter (before they blew him up with a bomb disposal robot, btw...) points towards an individual who drunk a little too deeply from the more radical and violent BLM rhetoric.

> I'd say it was 50/50 that the shooters were white supremacists trying to escalate the situation

How can you possibly make a call like that?

Cynicism. Too much cynicism, it turns out. Mass shootings in the US are usually, but not always, white perpetrators.

Often white perps with mental problems, not white supremacists sowing discontent.

"That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson

> On average, 91 Americans are killed and more than 200 injured with guns every day.

How many of these are suicides, accidents, or gang violence? I ask because you quoted one paragraph which starts by talking specifically about mass shootings, but then generalizes to a fact that is almost certainly 99%+ incidents that are always excluded (suicide, accidents, gang violence, etc).

Look at the consequences in Dallas!

Humanity has not dealt with bad information reaching this many of its lunatics at this kind of speed.

IMHO this is and should be the highest priority bug on the issue list.

Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page have no idea what to do about it and by keeping quiet about it or being defensive about it isn't helping.

Just try talking about slowing the speed of unprocessed information reaching the mentally ill, the ignorant or misguided and you will be taken out like the communist party is running the show. I expect better from the smart people of silicon valley.

I expect them to work out a fix. No one else has the capability.

Don't hold your breath on it, SV is more concerned on how to invade our privacy and push ads aggresively.

I think you make a salient point.

Historically, news either remained local and did not propagate, or if it did, it propagated slowly, and thus the impact was diffused, largely inhibiting reactionary movement.

Now, we not only have instantaneous hypersensationalised global media, but the filter-bubble echo chambers of social media which amplify and distort events to fit their world view and agenda, whatever that may be.

It's sad, really, as once upon a time we believed the Internet could bring global unity - but rather, it has deepened divisions, pushed political thought to extremes (defensiveness is one hell of a drug), and has brought about much of the societal ill we now see in developed countries.

Is there a solution? Facebook seem to be trying to break people out of their bubbles, but the thing is, people like their bubbles, as they're safe and cozy and they don't get angry at what someone they disagree with wrote.

Now, I'm pretty sure this same argument was espoused about handbills and movable type, and we demonstrably survived print, but again, velocity is the killer. I'm not sure if it's different or not.

Either way, it's the old tribal instincts doing their thing - either we need to collectively adapt (more easily said than done), or we need a technical or legal solution.

Legal solutions take the format of restrictions on speech, which nobody wants to promulgate, technical solutions will be worked around.

So - it's up to us to try to be better, to try to be moderate, to try not to get pissed off.

Maybe the solution is pharmaceutical. Maybe we need Huxley's soma. I don't see how you can change human nature quickly enough otherwise.

Lots of first-world countries have Internet. Not a lot of first-world countries have the amount of shootings, including mass shootings, the US has. That makes me doubt that the Internet is the problem.

It's not just shootings, though - the bitter rift that brexit has wrought is part of the same problem. Hell, gamergate sits in the category too. All this drives division, which ultimately drives violence.

Brexit is just as much, if not more, the responsibility of the newspapers which have spent so long writing misleading articles about the EU and inflammatory articles about "migrants".

Indeed, but that message has likewise been amplified through social media to the point where brexit became possible. Without SM, I don't think it would have happened.

Interesting theory, unfortunately in terms of the Brexit you have the Demographics and their choice of media dissemination, and their vote completely backwards.

The older Brits voted for the Brexit in mass, and they're much less likely to get their information from Social Media than the younger generations who voted to stay in mass. Also the British papers and television were largely in the stay camp as well

I don't think the effect necessarily requires the agents engaged by it to directly consume social media, as the traditional media producers act as surrogates, and have their increasingly extreme views and publications validated by the echo chamber. It's inarguable that SM has fundamentally altered the news cycle. Additionally, even if only a minority of a group engage in SM, it'll likewise amplify their views which then spill into meatspace, and then propagate through more traditional lines. It turns seeds into saplings, providing fertile ground for the burgeoning crop of political insanity.

