‘Do Not Resist': A look at the normalization of warrior cops | Hacker News Reader

‘Do Not Resist': A look at the normalization of warrior cops

washingtonpost.com

234 pointsjackgavigan131 comments

In Los Angeles I see so many cops driving black mustang cars, a predator style car. As if they enjoy their predator status and want to express and enforce their masculinity on the community. Every time I see a cop car it makes me nervous just by the sight of it.

I think its time we give them Pink colored bug beetle cars. That will remind them they are here to protect the community, not be a hero in an action movie.

Yes! Pink has been shown to reduce aggression. I wonder if a referendum to make all law enforcement uniforms pink would be popular.

You might be onto something there ...

In Montreal, cops are ditching their uniform as a form of protest. They look stupid but we are still afraid of them. They have incredibly eye-catching pants, check it out: http://www.cjad.com/EI/sharedobjects/handlers/ir.ashx?p=ZgAv...

OK, that's just silly. We can have police be approachable parts of the community without silly pants.

I think that's about as French as it gets.

Dead link, could we get another?

You get so used to aggressive police cars in the US. I found myself wondering why police cars looked so small, simple and not intimidating while overseas until I realized. Also, wearing black uniforms is ridiculous.

War on drugs in the US has been acting as a Gym that made police very aggressive. Just like more stress you give to your muscle it grows stronger. Everyone is a suspect rather than a civilian in need of some help and service.

It's not like cop cars are suddenly aggressive. The current challengers, Tauruses, and Explorers are at least no more aggressive than the previous Crown Vics.

>Also, wearing black uniforms is ridiculous.

why? if they are oppressors, they may as well look the part.

LAPD does not drive Ford Mustangs. Perhaps you meant the Dodge Charger. Even then, most police here drive Ford Explorer SUVs.

> black mustang cars, a predator style car

What happened first, though? Was the [Ford Mustang/Dodge Charger] a 'predator style' car first, or is it so, because cops drive them?

I recall a quote some years back, from a veteran police officer. I think it was in Chicago, but I'm not sure. To paraphrase, he said that people didn't realize that the police were the biggest and most organized gang.

Certainly, a lot of their behavior appears to bear this observation out.

P.S. Like other areas where we have problems, policing needs to be transparent, accountable (including and especially fully audit-able), and proportional.

Arising from the community, and not imposed upon them. If you can't make this happen, you've already failed.

"The striking thing about the footage is, again, the utter mundanity of the raid. A family was just violently raided over an immeasurable amount of pot. A man was arrested over that pot. The money he needed for his business was taken from him. Yet there’s no shame or embarrassment from the officers. There’s no panic that the whole thing was captured on video. That’s when it hits you. They don’t think they’ve made a mistake. This is what they do."

Ultimately this type of behavior erodes all trust in law enforcement in the communities where this kind of policing is practiced. A vicious cycle is amplified whereby residents learn to put little trust in police and in turn police decide to use more and more force, believing those (untrusting) residents would use violence against them.

As a side note, why don't police approach dangerous criminals the way radiological workers approach "hot" material. I'm not sure how "danger" should be enumerated but I'd imagine it decreases with the square of the distance. Unless there are other bystanders nearby who might be hurt, closing the distance to suspects seems to be one of the more dangerous things an officer could do. Seems like containing someone and letting them cool off is safer for both parties.

Re your side note: That's how police forces almost everywhere in Europe are trained.

This. It could be argued that most police don't even need a firearm if their role is not suppressive. In fact, a better division of labor based on a better rules of engagement may even negate the need for the concept of a generalist police officer. Large numbers of containment and assessment roles could largely clear (of bystanders in danger) and control an area until the situation can be assesed properly. Maybe engagement is required and maybe its not. In the event it is, only a small pool of highly trained officers need be draw from to apply lethal force. If its not and an arrest can be made peacefully, then yet another class of police could handle the actual arrest and custody.

Dividing the process across different roles should help reduce the spillover of tension and aggression from one phase to the next.

The problem with US police is that they now want to behave like deployed military troops without any of the risk. They want to play with all these "cool toys", and pretend they are raiding some compound in Fallujah or something, but they refuse to risk their life.

That's how they end up killing people who are fetching their ID in their pocket, or people carrying a black book, or really just standing there. The excuse is always the same: I feared for my life. And their superiors always back them up: The officer thought he was in danger, police officers have the right to use lethal force if they think their life is in danger. I remember reading an amazing post by a vet who joined the force, and he was totally baffled to see that his new coworkers were more agressive than his platoon in Irak.

Guess what, real military troops accept the fact that sometimes they'll get shot and die. They always make sure that the guy on the other side is actually shooting at them before they open fire. And when they don't, they're punished. Severely.

I know it's not a popular opinion in a country where cops are called heroes. But I'd rather see 10 dead cops than a single innocent citizen shot. It sucks, it's a lot to ask for, but it comes with the job. When you're a cop you have to put the life of others before your own. Otherwise become an accountant.

I get your point about the relative discipline of actual soldiers, but in Iraq it seems likely that at least 100 noncombattants died for every soldier who was killed.

