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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

This is disingenuous. Few reasonable people would suggest that the police have authority to kill because someone litters, has a broken tail light, or sells single cigarettes in violation of New York law. Depending on your viewpoint and the situation, killings occur because people resist the police, because people run from the police, because the police are trigger-happy and biased, or because the police are murderers. One might even think that it is ridiculous to ban sales of single cigarettes. Even so, this piece suggests I should not support laws banning littering unless I believe the police should be authorized to kill litterers. This is ridiculous. Of course we can support a law even if we believe that a violator should not be subjected to summary execution.

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I disagree. The point is that by creating a law which you by extension are asking the police to enforce, you are inherently increasing the number of times that the police will negatively interact with people.

The cigarette tax is interesting because this exemplifies a corporate entity/state which wants to protect its revenue at the expense of a person lower on the ladder trying to address a simple market situation, it's not one that I or you deal in, but this guy obviously did.

By making it illegal, the police must enforce the law. The guy then breaking said law is faced with a hard choice when dealing with the police in that situation, which is that he is going to be at a minimum fined or possibly worse. For a cigarette, which all sane people would say, "seriously?"

Our goal should be to have police enforce laws that we care about, and laws that actually matter. It reduces the chance for potential abuse of the law. Remember that most poor people are forced to work and live in more public areas, where richer people have more private property that shields potentially the same or worse incursions of the law from the police.

The discussion of cigarette sales/taxes is clearly a strawman. If you believe that we shouldn't have laws unless we are willing to kill to enforce them, you should be able to defend this argument against a law which the vast majority of people will support. For example, I would not choose to kill someone for driving drunk, but strongly support laws which ban drunk driving and remove the ability to drive from convicted drunk drivers.

> The discussion of cigarette sales/taxes is clearly a strawman.

I'd suggest that Eric Garner's case very explicitly proves otherwise.

Are you trolling?

"Strawman", really? Are you not aware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner?

> I would not choose to kill someone for driving drunk

You have completely missed the point of OP; it's not the punishment for the crime which results in death, but the enforcement of the law.

It is not the death penalty for drinking and driving that is on the table, but the possibility of the offender being killed as a result of a confrontation with the police over the act of drinking and driving. Engendering innocent lives is a serious felony and I imagine most people would support the police stopping the car with tire slashes and confronting the offender in case of further resistance, even though he might be killed (which is not the objective, but a possible consequence).

Thanks for your clear argument. I was definitely arguing 'past' the parent, and this helped me to see that. Won't hide my shame at completely missing the point.

Exactly. Police in other western countries are able to enforce minor infractions without killing or injuring the suspect. One can have the discussion (and should!) if these laws make sense or not, but if they are going to be enforced cops shouldn't be judge/jury/executioner. This seems to be a very American problem.

They're not acting as judge/jury/executioner, they're defending their lives. We can argue about the tiny percent of such cases where there's controversy as to whether force was used properly, but your sweeping generalization is wrong and totally unfair to people who put themselves in harms way to protect you and me everyday.

BLM talking points are not facts and presenting them as such is irresponsible.

They are defending their lives against phantasms and projections, largely arising from racism.

I'm sorry but you're mistaken. 60 police officers have been killed this year already, and we're only halfway through. For many tragic reasons, the crime rate is disproportionately high in the black community, including the killing of police officers. This means that unfortunately, police have to resort to lethal force more often when confronting black people than other groups. (But don't forget that, in absolute numbers, more white people are killed by police than black people). When police officers have their life threatened, they are totally justified in using legal force.

Reaching for your gun while you're resisting arrest is ample justification for the police to shoot you.

Where there's mistakes, they should be investigated. If the evidence shows that police acted unlawfully, then they should be charged with crimes. But painting these broad strokes is dishonest and divisive. It's given rise to the false myth that police are hunting down black men en masse.

This myth has consequences. If I believed that police were hunting me and my family down due to the color of my skin, I might take some drastic actions too, and feel justified in them. But it's not true for me and it's not true for black people in America either. The vast majority of police officers who have to use deadly force in the line of duty act lawfully in defense of their lives or the lives of others.

No one argues that police are racist against whites because Asians are much less likely to be killed by cops.

Loggers, pilots, taxi drivers, refuse collectors, athletes/coaches/umpires all have rates of mortality that are higher than that of a police officer. Millions of jobs put workers at more than double the risk or even two orders of magnitude more risk than that of an officer.

For example, in 2011 and in California, the rate of mortality was 4.9 per 100k. The national average that year for all occupations was 3.5 per 100k.

> They're not acting as judge/jury/executioner, they're defending their lives.

Often, in the cases that become national controversies, in cases where the specific facts do not present a reasonable fear of imminent danger.

Police taking reasonably necessary action in defense of self or others is not particularly controversial.

