Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Or,

1. use expendable police materiel to scout out the situation of a dispatch in advance of sending in any actual police bodies (e.g. police drones with fancy optics.)

2. send people in heavily armored rather than heavily armed. If you can make your SWAT team immune to bullets (such as by, say, encasing them in an Armoured Personnel Carrier), then they're not going to be feeling threatened and shooting anyone.

#1 is pretty universally useful. You can figure out who has guns and who doesn't.

#2 is more situational, because our best solution for heavy armor right now—APCs—have no good way of entering your tenth-floor apartment. This is why I'm constantly checking up on the progress of military robots and powered armor: the more invincible you can make something, the less it needs to actually kill anybody to do its job. The ideal here is a combination of robot-police and human-in-exosuit police that don't even need guns, because nothing they are sent to deal with is ever really that dangerous to them.

>>2. send people in heavily armored rather than heavily armed. If you can make your SWAT team immune to bullets (such as by, say, encasing them in an Armoured Personnel Carrier), then they're not going to be feeling threatened and shooting anyone.

It's way easier to figure out ways to pierce armor than it is to develop it. Green-tipped ammunition is more than good enough to pierce all common and easily-worn body armor today.

Besides, if you send people in heavily armored, they are going to feel threatened by nature and will be more trigger happy.

Here is a video of a cop getting shot while trying to apprehend a man on a motorcycle (maybe NSFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXqoYMOkuYc

The motorcyclist has a gun in his pocket, and shoots the cop without warning.

How will your proposed solutions are going to do anything in that situation?

Sorry to rant, but this attitude of an amateur thinking they know better than all the professionals who have been doing their job for many years, and can propose quick fixes that will solve everything, is ridiculous.

I have a real hard time caring about cops' fears in such a scenario. Innocent until proven guilty is a time-honored maxim of the U.S. justice system, and a cop deciding to kill you completely invalidates that.

Is being a cop scary? Hell yeah and I feel bad for those folks, but if you don't want to constantly be in fear of your life, get another job.

Put cops who murder innocent civilians in jail. End of story. This shouldn't even be a debate in the U.S.

EDIT: Since I had the goal posts moved on me, I want to make it explicitly clear that a cop should be allowed to kill in self-defense, just like any other lawful citizen.

> Innocent until proven guilty is a time-honored maxim of the U.S. justice system, and a cop deciding to kill you completely invalidates that.

Consider two civilians. If A shoots at B, and B shot back and killed A, should B go to jail for murder?

Now just because B happens to be a cop, does he lose all his rights?

> does he lose all his rights?

You've just created a pure strawman. Cops should never lose their rights! I am not making such an argument, and I don't see how you got there from my points. I would never argue such a claim.

The cases I'm talking about are not self-defense. They are like the story above. If A murders B, and A is a cop, then A should go to jail regardless of the fear A had in that situation. But this is not what happens in the United States. Cops don't go to jail for shooting perfectly innocent people because the cop can claim they were afraid for their life and thought that B had a gun.

If I'm a civilian, that defense doesn't fly. But if you're a cop, then it does work. That is a flaw in our justice system that needs to be corrected because a perfectly innocent man can be killed by the state and no repercussions are felt.

The state should never be able to kill an innocent man. If they are shooting at you, they aren't innocent. But if you think they have a gun (especially in an open-carry state like Kansas or Texas) then they are innocent and should not be killed.

EDIT: I am saddened by the downvotes. Does the state have the right to kill innocent people if those people own a gun? Doesn't the second amendment protect against this? I simply do not see the legitimate argument for allowing such behavior. This just seems like rabid tribalism for police.

I don't think I understand what scenario you're talking about. If you're talking about the scenario I posted a video of, I think you are completely off base.

If you're talking a cop straight-up murdering someone, and it getting covered up, then, of course, that's wrong.

I think there is a lot of gray area between these two scenarios, however. I also think if there was a ban on guns that would solve most of it.

The scenario at hand in the OP, where a cop murders a completely innocent man through mistake. I agree that a ban on guns would likely solve the problem in the video that you posted.

My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder. If cops were held to the same standard, then they could be held accountable for their crimes and some of the public outrage would be alleviated.

If (for the sake of argument) the amount of guns in this country were significantly decreased via a ban and the police still held to a different standard, police would still be able to kill an innocent person out of fear for their life. Racial biases could also cause a cop to be more fearful in a situation and still kill an innocent person without consequence.

I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).

> My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder.

That video was part of a specific response refuting the idea that if the cops just used drones and body armor, there wouldn't be a problem anymore. I did in no way intend to imply it was a counterpoint to the main story. I don't know why it's being perceived in that way.

> I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).

Yes, but that runs into the trade-off I was talking about. Either you have a heavy handed, "shoot first, ask questions later" style police force, or one with a lighter touch. In the first scenario, more civilians are killed. In the second, more cops.

Only by banning guns can you reduce casualties on both sides.

How would take the guns out of circulation already? There are millions of them out there and a whole tribe of diehards who will never give them up, and on top of this an entire industry around it -- the amount of people that die from this problem isn't worth the political capital and sustained decision maker attention needed to push this through compared to everything else that could be done using the same limited bandwidth.

The thing about guns is that there's basically no moment that exists between "in fear for your life" and "dead." Either you shoot the other person while you think they're pulling out a gun (i.e. kill in purported self-defense), or you {get shot and die, nothing happens}. There's no moment, with guns involved, where you can know that someone is trying to kill you, without already being dead.

Just because an approach isn't applicable in literally 100% of situations doesn't mean it isn't applicable in most everyday situations.

And it may have unforeseen consequences or it may take away funds for something else equally or more important, etc., etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com