Maybe. But those non-combatants were rarely killed by US troops in direct combat. More commonly, they were killed by 1) insurgent fighters 2) IEDs 3) US air strikes or other indirect fires.

And how many members of that family will EVER call the police to report anything short of a murder - if that - out of concern of being charged with it because they were convenient?

I'll throw in a relevant quote from this week's Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article about the 20% decline in 911 calls over the year following news of a beating by off-duty officers: (http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/investigations/2016/09/29...)

"In the Jude study, researchers found data suggesting people withdraw from the system after an incident of police violence. Papachristos said the study shows that police violence and other misconduct hurts officers' ability to work with communities and may result in a deepening of so-called "legal cynicism" — the idea that police are either unable or unwilling to help — within communities. That dynamic can perpetuate crime and distrust."

The Harvard study in question: "Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community" https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3114813-Jude-911-Cal...

edit: rearranging URLs

In Dennis Smith's memoir, "Report from Engine Co. 82", he wrote that in South Bronx people would call the fire department instead of the police, because they didn't trust the police.

That's very interesting, I might consider doing this in the future when needed.

Nowadays cops are a lot less likely to tussle and mix it up. It's all a sort of antiseptic interaction where commands are shouted from afar.

It used to be cops were willing to take a punch and punch back at someone who didn't cooperate. If that happens now it's resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, etc.

Not sure if it's a legacy of needles and aids which lead police to avoid any physical contact with a suspect or perp. It's a change that has led to much less "give" on the part of cops.

I think "assaulting an officer" happens even when you don't throw a punch. I've certainly seen enough videos where it was charged and I saw nothing like a punch.

Assault in most of the US is threat + ability. An actual physical attack would the add "Battery" to the charges.

I think the general public is unaware of how dangerous physical altercations are. The antisepsis of staged fight scenes on TV make it seem like any well-trained person can recover from a tussle and be back to normal by the next scene. In the real world, it only takes seconds for a struggle to turn fatal, even discarding the presence of any other weapons.

In the case of a police officer carrying a gun, all physical fights have to be assumed to be fights to the death. If the officer gets knocked out, there is now a loaded weapon on the table that is no longer under the control of the officer.

(Edited to fix typos.)

If the officer doesn't get knocked out, there is a loaded gun on the table under the control of a uniformed thug. For some reason, that scares me a lot more.

Police work is much less dangerous than many civilian jobs, yet the police are paid to assume risk. I think the balance is off, and society as a whole is suffering, because civilians who generally are nonviolent are much less capable of taking on that risk than the tainted police officers who are paid to do so.

It wasn't even in the top 10 in 2014 according to the BLS Census of Fatal Occupation Injuries[1], as summarized here:

http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/

Police and sheriff's patrol officers was number 15, at 13.5 fatal occupation injuries per 100,000 and it appears that around half of these were traffic related fatalities.

The top 5 are:

    Logging workers
    Fishers / fishing workers
    Pilots and flight engineers
    Roofers
    Refuse / recyclables collectors

[1] http://www.bls.gov/iif/cfoi_revised14.htm

Ahem... "police work is much less dangerous than many other civilian jobs".

The police ARE civilians. That they imagine themselves to be a branch of the military is the very problem!

They are civilians... however, colloquially "civilian" can refer to a non-insider, someone outside the profession.

A group of boxers might say "yeah, civilians wouldn't understand why we love the sport".

In other words, it's not always used in the strict sense of military vs non-military.

it's not always used in the strict sense of military vs non-military

When people with machine guns and armoured vehicles, etc refer to others as "civilians", I think it's clear what sense it is used in.

Well, is some countries (France, Spain, Italy) they have the concept of a Gendarmerie [1] which is a para-military police force. This is in contrast to, for example, the UK Constabulary, say, which is simply a policing organisation. A Gendarmerie is more disciplined, with a stricter enforcement of hierarchy and chain-of-comment. Related to this, I notice that some police forces in the US (all?) have military style titles - Lieutenant, Captain, etc. - rather than Officer or Constable. Is there a reason for this? Maybe the military-style ranks reinforce the idea in individuals that they serve a military-style role?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmerie#Role_and_services

I think the kind of danger police face is scarier though, and leads to more stress. Most people aren't very afraid of getting into a car or drinking soda, even though those are probably the two most lethal things any of us will ever do. It's not scary because the way in which they harm us is abstract and seems controllable.

When there is a shooting, on the other hand, everyone is terrified, and we spend days and weeks worrying about it amongst our friends and on the news. Because getting shot is very concrete, and totally out of our control.

And I think danger from human beings is in itself more scary than danger from inanimate objects. Maybe because we know that deep down if a human being is trying to hurt us they'll probably succeed. We know we really can't control another human being. We rely on social graces to keep us safe and when those are gone we are in a very scary place.

American police operate outside of those social graces all the time, and they never know when they'll depart them. It creates a lot of stress that "one day I may be pulled over the edge of the boat into the sea" doesn't.

Incidentally, this is a justification for de-arming first responder cops. It creates the assumption for all parties that the cop will stay inside social graces, keeping everyone safer, and de-stressing a situation.