Add to this reactionary forces, whereby groups step up their rhetoric in defence against a perceived threat to their worldview, and you see that part of what spurred the non SM older brexit group was opposition to theincreasingly shrill and derogatory warnings from the remainers.

Essentially, I think social media catalyses division, regardless of whether you directly consume it or not.

(Has anyone confirmed the identity and motives of the Dallas shooters yet?)

Police brutality leading to counter-riots predates Facebook and indeed the internet. Trying to hide the evidence is not going to help.

The information was complete even before the murder, and no Facebook censure will achieve what you want: We know that USA institutions including police make undisciplined use of force, lethal or not, legal or not, against any layman interpretation of the constitution or not, against the UN rights or not. We know the police has always been systematically acquitted when charged with the murder of a civilian. We know the police tries to seize all evidence of events and loses it. We also know they use of Civil Asset Seizure of innocents (and we know they are 100% innocents, because they haven't been proven guilty nor charged). We know 1% of the USA population is in jail and we know that 95% (yes, 95%) jail sentences are set by plea bargain, and most of the remaining ones by police-only testimony, which means there is no formal proof that people in jail are guilty. And we know that not a single sentence was pronounced against HSBC drug lords.

For all I'm concerned as a member of the dominating class, the police is daily asking to be shot. Tough luck if you are an uncorrupted agent, but if you are uncorrupted you'd better speak up now.

Obama saying "It's time for a reform" is a mere approximation: If he issued an order for all police to put down all weapons tomorrow, the safety of the street would actually increase.

>If he issued an order for all police to put down all weapons tomorrow, the safety of the street would actually increase.

US police losing all firearms instantly without changing civilian gun controls laws would be a very dangerous situation. Much more dangerous than the current one.

It's not just the mentally ill, the ignorant or misguided, it's the general public that has to deal with so many negative emotions and information at an accelerating pace.

The world didn't got worse, but everybody started to feel that way. Because people now know what they didn't know before.

Two hundred years ago, when your beloved aunt died, you realised that after a week when the letter informing you arrived. During that week you could be happy, because you didn't know.

Now the death, misery, violence and unfairness that happens so regularly in our world is just a fingertip away.

Resulting in fear and anger. Those emotions are good for evading and hunting animals, but not for dealing with complex rules in a globalised society.

>Now the death, misery, violence and unfairness that happens so regularly in our world is just a fingertip away.

>Resulting in fear and anger.

or it could result in increased awareness about the issues and empathy toward the victims of "the death, misery, violence and unfairness". Such awareness and empathy can be very constructive and a force for progress and thus "good for dealing with complex rules in a globalised society."

History of progress is a history of wider and faster spread of fuller information. Police was brutalizing and murdering black people long before cell phone cameras. With cell phone recordings of such events now available, the society can't anymore just dismiss it and has finally to deal with it.

I agree and I'm not advocating to take back information. That is not possible anyway.

I just think that most people, for whatever reasons, do not have the capacity for "relaxed empathy" in stressful situations.

>I just think that most people, for whatever reasons, do not have the capacity for "relaxed empathy" in stressful situations.

It is not about "relaxed". It is about instinct in stressful situation to help the wounded member of your tribe. The modern technology just made the whole human race the same one tribe.

Humans cannot comprehend that many people being part of their tribe.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups

> Now the death, misery, violence and unfairness that happens so regularly in our world is just a fingertip away.

And since they're always a kind of "emergency", an overriding situation for our brains to which we instinctively pay attention, that's the ultimate topic for news. Now with unlimited supply - if there's nothing bad happening in your city, local media will borrow something from elsewhere in the country. And if the whole nation had just a peaceful and happy week, they'll borrow something from abroad.

