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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

Every single police officer?

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