Watch some police documentaries from the UK - I'd recommend the BBC's "Traffic Cops" or Channel 4's "24 Hours in Police Custody".

Even accounting for the presence of cameras, what's really striking is the politeness of British officers. The whole character of an interaction changes when it starts with a cheery "alright mate, do you know why I've pulled you over?" rather than "license and registration, keep your hands where I can see them".

A confrontation starts long before a punch is thrown or a weapon is drawn. In the UK, there's a doctrine of verbal de-escalation and an acceptance of risk that just isn't there in the US. If you treat everyone you encounter as a deadly threat and escalate your response accordingly, it quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Well there's this infamous interaction which is shown to most U.S. officers during their training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOSELcrJ7Kw

Admittedly, the officer starts the interaction with a command rather than a cheery, "aright mate," but I'm not certain that would have changed the outcome. The murderer later said during questioning that he killed the officer, "because he let me."

There is a very different dynamic in the US with regard to authority compared to the UK. I do think that US police have become too militarized. In particular with regard to the military-style raids discussed in the original article. However, I'm not certain that US cops can simply assume the attitudes of British cops without wider cultural transformation in the country at large.

One point that I don't see discussed often, is the background of police officers. How many are Iraq vets that apply in America's streets the exact same methods that made Iraq hell on earth... And why could anyone think applying occupation tactics to domestic law enforcement was remotely a good idea...

The bureaucratic divisions of the arms of the security state mask the underlying cultural fluidity between them all

I used to walk past the parking lot for Border Patrol at the Rainbow Bridge (US-Canada crossing in Niagara Falls), and 80% of the cars for the US Border Patrol had bumper stickers all over them stating that they were veterans. One of the stickers was even "Vietnam Vets Aren't "Fonda" Jan Fonda" (or something like that).

You could usually tell which ones were probably vets too. For example, during one crossing, the Border Patrol guy started trying to have a "sensible chuckle" with me over the fact that some guy had committed suicide on the casino floor (couple of blocks away) the previous day. He even made a fake "hand gun" to mouth motion.

Speaking of Border Patrol, you can always tell the ones that have been recently rotated up from the Mexican to the Canadian border crossing stations. Long-time Canadian border regulars saunter out of the office, casually ask for your passport and barely scan it over, and ask you how your trip was before waving you on through. The officers that are used to the other border come out with one hand on their pistol, on red-alert, spring-loaded to react at the slightest thing.

It makes for quite a contrast, particularly at a place like the sleepy border crossing closest to where I grew up; 95% of the traffic through it was log trucks or Canadian locals that crossed over to buy cheaper gas at the station just across the line on the US side.

Unrelated to the article and discussion of policing, but how does money work in border towns? Do towns close to the border accept both forms of currency? Do people just carry both? Does using a credit card just do the conversion behind the scenes?

Some credit cards charge international fees, some do not.

I can't speak for the Canadian side, but I grew up in El Paso. El Paso is right on the Mexican border with another large Mexican city on the other side, Juarez, and a fair amount of travel in both directions. On the US side, everything is done in dollars. On the Mexican side, pesos or dollars both generally work. I can't answer how Mexicans get ahold of dollars -- it's just never been a problem I've had to solve. I would suspect it's similar to when I've gotten local currency outside the US. There are currency exchange places, though I've only seen them in airports, your CC does the conversion automatically, an ATM does, or you go to a bank.

> your CC does the conversion automatically

At a markup. This was 1% for Visa and MasterCard back in ~2006 when I looked into it.

ahlatimer gave you the southern perspective, and for the Canadian side, my experience says that a store will take your foreign currency at (approximately) the exchange rate, but you'll get local currency as change. As you get further from the border, a vendor will still take your funny money, but "at par": my $20 U. S. buys me $20 Canadian in goods. Which currently means I, a holder of U. S. currency, get screwed by 28%. That's the penalty for not finding a Canadian ATM or using a credit card.

On the U. S. side, it would appear, according to signs at the cash registers, that many U. S. vendors work in a similar manner. The registers signs disappear within tens of miles of the border.

I really doubt it has anything to do with them being vets. In Iraq and Afghanistan you can't shoot until you are fired upon but in the US it's shoot first and ask questions later.

That really puts in context police shootings.

I wonder why the police are given so much more weapon's autonomy than the military?

Maybe because the military has to worry about international laws?

Not the United States military, to any appreciable extent. It does have to worry about its internal laws though, in which restraint is assumed unless specifically excepted.

Oversight from someone other than your own organization seems to be a novell concept for police departments.

Because someone will bring them to court? Hardly.

Unlikely. The military is set up to operate in extremely volatile environments where tiny mistakes can have immediate consequences far more deadly than anything the police ever faces. There are far bigger threats to them than someone else shooting first. Resisting immediate fears for the sake of bigger, more abstract goals/dangers has been a key element of military training ever since the ancient days of hand to hand field battles and this is just the continuation of that.

The police, on the other hand, can easily give in to the immediate fear of someone else shooting first: when they are not careful about not escalating, the worst thing that is likely to happen to their side is having to call in reinforcements and having some more bad press that won't add much to whatever they already have. If you want to put it in very crude terms, they are playing war in easy mode and there, many things that are very important to the military are completely irrelevant.