I do believe that as a society we need to reconsider the "freedom of press" in mainstream media. To be clear - the idea is based on the most honorable of principles. But with few decades of instant electronic communication behind us, we know few relevant things to be experimentally confirmed as facts:

- publishers have every reason to pick up most extreme examples for anything, and with lightspeed access to global information, they'll happily do this every day

- media plays havoc with our brains; in particular, with availability heuristic[0] - that makes us instinctively feel that everyone around us is rich hand happy (since our real neighbors, in terms of what we know about them, are media celebrities) and the world is a dangerous and brutal place (since we keep hearing about some crime or attack every single day - and the distance doesn't matter for availability heuristic)

- most people seem to be unaware that brains are not well adapted to our current technological environment, and in particular that if you don't constantly downplay or ignore most of the news, you're being lead to believe extremely wrong things - by the very virtue of availability heuristic

- those people vote

Something needs to be done about at least some of those points there. Trying to just educate people is too slow and too unreliable. I'm not saying "censor press" or something - but we need to somehow take into the account the standard failure mode media triggers in majority of population.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

I fully agree.

Or you could fix your police. In any other modern country if police kills somebody it's huge news. In US it's usually a footnote (even cheerful sometimes).

And when police gets killed it is OK? Justified?

Honestly, it's the closest thing to symmetry yet. Let them know what it is like to constantly be under attack, to have your brothers slain in the street daily without provocation.

The consequences of such events do not move society in a positive direction, however.

> Let them know what it is like to constantly be under attack

Actually that's what's causing most killings by police. Police feeling like they are constantly under attack and that their lives are in danger every second of the day and that they have to protect their lives with the guns they were given.

Being a policeman is and should be a risky job. Not to the point of people orchestrating mass police killings but you shouldn't try to eliminate risk from being a policemen by shooting every citizen that might pose some threat to you.

Anything that threatens to lessen profits in the least is hard evidence for the communist party running the show.

</sarcasm>

Social networks aren't the problem here. American police being useless and corrupt is.

If anything, social networks can be part of the solution, because they provide evidence in cases where otherwise there'd be none.

Now it's up to politicians and courts to actually punish corrupt cops.

> I expect them to work out a fix. No one else has the capability.

Would you have AT&T start filtering phone calls based on content?

There's so many things that need to change in the United States for real change to be seen.

We need to pay our officers more and have fewer of them, If you start to pay the good ones a respectable salary you'll get more accountability.

We need to train our officers better, we should have an apprenticeship program that lasts at least five years where the apprentice officer rides around with a veteran UNARMED until he picks up every skill necessary to do a good job in real time, two years of community college and then a year as park police isn't cutting it.

We need to reduce conflict on the streets, Philando Castile knew that his taillight was out, the problem is that in an impoverished and racially oppressed culture these small fixes become tough to handle when you have other bills to pay. The officer was either going to ticket him or give him a warning, neither of which would have done any good long term, and so you had unnecessary conflict. We need to change the laws so that cops aren't allowed to harass people over minor things like taillights/inspection stickers/small amounts of marijuana/jaywalking you name it.

Black culture needs to change, stop selling CD's on the corner with a gun in your pocket and get a job that supports your kids, this "gangster" lifestyle is a result of rap music.

The media needs to fined by the federal government for disproportionately reporting on content that is intended to get ratings and thus adds to the chaos and race baiting. How many people were killed in Chicago last week? Can you name them? The media outlets need to be fined to take away the incentive to over report on sensational news. We need something along the lines of a "Fair Media Coverage Act" that will completely destroy the financial incentive of media outlets that over report on sensational news, this would hopefully have the dual effect of (over the long term) slowing down the mass shootings that appear to be happening every other month. These rioters/mass shooters/cop killers are doing it for the 24/7 CNN news reel and the people tune in because the chaos is interesting and exciting, like a war movie with real life ramifications. Destroy the incentive.

Just some ideas for real changes.

>this "gangster" lifestyle is a result of rap music

Are you sure about that? That's a pretty outlandish thing to say.

>The media outlets need to be fined to take away the incentive to over report on sensational news

How would sensational news be distinguished from highly engaging/interesting news?

You can already see this issue regarding the hate for clickbait, people will call any content with an enticing title clickbait regardless of the value of the content itself.

>Are you sure about that? That's a pretty outlandish thing to say.

I'm positive, see the picture of Alton Sterling posing with guns with his kids, this is black culture in a nutshell (not ALL black culture, but a very real part of it)

>How would sensational news be distinguished from highly engaging/interesting news?

