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Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

>Second, it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement is a benevolent actor.

I totally disagree. Care to expand on that?

I think the point is that police etc should not behave in such a way that many people immediately assume that an encounter would likely be antagonistic.

Basically, if you're afraid to go ask a police officer for help (which, apparently, is fairly common among black people in US, for example), then something is very wrong about police, and needs to be fixed.

It's worse than that. Some prominent lawyers advise that everyone should never talk to the police.

Which is very good advice, but it's because of the fact that testimony given to a police officer can only ever be used against you (it's hearsay otherwise). Not to mention that if someone slips up and accidentally tells a lie in the middle of a testimony, that instills doubt in the entire testimony ("I didn't kill her, I've never killed anyone, I've never even used a gun, I wasn't in the area that night" sounds fine until the last part if it turns out you were in that suburb that night).

Basically, to a lawyer a client talking to the police is giving the prosecution ammunition. Not to mention that nobody (not even the supreme court) can claim to know every federal law that applies to a person at a particular time (there was a quote for that but I can't find it on my phone right now).

Which is very good advice, but [..]

Wrong conjunction? It seems like you're explaining why it is good advice, not offering an opposing view.

I think you have given a perfect illustration of the GGP's assertion that "if you're afraid to go ask a police officer for help [..] then something is very wrong about police". This is a good example where the law sets up the police as antagonists against the general population.

My point with the "but" was that the reason why lawyers advise this is not because police are trying to harm you. It's because in general, people are very bad at law and providing testimony. So maybe I should've clarified that -- the police are not at fault for doubting flawed testimony.

To be fair, police do engage in manipulative tactics in questioning, but that's kinda their job. The job of the person being interrogated is to ask for your lawyer and say nothing else.

It's good to keep in mind how police are incentivized. They are paid to arrest suspects and close cases. Whether or not they nab the wrong person hardly matters to them. So although they generally may not intend to harm you they will gladly do so if it increases the numbers on which they are graded. And if you happen to have some cash on you when you make the mistake of talking to them then there is the bonus opportunity of asset forfeiture.

Thank you, this is exactly what I meant in the ancestor post.

It's a difficult situation, because different people have different opinions on what the role of law enforcement should be in proactively addressing upcoming behavior that they believe may develop to be criminal. By engaging in targeted mass surveillance in ahead of a suspected protest, the police in this situation is literally preparing for a confrontation, contributing to an antagonistic relationship between (this slice of) the community and the police.

I don't believe this approach is productive, but I recognize some people hold a different opinion. However, when this approach causes knock-on chilling effects and reduces the likelihood that people needing help will call upon police [1], I believe it's a detriment to the health of society.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-v...

You can tell how bad things are when people are seriously arguing that police can't be expected to be a benevolent actor.

Meaning the police ought to earn that expectation, not that people should think that way right now.

Can I ask why you disagree?

Sure. I think that law enforcement is necessarily there to keep us from doing things. That is enough for me to think it's not necessarily the same as benevolence. At the risk of flying my ultra-nerd flag, it's like the lawful-chaotic vs good-bad axes. To paraphrase the comment I was questioning, I think it ought to be a person's reasonable expectation that law enforcement is a lawful actor, but A) we aren't even there yet, and B) that is orthogonal to benevolence. The connection between lawfulness and benevolence is complicated by so much history and disagreement about what is actually "good" that I hesitate to just casually purpose them together like niftich's comment did.

It might even be worse, that we ought to expect law enforcement to be agents of order above all, and that just makes kinda me nervous. I'm not sure how rational those feelings of nervousness are. (both of those "ought to" statements are in the sense niftich used it in). Maybe law enforcement is fundamentally just a necessary evil, in that they're going to prevent someone from doing what they think is ok. Hence the orthogonal axes, where this is just a statement about order. I don't really know how I feel about this, hence the terse question. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyways, I didn't want to put my own opinion directly in my question because of the risk of sidetracking discussion towards my own opinion and away from my curiosity about why niftich felt that it was true enough to state without justification.

You raise some good points and it's helpful for me to understand how you arrived at them.

I don't disagree with most of what you said, but I feel that law enforcement ought to be agents of societal order, where that benefit is to the good of society at large. They're the enforcers of a social contract -- one that we happen to write down and call 'laws' -- and only by willfully violating these laws would I incur the antagonism of the police.

My rationale for using the construction "... law enforcement is a benevolent actor" does reveal my view that certain types of proactive policing result in tactics indistinguishable from a malicious actor: stalking suspected future offenders, aggressively policing minor offenses that in other circumstances would be excused, and creating an environment where proper etiquette to not end up detained, injured, or deceased is getting exceedingly difficult.

See also, this comment [1] where I address the original question from the context of another reply.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12690543

I expect police to be good people. Guess we differ there. I expect police to not follow evil laws. That's a bit hyperbolic though. More importantly, I expect police to use their judgment to do the right thing.

Police have an incredible amount of flexibility inherent in how they interpret laws. They choose when to put someone in jail and when to give them a break. They choose when pull their gun.

The law doesn't provide adequate guidance here. It cannot. Laws are made to be interpreted by people. Police, prosecutors, judges, and juries all apply their humanity to the ridiculously coarse and simplistic letter of the law.

I expect police to be the best of us. They need to be. It's an impossible goal but we could go a lot better than we do now.

Are you a programmer? If so, I hope it wouldn't offend you to suggest that you might be thinking of the law as a computer program, and police as machines that run it. If we ever create a benevolent machine to serve as our lawbook, I'll agree with you that humans should simply put their judgment aside and be simple agents of its will.

I think that flexibility is what puts laws as they exist (imperfect, maybe even bad) right next to the "ideal" social contract (good) in their mandate. With both of those in the job description, yeah, they ought to be good. That flexibility in enforcement and the judiciary can have bad unintended consequences (leaving the door wide open for the same action being legal for people in power and illegal for everyone else, or for bias to creep in), but on the whole we need it. You're totally right. Thanks for the insight.

I'm astonished at how lazy this comment is.

Sorry if that came across as lazy. I answered with my own opinion in more depth in another comment, but I didn't want to have niftich have to focus on details of my disagreeing point of view. I just wanted to know why they felt it was so plainly true that they stated it without justification, and I wanted to ask it without distracting the conversation. I was trying to respectfully say, "There are (hopefully) rational people out here who don't take that statement for granted. Can you explain?"

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