An opinion from a non American: This is what you get when you focus on tactics without focussing on strategy. Reactive vs proactive. By splitting the American police into many many different layered jurisdictions with no overall plans or even goals, there will never be a coordinated strategic view of anything.

The US military is far more centralised and (despite its many faults) aware of planning for wider strategic issues.

Many police depts don't seem to want to face up to the fact that the tactical problems they have now have root causes in their own short sighted policies, incentives and behaviour. If they carry on like they are, these problems will only get worse.

Other western countries with more centralised police hierarchies seem to put more effort into community relations and other more strategic stuff, even if it means less 'effective' tactics ie less control, arrests and convictions etc.

That does make a lot of sense. This reminded me of battle of adrianople, where the roman army was gathered for negotiation purposes and the emperor was not read to attack. But some Roman units began the battle without orders to do so, believing they would have an easy victory, and perhaps over-eager to exact revenge on the Goths after two years of unchecked devastation throughout the Balkans, however this resulted in the utter defeat of the roman army and was probably start of the process which led to the fall of the entire Western Roman Empire

Rule of Engagement are strict and strictly enforced. You can end up in deep shit for shooting someone in Iraq or Afghanistan if it was not allowed under the ROE. Whereas you can apparently choke someone to death in the US with the primary punishment being desk duty.

Unfortunately now the question becomes "why aren't there strict rules of engagement for domestic police forces?"

Because the people who would write the rules want to be "tough on crime".

"Law and order!"

> I wonder why the police are given so much more weapon's autonomy than the military?

I think because there is no political will to protect the usual victims of police brutality—indeed, the "tough on crime", and concommitant "tough on people who are in the general vicinity of people perceived to be criminals", mentality, is perenially politically popular.

Of course there is also no political will to protect the usual victims of military brutality, but they can and do (in many cases, to some extent, at least historically) protect themselves, and so it has been perceived that it's necessary to reckon with the possibility of reprisal.

Post Vietnam, in the eighties, almost half of US were veterans.

This has been going down ever since. At least in my area, new officers are usually straight out of college with a criminal justice major and no military service. (Though I do know several officers who have joined the national guard or the reserves later on.)

>> Post Vietnam, in the eighties, almost half of US were veterans.

Source? A quick Google search shows roughly 3.4MM deployed soldiers in Vietnam and another 4-5MM non-theater personnel.

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004615.html

[2] http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/what-percentage-of-americ...

It does seem high, but he probably also included veterans from previous military engagements, not just Vietnam veterans.

I've heard the opposite hypothesis. Previously police departments had a much higher percentage of vets. After having experienced the horrors of war, they had no need nor no desire to play soldier on the street. Also they would have calibrated their us versus them response. The criminals they encounter on the street are the same people they were defending and fighting with at war.

Their predictive power depends on the credibility of the premise (are actually vets less violent, non-vets more prone to playing solider-cop), which in both cases is taken for granted.

They don't explain the same conclusion. One predicts that police departments with more vets will tend to be less militarized, the other predicts that police departments with more vets will tend to be more militarized. These could be easily distinguished by gathering data, and it would be very helpful to know which, if either, is true.

That's not what predictive power means, and that's now how causal inference works.

> ...the exact same methods that made Iraq hell on earth...

...the suicide bombings, beheadings, religious wars, and terrorist organizations had something to do with that as well.

Military vets are vastly better trained than the kind of police discussed in this article and most importantly have an understanding that a. This is not a game b. The relative level of danger in these drug raid situations is usually vastly smaller than what warrants a militarized approach and c. American citizens are supposed to be the "good guys" in any case

Really? Some US soldiers in Iraq looked very young, maybe 20? How many years of training can you get before they deploy you, maybe two? Most professions require more training.

Most professions require more training.

Not policework in the US, though: From what Google tells me, training often lasts less than 6 months. In comparison, in Germany it's normally 30 months, but it can vary from state to state (in a few, it's 24 or 36 months).

Some US soldiers, airmen, marines, and sailors in Iraq/Afghanistan are 18. It took about 6 months from entering BCT to being with the unit I deployed with. You can attend BCT and AIT or OSUT at 17. And you can deploy when you're 18.

The drug war is what gives these type of police the justification for their actions. The drug war will be our undoing.

I watched Sicario last night. Great movie, but it also highlighted how the drug war will never be won and what a waste of life, money and time it is.

Yup. It starts with the very term "war".

We have military hardware and military guns. We have an institution of filled with arrogance and the instillation of fear ("Contempt of cop" is a real thing.) Even in this article, they talk about how the sheriff's swat team has a logo featuring a human skull. Not exactly in the "protect and serve" department, but more much more "I'm gonna fuck someone up" department. Civil forfeiture. Targeting communities for fines. Broken windows policing. A privatized prison system. Policing as a money maker.

This is contemporary police culture, and it is dysfunctional.

I've said this multiple times, but the older I get, the more I see the wisdom in NWA[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tke_27wbW-0

>Some are wearing T-shirts with the tactical team’s logo. It’s a human skull imposed over two crossed AR-15s.