News shouldn't be interesting, it should be informative and that's it. CNN/FOX/MSNBC have turned into real life action/crime dramas. I'm convinced that five officers might not be dead if these networks had restrictions on what they could report. You could enforce this by only allowing networks to report for one hour per news story, per media day. Anything over that would result in a fine that would eat into advertising revenue. You could also enforce a rule that would fine media outlets for stating the name/showing the picture of mass shooters so you don't glorify them. Media outlets have too much power in this and there needs to be regulations on them just like any other industry in this country.

I was with you until you implied that racial oppression makes it more difficult for someone to fix a tail light or that police officers shouldn't be "allowed" to give a ticket for it? And nothing said after brought me back.

Racial oppression and poverty make everything more difficult, you're a highly paid developer so you don't have to experience it. It's quite possible that Philando Castile didn't have enough gas to get to the store to buy a new bulb, or the extra money for a spare one, or an internet connection to figure out how to do it in the first place, or access to a friend or family member with the resources to get it done. Hell, maybe he was on his way to the store to fix it when he was shot. Either way we don't need the confrontation, people with a broken taillight know that it's broken, don't confront them! It seems small, but maybe you don't quite comprehend paycheck to paycheck poverty. I'm talking real American poverty which is a stark reality for far too many minorities in this country, an issue of which is also contributing to the violence and the riots plaguing the US as of late.

> Racial oppression and poverty make everything more difficult

And racial oppression affects the distribution and stickiness of poverty among different communities.

> people with a broken taillight know that it's broken

Unless they don't. How often do you stand behind your car while someone else presses the brake? I never know my tail light is out unless I see a reflection or someone tells me.

If you don't think that a broken tail light should be a crime, that's one thing. But it sounds like you're saying "don't bother poor people if they're breaking this law, just bother people with money."

Aren't these events statistically likely in a way?

1. Some white people are afraid of black people. (the other way probably too)

2. Most people are very afraid of other people carrying guns.

3. Most people are afraid of some form of resistance when they challenge/approach somebody.

Add it up. It's likely that somewhere a white policeman approaches a black person who has, or could have a gun, and experiences fear.

Before this is read as an excuse for the policeman, which it is not:

Keep in mind that fear and anger, fight and flight are intertwined. Hatred can come from fear. Fear can come after hatred. One brain-areal is responsible for both emotions.

The only efficient response to defuse these situations is to eliminate the "very afraid" above and disarm the population.

>and disarm the population

And the police (see UK, where most police is unarmed).

I'm not as sure about that, but probably yes.

And make police a highly-recognised profession with top-pay, but also heavily scrutinised selection, entrance-tests and no allowed margin for error.

> [...] no allowed margin for error.

Or rather, make sure that any human error doesn't impact people.

But that's easier implemented in a technology company, with automated tests etc, than in the police. Yet still, eg putting a GoPro on every officer would help make mistakes in eg investigating allegations of police brutality less likely.

Here are some basic facts:

Half of people killed by police are white. Blacks are 25%.

Blacks are also disproportionally represented amongst violent offenders.

One more interesting trivia - black and hispanic cops are more likely to shoot a black suspect than white cops.

Black people are 13% of US population, yet black men (6% of US population) commit 50% of homicides in the US.

Thus your assumptions are incorrect and thus your conclusions may also be incorrect. It appears that white people are more afraid of being called racist than being assaulted by a person of color.

http://www.dailywire.com/news/7264/5-statistics-you-need-kno... http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race... http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/28/5-devasta...

Breitbart is as far away from facts as you can possibly get. "American Renaissance" with its "race realism" doesn't sound much more reliable.

All the articles cite official data.

I would love to link Huffpo, Salon or Atlantic, but they are just to dishonest to publish something like this.

The data is fine, but I'm asking sincerely - what is the point of the breitbart article?

They present those statistics on black on black crime and lack of outrage thereof as evidence that the black lives matter movement and the left-leaning are taking advantage of white on black incidents to "advance their political power". Ok fine. This seems like an extremely cynical position to take, but going along with it, what is their implication? Advance their political power for what purpose? The subtext from the article (and more heavily from the comments) is that liberals want to take your guns, and black folks are violent people that kill each other anyway, so it's their own fault.

