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Comment by knucklesandwich | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how this follows. Not all laws permit use of deadly force. And it's not even the laws per se as much as the circumstances and criteria around authorization of deadly force. I've been trying to learn about this lately, and it seems as though the supreme court case Graham v. Connor [1] is heavily implicated in the fact that very few of these police are convicted despite how objectionable the circumstances have seemed.

As a side note, if you're interested in this type of thing, Radiolab has just started an excellent podcast on supreme court cases called More Perfect [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._Connor

[2] http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolabmoreperfect

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Not all laws may permit the use of deadly force, but every encounter with the police implicitly does.

The line between being pulled over for a minor infraction, and making an officer fear for his life is a very blurry one.

Except that the implication here is that the laws precipitate the use of lethal force. You may not be guilty (or suspected to be guilty) of anything in the eyes of the law and face the prospect of lethal force, considering police have investigatory powers. The laws aren't the problem here (I think there are problems with the laws and penalties in other regards, but that's a separate matter), its the wide berth we give to police to enact deadly force.

>Except that the implication here is that the laws precipitate the use of lethal forc

Which they do by proxy.

Get a simple ticket and don't pay it or show up for court and it can become a bench warrant in which the cops can go arrest you. Serving warrants is a dangerous event, as in some percentage of the time the served fight back violently.

The only power police have is the power of violence.

In my country (Belgium) no one would make that association. As far as I know, there has been one policr officer killed violently on duty in the past decade, and that was in a confrontation with organized crime.

There's something weird with the culture of violence in the US.

It's about the potential for deadly interactions with police as a consequence of creating new laws for police to enforce. I think the title is slightly obtuse, but it is attention grabbing.

Sure, my point though is that it's being disingenuous to put the blame on the laws themselves for enabling these circumstances. As a society we tend to want punishment for theft, violence, etc. so it's a little absurd to say that the solution is to get rid of the laws that penalize those. A lot of people here seem to be complaining about minor infractions... some of these things have a social history and context that caused the laws to be created in the first place. Some of them, frankly, are racist or are a means of criminalizing race or innocuous behavior, and we really should be fighting to repeal those laws. But that's a discussion unrelated to the thesis here.

The problem is not per se the laws... I'd wager that most Americans favor roughly proportional response by law enforcement, and the penalties of laws usually reflect that. The blame belongs in the constitutional powers we give law enforcement to investigate crimes and respond to perceived danger. As long as the police are free to investigate suspicious persons and respond with deadly force if they feel that a person is an imminent danger, it doesn't actually matter what laws we pass.

But what is the proportional response to littering? To theft? To selling a too large coke? To braiding hair without a licence? To driving with an expired licence? To smoking pot?

In a world where offenders will readily comply with the punishment, you can just have purely civil enforcement, no need for a special class of sworn officers to deal with it.

This is the point of the essay: law enforcement gets to use physical, ultimately deadly, force, and this is the case everywhere, even if US cops are significantly more trigger-happy than pretty much all their peers.

If you're never comfortable using violence to enforce the law, there is literally no need for it to be a law. There is no point to employ police officers to check on the size of sodas if they are not allowed to initiate force to prevent people from buying and selling them.

On the contrary, if you are comfortable using violence, you have to own that anf accept that ultimately such violence will be deadly.

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