Have they realized they're the baddies[1]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

Give everyone: 1. Food 2. Clean, safe and warm shelter, doesn't need to be fancy 3. A little money to spend (just a little! There still needs to be incentive to go out and work!) 4. Free and good quality education

And legalise drugs.

No more need for warrior cops.

What pisses me off most about this is that people say the cops need these tools, etc. Well, how come the cops suck so much at their jobs?! No, I'm serious. My local PD is in the midst of a crime wave. They take many hours to respond, never actually catch anyone, catch the wrong people, act like idiots.

this is the reality in our black communities. night raids, arbitrary detention, brutality, denigration. the police fight a war against the poor.

if they behave like an occupying army, they should not be so offended when they are fought like an occupying army. the black communities will continue to be oppressed, and so there will be more incidents like the slaughter in dallas. everyone will say "oh, the humanity" or similar, but nothing will change until public policy tightens the leash on the cops.

until we start taking officer safety more seriously and hobble their ability to abuse the public, we should expect continued violence against the police. to improve officer safety, the police need to be stripped of their weapons, armor, and legal leeway to abuse. it's simple: violence begets violence. rather than doubling down, pull back. unless the lives of police don't matter-- then by all means, let the police try continuing with the shootings until the morale of the black community improves.

under the best circumstances, the black community won't trust the police for another generation or two, provided that the police stop doing damage now. we need to aim for the children of their children being able to trust the institutions that are there for their benefit... or we could keep beating/shooting/stealing from/raiding them for another 20 years, and cause peace to be that much farther off.

That's why I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that paying taxes is immoral and wrong in our current system.

And that is because a good chunk of the taxes we pay go towards arming young people and sending them to kill other young people - military/war/defence.

Another chunk goes towards arming your own people against your own people, thus making dissent and protest hard and dangerous.

And another chunk goes towards maintaining big and powerful institutions, like the IRS, threatening us with violence if we don't pay up.

Centralised taxation systems should be replaced with citizen crowdfunding, in which everyone can choose where his tax money goes.

I'm curious if we'd still be spending as much on police and military if we could choose how we spend our taxes.

Unfortunately, taxes are difficult to avoid. For that reason, disrupt or damage at least as much as you contribute so it balances out.

That will only lead to more tax money being funnelled into law enforcement instead of public services.

Then step up your disruption?

We probably wouldn't be paying so much towards the military, but god only knows what idiocy would be receiving the money instead. The whims of the people would probably deliver super-unstable funding, making it confusing as to what programs really were effective and which ones just became scapegoats. Hard to say if that system would be more or less wasteful, especially with the low bar of what's currently happening.

Honestly, there's a leadership gap right now, but I'm not convinced that that means leadership as an institution is dead. We need good leadership that people can respect, which does it's job, and is ultimately accountable without endless redirection and blame for "the other guy being the bad one"

There are many parts of government that I disagree with, including many that I consider immoral. That's why it's important to participate in the political process. Government and law can be changed; it's a slow process and it requires a lot of work, but it's possible.

Picking and choosing where your taxes go a terrible idea, because government isn't à la carte[1]. Everybody has their own opinion on what they don't want to pay for, such as the religious fanatics that don't want to cover certain medical items (e.g. some types of birth control). The "market" is not a law of nature that fixes everything, so you're really advocating for a failed government where nothing is properly funded.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSQCH1qyIDo#t=170

> Government and law can be changed; it's a slow process and it requires a lot of work, but it's possible.

We embrace diversity in culture, why not diversity in governance?

People are exploring ideas like 'stop paying taxes' because there are no other options available to them except civil disobedience. We can't just move to another city or another state and get a governance we can endorse in good conscience.

> We embrace diversity in culture, why not diversity in governance?

When was the last time you participated in your local city council? We do embrace diversity in government. Local government is much easier to change.

> People are exploring ideas like 'stop paying taxes'

Well, have fun when they throw you in jail for failure to pay. That isn't a new idea (it's been tried longer than the USA has existed), and it always ends badly. It's equivalent to advocating for the government to fail. If that is what you want, you should say it directly.

> no other options available

> We can't just move to another city

First, sometimes you can. It's a solution used by many people in the past.

Second, why do you think this is the only option? Did you spend time trying to change local government? Did you run for office?

> endorse in good conscience

So you support every type of religious fanatic that hates some aspect of government? And the people that want to disband the armed forces? And the anarchists that want to unfund the entire government?

> People are exploring ideas like 'stop paying taxes' because there are no other options available to them except civil disobedience.

Stopping paying taxes is a form of civil disobedience. eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Thoreau_Spent_in_Jai...

> Picking and choosing where your taxes go a terrible idea, because government isn't à la carte

And why not ? Our current system stems from a different age, when there were no technological means of communication and collaboration similar to what we have today. Democracy (majority wins, regardless of competence) was the best tech people could come up with in those circumstances.

But this is no longer the case.

If we could start over, how would we build SocietyOS today ?