Larry Elder frames it nicely in conservative terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piwaBO6U43U

The implication is that liberals are engaging in soft bigotry of low expectations. That they are pandering to black voters for power.

Another implication is that all the things that liberals are promising to the minorities that should be helping black people, such as welfare and affirmative action, end up causing more harm in the long run.

Of course, I expect you to ask why? I would say one part lust for power, one part good intentions that pave road to hell and one part good old fashioned ignorance.

And if you ask about motive? Just a power grab. In contemporary culture diversity is much relished. But not all of it, diversity of opinion is being shunned and anybody daring to show doubt is ostracized. If you take a long hard look - pretty much all the power structures on the west are very, very liberal/progressive (entertainment, media, school system, government and indeed politics).

Since the consensus is that expanding government outreach and bringing more and more functions of society is a good thing and since the results are really not there - the liberals would either have to face their folly or instead keep doubling down.

And since doubling down makes things worse - the liberals are becoming increasingly authoritarian, thus the vicious cycle is feeding itself.

p.s.: In case you were asking what the motive of BLM is? I don't think they have one. Just as any other flavor of identity politics they are engaging in an us vs them discourse, which inevitably will cause them to turn on themselves. But liberals are going to squeeze as much out of them as possible.

Interesting video, thanks.

You might also like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNrHW1E8hRI

Thomas Sowell debating policies of the last 40 years, back in 1982, it is quite interesting to see how those have turned out pretty much as he predicted and indeed even the arguments of the proponents have gone in the exactly the same direction.

I don't know what assumptions you think are incorrect: that people are afraid of getting killed?

What I said was that situations involving guns tend to scare/alarm all involved parties.

And that getting rid of the guns is easier and will likely have a larger effect than curing people of their racism.

Getting rid of the guns is not a realistic option. The U.S. is too big, and too diverse for blanket intrusive policies to work well. A firearms policy that makes sense in Baltimore is complete overkill in Montana.

In 1996 Australia bought back more than a million firearms from people and destroyed them subsequently.

Brazil did the same.

Peanuts, in comparison. There are more than 300 million firearms in circulation in the U.S.

Australia was never a gun culture in the first place. Apart from security forces, civilian guns were things farmers used for stock control, or occasionally hunting. It used to be the same in the US as well, until the weekend warrior/home security people went berserk.

The real problem in the US is the cultural trope that 'problems are solved by a man with a gun'. From domestic police to foreign policy, the US psyche approves of an armed response early. Until that's sorted (which is a generational problem, with no 'quick fix before the next election'), the US is going to keep having this issue, again and again.

Yes, unfortunately (and a bit ironically given current events, oddly enough) I feel that much of the whole current "2nd Amendment culture" is directly tied to the same sort of dynamics that have lead to the rise of Donald Trump here (and things like Brexit etc).

You'd also be destroying most of the $6 billion dollar gun industry and approximately 200,000 jobs in addition to all of the costs associated with trying to extract millions of guns from the populace.

It's always painful to watch HN discuss race.

The majority of us will consider crossing the street to avoid an oncoming $category_of_person. Maybe it's black men, maybe it's police, maybe it's beggars, maybe it's missionaries, maybe it is visibly agitated men of any color, etc.

Maybe you feel like you've failed a bit every time it happens. Maybe your personality changes over time and at some point you taught yourself to abstain from such behavior. But, feelings are harder to change than behavior...

When I pass my own problematic $category_of_person on the street (on the same side, now!), I spend a few seconds with no other topic on my mind than that person.

It is because deep down, some part of me still sees that person as a threat, like a cliff or a fire or a bear.

This is terrible, I know. Look, I'm trying to explain racism. Gimmie a minute...

My mother taught me, before I was old enough to know better, to avoid some categories of people. To fear them, for my safety.

I can, do, and will continue to overcome those crappy cards I was dealt.