What sort of fool would put themselves into a position where they need to "defend their lives" on account of some schmuck selling cigarettes?

Every single police officer?

Police unfortunately don't get to decide what laws to enforce. If the government decides to ban selling loose cigarettes, then police have a duty to the people to defend the laws that our democracy produces. Police are not elected legislators.

Every law ultimately rests on the police arresting you for not complying, at some point. Otherwise, the law is meaningless.

It turns out that people don't like having their freedom taken away and often fight back against the police. It's a very dangerous job.

In practice police can "turn a blind eye" - there are so many silly laws that if the police went around enforcing them all without interpretation they'd never be able to get anything done (kind of like a depth-first traversal). Generally speaking police have the freedom to pass over many misdemeanours unless they have been instructed not to.

Well it isn't as black and white as you're painting it. It is correct that sometimes law enforcement are obliged to enforce laws they as a group or as individuals do not agree with. On the other hand law enforcement are not obliged to enforce all laws all the time at any cost.

The legal principle of proportionality states that law enforcement always have to consider whether their actions are reasonable in comparison to the violation of laws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)

There is also a general concept related to proportionality that basically states that law enforcement actions must be strictly necessary or required in the given situation. Especially when the means of enforcement includes physical violence.

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/UseOfForc...

First, since America is awash with guns I would hope the law enforcement from the top down would be the number one supporters of sensible gun control. I'm sure its hard being a cop on the street not knowing who has a gun and who doesn't.

Second, it also comes down to a training issue. I would say that the response from law enforcement that Eric Garner and Tamir Rice met was no way appropriate to the threat that they posed to law enforcement or society, perceived or otherwise. I would hope we can at least all agree that these two citizens should be alive today.

The two videos linked below are an interesting and disturbing contrast. The top one is UK police responding to a man with a knife at a Tube station. The second one is American police responding to an unarmed bank robber in Miami.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2015/dec/06/police...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1K9yY3w-WY

You always need the threat, though, otherwise people can just ignore minor punishments. Why pay fines if it can't be enforced to the last consequences? Just escalate things until the other side gives up.

You are effectively, though not directly, threatening every law breaker with the possibility of being killed by a police officer.

Every lawbreaker who is willing to try to keep escalating until the other side gives up, yes. But then the problem isn't really the particular law that they first broke, it's the attitude of "you can't make your rules apply to me, and I'll fight you to the death to make sure you can't". And sometimes, it winds up literally being "to the death". But someone with that attitude, that approach to life, if it wasn't this rule that was the issue, it would be another one. So your options are "don't have any rules against ordinary stuff like trespassing, false advertising, petty theft, etc.", or "have rules but don't enforce them if the person resists", or "have rules and enforce them, even if some people wind up fighting the police after breaking that rule, and get killed for it".

I really don't think that the society with no rules against "not absolutely major" stuff would be a very good society to live in.

But then you have situations like selling loose cigarettes. Was that the fault of the rule, or was it the fault of the cop? Well, you may say, without the rule, the cop wouldn't have been in that particular interaction. True. So what would he have been doing? Interacting with someone else, with the same heavy-handedness.

It is not necessary to keep escalating things until the other side gives up in order to get killed, the possibility is always there when you allow someone (a cop) to use violence to enforce a law (which is necessary for every law), since there is no perfect system of law enforcement which always uses "the right amount" of violence. Thus, the author arguments for the reduction in the number of laws, not their extinction. I don't think there should be 'no rules against "not absolutely major" stuff'. I just think people should realize the threat that is implied in law enforcement and rethink some laws.

Fair enough. Is too much stuff illegal? Yes. (And, are there too many loopholes in existing laws? Also yes, and it gives the law an appearance of unfairness, which lowers respect for the law and increases attempts at escaping from it.)

And in fact, decriminalizing pot nation-wide might be the big step to help with a lot of this. I'm not sure it would be free from other consequences, though...

There are alternatives to allowing a situation to escalate. Firstly a well-trained police officer can manage a situation such that it doesn't escalate. Then restraint can be exercised. Admittedly these strategies are much easier in a society that isn't awash with guns.

A superior restatement of this would be "Don't support or reject any law unless you are willing to sustain the sum of all features."

Supporting some law could mean some cases interact with those of dubious mental resilience, or with unnecessarily deadly cops, which results in irrational escalation or death. It could also mean that, on the sum of all things, including people dying, society experiences net benefit.

Supporting a law which benefits nuclear energy and rejects fossil fuel or coal energy could mean people dying as well, but it could also mean a better world where fewer people die from energy policy.

Unfortunately, some people stop at the idea that an unjust death occurs, and only focus on that, without recognizing that more people may be already unjustly dying with a status quo policy. To borrow an example, people would rather a man made train barrel down its existing man made path to kill 3 people than to redirect the train to kill 1 person.

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