Laws ? Why not write them in a special programming language, which can then be executed against facts from reality (coming from sensors and human input) - no judges, lawyers and lawmakers - input facts, click and get the judgement.

Use collaboration and communication tools like Github to write the laws. Let citizens submit pull requests.

Let citizens have the "Society" app on their phones and let them up/down vote serious things too, not just pictures of cats.

Log the public opinion and gather feedback in real time.

Use advanced reputation systems, in which people's opinions have different weights in various domains. And so on.

Many many ways in which we can use today's technology to create a 'better', 'fairer' society - we just have to let go of the old system.

I think this will inevitably happen 'naturally' some time in the future, but the weight of the 'old' makes it very difficult to move forward now..

> And why not ?

Because you are advocating for the government to fail due to under funding. Do you not realize that every piece of government has some group that wishes it didn't exist? You are advocating for the de-funding of everything.

Living with other people requires compromise. We cannot all have the government we want, because most of those governments are contradictory. Instead, the goal should be to guarantee the ability to change government.

> regardless of competence

That's a feature, not a bug, because there isn't (and never will be) agreement on the definition of "competence". In the past, for example, tests of "competence" were used to disenfranchise people.

> best tech

You cannot define this either.

> Why not write them in a special programming language

I would love to have laws written in a strict, machine-checkable grammar. "Legalease" already approaches this idea, with many defined terms and standard formats for some things. There is a lot of room for improvement, of course.

> executed against facts from reality ... no judges, lawyers and lawmakers

You should really hang out with lawyers more, because this sentence is wildly detached from reality. You're pretending that "facts" and the interpretation of how the law applies to them are (or ever could be) some sort of automatic process. A large part of trials is deciding what the facts are, as there is often disagreement about that.

> coming from sensors

Sensors fail. It requires interpretation and argument to decide how to handle those situations.

> input facts, click and get the judgement.

Automatic judgment of law is terrifying. Consider that from the perspective of people that don't have your level of privilege. Minority groups regularly have to fight democratically created prejudices, and human judgment - judges, juries, etc - that has the option to not apply the law is an important safety mechanism.

> Use collaboration and communication tools like Github to write the laws.

Sounds great. When are you introducing these tools to your local government? Also... "collaboration and communication" to decide how to run society is called politics. I strongly recommend participating in that process; just remember that you may have to do a lot of remedial work before everybody else is ready for tools like git.

> Log the public opinion and gather feedback in real time.

I'd love to have that. If you know of a way to do that which isn't trivially broken and doesn't allow coercion by employers or other people in positions of power, do share it. It would solve a lot of problems. Right now, we already try to do this in the voting process; adding in the internet or a phone "app" is guaranteed to create problems. For an explanation of why, see this[1] talk by Andrew Appel (CS prof at Princeton).

I suspect you're suffering from a tech-focused variation of the Just World Fallacy[2]. Reality just doesn't work that cleanly, even when you use computers. In fact, computers have a nasty tendency to amplify and automate mistakes and prejudices, just like they can amplify and automate useful work.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

> Automatic judgment of law is terrifying. Consider that from the perspective of people that don't have your level of privilege. Minority groups regularly have to fight democratically created prejudices, and human judgment - judges, juries, etc - that has the option to not apply the law is an important safety mechanism.

In other words, are you saying the system might be prejudiced?

But even so, as long as it's less prejudiced than humans (notoriously bad), it'll be better.

> In other words, are you saying the system might be prejudiced?

Every system has prejudices and biases.

> But even so, as long as it's less prejudiced than humans (notoriously bad), it'll be better.

I'll take a system that has less prejudice, but first show that it actually is less prejudiced in practice.

Non-human systems "bake in" and automate the biases of the creator of the system, and it is very hard to create a system that isn't full of preconceptions, misunderstandings, and bad data.

The point I'm trying to make is that our society runs on a myriad of apps and databases, yet the operating environment in which these apps run is maintained by a bunch of people in suits, using a set of laws written in human language, elected by the majority vote, prone to corruption, emotions, insanity, etc...

We will need an operating environment which can distribute the limited resources available on the planet in a sustainable way if we are to survive as a species.

People can and want to govern themselves - most of our needs are local and can be solved locally without having to rely on a centralised entity to distribute money and decisions for us.

We can replace politicians with discussion forums and instant votes, instant decisions.

I see the role of 'government' as an institution which creates and runs campaigns for various 'global' societal issues, not as an institution which 'thinks' for everyone else.

Anyway, I know this is extreme idealism and I'm probably wrong in many ways, but as I said, eventually this system will be developed, it would help if we start thinking about it, because we're kind of running out of time ...

Thanks for the conversation.

If you really want to make your plan happen in reality, you can't target government first.

First step is build the software and get a small group of people to use it to govern themselves. Say... some conference organizers.

Second step is scale.

You don't even need to do the third step, because once teenagers are using SnapGovernance to organize bake sales and establish codes of conduct, the manual government will just look sillier and sillier, and people will look to government to solve fewer and fewer problems.

I totally agree and that's how I think it will happen anyway.

>Let citizens have the "Society" app on their phones and let them up/down vote serious things too

r/writing prompts had a scenario like that. Where a nuke is incoming and a majority of the citizenry has to approve a retaliatory strike, via an app of course.