But don't put a badge on my chest and a gun on my hip and tell me to go talk to various categories of people in inherently heated situations and expect that evil that has been a part of me since before I can remember to never manifest itself in a statistically significant fashion. That's stupid. Police officer is not the job for me. Duh! See above!

What I'm getting at is that my own combination of upbringing and later enlightenment is not uncommon. (Said differently: it's not uncommon for a person to be less racist than their parents were, right?) And therefor some meaningful percentage of good cops who don't consider themselves racist are, in fact, racist in a statistically significant way. Stress = gunfire.

...So... can we be done resisting the Black Lives Matter meme? Please? Y'all look ignorant when you do that. :)

p.s. the fear when walking thing dissipates immediately if a conversation happens, etc. It's not that big of a deal, right? We'll all have a good laugh about it one day when I am caught off guard and mugged by a white girl... Anyway, I'm sorry. I try.

I bet nothing is going to happen to the policemen involved in this scandal.

If he walks free he might get killed by another gunman like those officers today in Dallas.

Context: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36742835

I think usa is going for civil war like this. Violence spiral that will get worse. Remember what the last civil war was about? Also media censorship will contribute to the distrust. BBC yesterday had much better coverage of the situation than fox and cnn combined.

Civil War will be possible only if low boiling. Lots and lots of domestic terrorism.

There are no groups even united that could stand up to the Federal government. And the USG is strong enough to subdue any two groups that decide to war with each other.

Well i think it will look a bit different in modern times, more like a peer to peer structure, without one point of failure Like you see with terrorist groups, small autonomous groups. A war that you cannot win as a government (irak, afganistan etc..)because there is no single fronline, the war is all over the place.

Terrorist groups are not very effective.

See https://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror and https://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective

Thanks for the link, interesting read. After reading this i don't get how these wars could be lost...

Insurgents are different than terrorist groups, I think?

Ending low-intensity conflict within the United States is not going to be achieved by pure force. At least not by any level of force that can be practically applied. Dominant factors will lean more towards public relations, resilience, and good OODA loops.

These are not areas at which the US Federal Government excels. Attempts to remedy such situations with overwhelming force will only serve to exacerbate them. I'll guess that the next two decades (or less) will see a phase change in the nature of US governance, even if the superficial forms remain the same.

I have been watching this thread today, and i am amazed by the speed this thread made it off the first page. It has the most reactions of any topic today 188 so far. Yet it is now on page 2....with topics still on the front page with way less comments.

AFAIK comments play no role in the rank determination of an article. Not only that but this is older than every other article on the front page.

Were this true, for what reason would Facebook (and specifically Mark Zuckerberg) lie about the reason? To avoid people thinking they have this capability?

I have mixed feelings about the topic.

Where I live, police are reasonable and populace is unarmed.

On the other hand US is on of a few modern republics that hasn't produced a tyranny yet. And perhaps 2nd amendment may have something to do with that. Along with rest of the constitution.

> On the other hand US is on of a few modern republics that hasn't produced a tyranny yet.

What about most european countries?

The history of Europe I learned is littered with tyrannical regimes throughout Europe.

Yes, but less so the modern republics. (But that borders on True Scotsman argument.)

Hungary is moving in that direction, Poland too, Austria is mixed case and even the western Europe countries are not as hostile towards wanna be authoritarians as before.

That is simply false, corruption and amassing political power is a thing, not that most people can do anything about it. Which is an elephant in the room very few want to address, exactly because it is a hard problem to tackle.

It is interesting however, from here it seem one of the US presidential candidates is much more above the law than any leader in Europe, and no one bats an eye.

Have you seen Berlusconi?

I happen to live in Austria, and while the presidential election (between a far right and a far left candidate) stirred up global attention, I can tell you we are not a tyranny or authoritarian state.

I always read about this supposed "freedom" in the US, but what does that mean actually?

I mean here you can drink alcohol in public, wear no t-shirt on the subway, still smoke in many bars, say what you want online, and there are even illegal misdemeanours like kids smoking weed in public that nobody really cares about.

I said that European countries are moving in that direction. Not that we are tyrannical yet. Although France with its permanent Extraordinary Circumstances since Paris ...