Also, I'm hitting myself in the face right now.

Interesting. But unrealistic. The "do we all trust Todd to launch a retaliatory strike?" app would've already made the rounds long before that.

These are all from different countries. Just a quick image search. Would a visitor from another planet be entirely wrong to deduce that local regime propaganda aside, all governments have assumed a paramilitarized posture towards their citizens?

http://media.presstv.com/photo/20160325/1bd21648-c58b-4d39-a...

http://media.presstv.com/photo/20160323/f17b570b-68b6-4d7d-9...

http://media.presstv.com/photo/20150519/76bdc4b0-98ca-42b1-b...

http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200704/r137524_467947.jpg

http://worldnews.indywatch.org/archiver/worldnews.indywatch....

We don't know the context these photos were taken in though. Might have been during riots, or a terrorist alert. I'd personally want the cops to look like that if there was a nutter on the loose with a machine gun.

Context is a fair point. Interestingly enough, they are all beating the "terrorist" drums at your local regime.

> I'd personally want the cops to look like that if there was a nutter on the loose with a machine gun.

Here is the point: Physical protection of police personnel does not invariably require 'psychological intimidation' aesthetics.

Your "lone nutter" is by your description already nuts and has already crossed the line, so what's the point of dressing up in storm trooper outfits?

>Would a visitor from another planet be entirely wrong to deduce that local regime propaganda aside, all governments have assumed a paramilitarized posture towards their citizens?

Yes. Most of those (if not all) are from riots and such loaded scenes.

The "shoot first, ask questions later", or the "Send SWAT team because some guy sells marijuana" (or even lesser stuf) is 90% US (and some developing countries).

> 90% US

We forget (given the monkey business of the past 2 decades) that United States is an enabler in terms of what is acceptable. Today US, tomorrow everywhere.

True. Now in Europe there's police going around with useless combat weapons, in case they need to shoot some poor electrical repair worker by mistake.

I don't think that I get the point of the second picture:

> http://media.presstv.com/photo/20160323/f17b570b-68b6-4d7d-9...

It actually looks pretty unmilitaristic to me. (The others are horrifying.)

Those are French. Agreed, it is a tame one. Interest here was the universal pattern of white boxed "POLICE" on these uniforms regardless of the nation. They apparently all shop with the same tailor. /g

FWIW, those police appear to be at Charles de Gaulle airport. The OMON are (or rather were) the rough Russian equivalent of a SWAT team.

You want the text to be high visibility. One way is with a strong contrast between light and dark. Another way is dark on light. If the uniform is dark - which is typical of jackets - then either the letters need to be light, or there needs to be a box or other shape which is light, with dark letters inside.

Here are police with dark jackets, light letters with "POLICE", and no rectangle: http://www.europe-israel.org/2016/09/intifada-en-belgique-un... http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2016/06/20/une-cellule-...

They say "police" because they are in countries where France is a local language, and, quoting https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_(institution) :

> Le terme « police » désigne de manière générale l'activité consistant à assurer la sécurité des personnes, des biens et maintenir l'ordre public en faisant appliquer la loi.

They also include "Politie", again in light letters on dark. That's because they are Belgian police, and "politie" is what the Flemish population of Belgium uses.

At https://www.dreamstime.com/editorial-photo-french-police-con... you can see a mix of styles used in France, so that tailor isn't very consistent.

Other police prefer a high-visibility jacket, which means they need either dark letters, or a block (or other shape) if they want light letters. Here are some examples with the British police: http://daafeet.com/?p=6956 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9762516... and https://duckduckgo.com/?q=british+police&t=ffsb&iar=images&i... .

And here are some German police, who don't use the English/French word "police" on their jackets but rather the German "polizei". Both of these cases use light letters on dark jacket with no rectangle: http://www.liberation.fr/planete/2016/01/08/harcelements-de-... http://nyheteridag.se/polis-morklagger-asylsokandes-kriminal...

Or in Sweden, with the Swedish word for police, "polis", is in white, on a blue rectangle on high viz yellow: http://www.somaliska.com/booliska-stockholm-oo-joojiyay-ugaa... and where the underlying jacket doesn't have any word at all http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article18116027.ab .

At the bottom of http://almunecar.se/leva-och-bo/bra%20att%20veta.html you can see three different uniforms for Spain. Neither the municipal police (http://almunecar.se/onewebmedia/LEV-5.JPG ) nor the Civil Guard (http://almunecar.se/onewebmedia/Policia%20Guardia%20C.jpg ) have text on a rectangle, instead using the entire shirt yoke in a different color as the background.

What you showed, therefore, is neither a universal nor anything like your attempted joke about the same tailor.

Your first photo is of paramilitary police in a country fighting a civil war.

The second photo does not show any militarism.

The third photo is, sadly, from the USA.

The fourth photo is from a police state (Russia).

I don't know the context of the fifth photo but it looks like it may also be from the USA.

I'm pretty sure the first photo is from Belgium (Police/Politie gives it, as does the P90 SMG). Civil war, are you sure?