But if in 2050 I live in united authoritarian Europe, I won't be surprised the least.

I understand. But still: the US has homeland security, the patriot act and so on. Aren't those rights like "permanent extraordinary circumstances"?

We don't have anything in that magnitude.

I think it's actually way easier to defend yourself against the state here, than in the US.

Well the US have headstart before us. But as with electric grid voltage, telephones and wall sockets - we the europeans take their innovation and do it right.

Everything you say is true. But I think that adding yet to the end of each statement is not great stretch.

You know, I don't think europe's immediate future is pretty either. But I don't think there will be much more oppression of it's citizens. I think the borders will be closed and immigration forced to stop. After that happens people will be content enough to stop leaning further to the right.

How are these countries tyrannic?

Google Victor Orban.

Yeah that is a bit of a stretch. Last 50 years have been far from universally peaceful, but even then - this period is an anomaly in European history, not yet the norm.

> On the other hand US is on of a few modern republics that hasn't produced a tyranny yet.

Tell that to the Native Americans and slaves.

Another little known historical fact.

"Only" 300.000 black people have been brought to US as slaves. Less than 5% of American families owned slaves.

Also to put things into perspective - between 1MM and 1.3MM white Europeans have been enslaved by Arabs.

What has been done to Native Americans is horrible. Slavery is horrible.

But I have no idea what any of that has to do with the fact that United States is really a one-of the kind country in the world.

I think that Americans should take a long hard look at all the problems on their plate, but they should really stop falling for snake oil peddlers who are selling Identity Politics and trying to benefit from pitting communities against each other.

> "Only" 300.000 black people have been brought to US as slaves. Less than 5% of American families owned slaves.

That's a really odd point to make. From Wikipedia:

"In South Carolina in 1720, about 65% of the population consisted of enslaved people... The number of enslaved people in the US grew rapidly, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census."

People are mamals. Mamals breed.

There were 1bn people in 1800, there are 7bn today.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

So you're saying that slavery only counts if they're imported (your 300k)? Being born a slave is not a problem (ceejayoz's 4M)?

And seriously, does it matter if it was 5% or 30% that owned slaves, if 65% of the population were slaves themselves?

I am saying none of that.

Slavery was horrible. And American people fought a bloody war so it could be abolished.

All I am doing is I am setting some perspective. As some people on the left engage in fallacy that every single white person owes them something because some of their ancestors may have been slaves.

Slave population in 1860 was 12%, 65% was for a single state, that was an outlier.

> People are mamals. Mamals breed.

Yes, and America took advantage of that to increase the slave population in a cheaper manner than importing. They ripped children from their parents.

That you're portraying this as a positive fact is horrifying.

> you're portraying this as a positive fact

That's an exceedingly uncharitable interpretation. Please don't do that here.

And as the government gets more tyrannical, with homicide rates at historic lows[0], they seek to remove that right for our 'safety'. I smell bullshit.

[0]http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/04/us/gun-violence-graphics/

The reduction in homicides since 1990 is due to the j-curve in incarceration rates, not the various forms of carry (that for the most part across the US, didn't start in the early 90s).

Washington state also went concealed carry in 1961, and it's crime rate rose and fell with the rest of the country over time. Seriously, it's not an armed population, but an incarcerated one that reduces crime. It is, after all, the point of incarceration.

> an incarcerated one that reduces crime. It is, after all, the point of incarceration.

Do you have any sources on that? The causality is not obvious.

Here's a pretty good paper titled "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 90s: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Six Factors That do Not" it's written by Steven Levitt the author of Freakonomics.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUndersta...

>Four factors appear to explain the drop in crime: increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack and legalized abortion.

Other factors often cited as important factors driving the decline do not appear to have played an important role: the strong economy, changing demographics, innovative policing strategies, gun laws and increased use of capital punishment. In stark contrast, the crime experience between 1973 and 1991 is not well explained by the factors identified in this paper. The real puzzle in my opinion, therefore, is not why crime fell in the 1990s, but why it did not start falling sooner.

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