It's been a few years that Terry Gilliam's Brazil movie got upgraded to 'mostly documentary' status. At the time, 1985, it seemed only a dark comedy / cautionary tale.

(Well, the caution against ugly tech seems to have worked. Architecture and policing, not so much.)

Oh I get it now. The warrior cop is the new Klu Klux Klan. Violently suppressing the ability of the (poor/black/?) to succeed in America

It is the civil forfeiture thing with the lawnmowers that was a light bulb moment for me.

The author might be right about some things, but he is also clearly exaggerating toward his narrative in some others.

It wasn't the "Ferguson Protests" as the author is trying to put it, it was the "Ferguson Riots", there was looting, violence amongst the people and destruction of public property all around, you can't expect the police to show up in their blue uniform armed only with a baton in those cases.

Contextually, the employment of literally hundreds of armed troopers in anti-riot gear occurred before any violence at the protests, and the local and state authorities ratcheted up the response in the intervening days. Violence and looting within protest actions is definitely a problem, but it can't be considered in isolation from the behavior of the government towards protesters of all kinds.

Do you see that action by the police as provocation or deterrence?

At the risk of being facile, I think it was an attempt to deter peaceful dissent that provoked violent protest. Like the execution of Louis Antoine, it was worse than a crime -- it was a blunder.

Edit: It's also worth noting that Ferguson is a particularly pernicious example: an exclusively white power structure that functioned as a rentier class, using its government monopoly on force to forcibly extract revenue from an impoverished, ethnically-minority and, for voting purposes, transient population. It's like a midcentury European Marxist's fever dream of problematic class relations embedded in a matrix of structural racism.

Police deploy undercover provocateurs in order to discredit protests. At least one at Ferguson was caught on video.

Ferguson involved both protests and riots. More people were involved in the former than the latter.

Quoting M. L. King's "The Other America":

> These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity. - http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/

I can expect the police to not yell out "Bring it, all you fucking animals! Bring it!".

Well, let's be honest, justice and humanity is only possible in an atmosphere of respect for law and relative tranquillity. Justice has seldom been found at the head of a mob.

Or, to be honest, on a gunboat?

Justice has even less seldom been found when the police, government, and court system have little respect for a political minority.

You are not wrong in general but for cases like these maybe try to see it more as a "thrown exception" where as per the MLK quote above, the base "promises of freedom and justice have not been met".

It's not a simple problem, true. But I stand by my belief that riots are simply going to provoke a more powerful backlash in opposition to the rioters.

The Stonewall riots seem to have lead to long-term success. What better alternative would you have suggested than to riot?

The Zoot Suit Riots had the opposite effect from what you describe. Some of the police joined in on the riot against young Latino males, and there wasn't a powerful backlash against the rioters.

The riots in Romania in 1989 provoked a more powerful backlash. The government eventually lost.

That makes it sound like things aren't as simple as you describe.

The police started the lawlessness.

That is arguable, at best.

So, black people looting black people stores is a protest against the white system? I truly appreciate the huge mental gymnastics going on there.

Most protests are made of a mix of people. Many do so peacefully, including those whose actions might be illegal, as in cases of civil disobedience.

Some are angry, and express their anger through violence.

Some feel that despite a lifetime of struggle and anger, peaceful means don't seem to be working.

Some feel the only way to change the system is to tear it down and start over again. It's easy to do a web search and find people saying things like http://www.amerika.org/social-reality/the-revolution-has-fai... :

> Do your part — get out there and help tear [liberalism] down. If it’s part of this social fabric, destroy it. Debunk it. Subvert it. Vandalize it. Overthrow it.

For some, there is power in destruction, when there is powerlessness otherwise.

Still others are opportunists. They see a protest and decide to profit from it, or simply vandalize and loot for the lulz.

Unless there is a powerful internal leader, as there was with MLK, it can be hard to figure out who is who during a protest. It can be all too easy to look at the worst and attribute their actions to the whole.

Which you appear to have done.

> And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

All nice and dandy if it weren't for you quoting this as a part of your justification for the unjustifiable. It's not about attributing the violent behaviour of a minority to a group (like you are now trying to change the discourse), it's praising that violent minority behaviour as a fight against the system as you just did.

MLK was neither praising nor justifying those who riot. Here's the context before and after the quote I gave earlier:

> ... it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. ...

> And so we must still face the fact that our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nations winters of delay. As long as justice is postponed we always stand on the verge of these darker nights of social disruption. The question now, is whether America is prepared to do something massively, affirmatively and forthrightly about the great problem we face in the area of race and the problem which can bring the curtain of doom down on American civilization if it is not solved.

Nor do I praise nor justify riots. The goal should be to understand why riots occur, in order to avoid having them in the future - and hopefully by improving justice and civil rights, vs. some of the more horrific solutions that humans have tried before.

I'm always wondering if that isn't also a reaction to police force, at least to some extent.

Civilized and creative diplomacy more often than not leads to better results than setting the stage with an atmosphere of violence.

Also wasn't that incident of escalating violence triggered by executive failure in the first place?

Back in school we learned that the separation of powers is one of the defining attributes of a functioning democracy...

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