This is the tone and conclusion of this article. If you want the actual story, read the original report here: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-gun...
Edit (instead of replying to all of the individual replies):
I'll be the first to acknowledge that there are systemic problems in police forces worldwide, just like there are systemic problems in any large organization, especially one endowed which so much executive power.
However, any argument that paints a picture of "uniform equals bad" is, in my opinion, not only delusional, but is also a severe injustice to the good apples in public service, that is: in service to the public.
"Bad apple" arguments only work if there's actual evidence of "good apples" working to expel the bad ones.
Because that's the standard I'm calling for.
"Is there evidence of 99% of supposedly non-complicit blacks standing with victims of black crime, insisting on justice for those guilty?"
If you assume that everyone in a group is guilty of some crime committed by a tiny fraction because there isn't evidence that 99% of them condemn the guilty, then you're participating in a conspiracy and you're validating a dangerous line of reasoning that can be weaponized against anyone, including groups that you care about and/or belong to.
It's not the same at all.
The idea that police nationally get together and conspire violence against the public or even a particular racial group is beyond absurd. This is among the most dubious of conspiracy theories, and I don't know how such theorists can hope to be regarded as credible, reasonable people.
I don't buy it, the system itself enables this, if it didn't then those bad apples would have been detected and expelled before they could cause so much damage. It can be a minority doing that but they have affected so much that the whole itself is no longer trustworthy and requires reconstruction from the ground up, the foundations themselves have been damaged and as it would be for a structure or a car, when the base structure that supports everything else cannot be repaired you need a new one.
That's what should happen in Baltimore, that's what should happen with the Brazilian military and civilian police, their foundations aren't good enough to be trusted anymore.
There is - the tone of the article affects the tone of the thread. Hacker News is supposed to be about intellectually gratifying discussion, but an article whose purpose is to spark outrage results in comments full of invective and tedious boilerplate. Cathartic for people who want to rant about Americans and guns and ACAB... but we've already been there and done that and read that a hundred times.
How are such straw men intellectually gratifying? How is that not tedious boilerplate? How is you reading something a hundred times even a factor compared to hundreds of murders swept under the rug? Don't wanna read about it, put an end to it.
> How is you reading something a hundred times even a factor compared to hundreds of murders swept under the rug?
You have provided a perfect example of what this discussion does not need, and what articles like the above lead to, thank you.
Yes you might be able to solve police misconduct by forcing them to turn on each other and report and aggressively as possible. You probably will utterly destroy any semblance of morale and group cohesion and won't have a functioning police force at the end. Yes, we could ban guns from the population. Except that would not only require a constitutional amendment, but also solve the logistical issues of tracking down guns while simultaneously solving the problem of an armed criminal element who now has a helpless population in a massive country where response times can be 20 mins or longer. Body cams will help, but even if people trust police, how does that solve the problem where being a drug dealer is probably the best opportunity you have in the inner city? And it goes on and on.
It's a similar issue to homelessness. It's a multivariate problem that requires many different targeted approaches to deal with the entire thing. People unfortunately tend to focus on their pet issue of choice and ignore the others. Worse yet, political interests often will try to shut down each other from getting funding in order to push their own cause du jour.
You're confusing "intellectually gratifying" with "apathy".
You're confusing endorphin hooks and virtue signalling with action. Being outraged on an internet forum doesn't lead to progress against police corruption.
Why on earth did you put "article" in quotes. Are you questioning whether it is, in fact, an article? Because that seems quite self-evident.
You might disagree with it but be assured TFA is, in fact, an article and putting the word in quotes just makes it look like you don't know what quotes are for. Hint: quoting.
Nowadays anyone can post an article on the internet. That’s great. But because of this, the definition of “article” has become basically meaningless. An article could be entirely fact based, full of falsehoods, or misrepresent facts by mixing them with opinions. There really should be a distinction between different levels of reporting. Most of the problems cropping up these past two years can be traced to the fact that people put the same credibility in a piece by some random person on the internet as they do in one by a career journalist.
Citation needed.
Have you missed the whole “fake news” fiasco? People will upvote and share any article that reinforces their existing beliefs and world view. Rather than approaching articles with a healthy skepticism and critical thinking, many people are consuming content based on what “team” the author seems to be advocating for. Instead of asking questions like, “what is the author’s agenda?” or “does this author have a track record of reliability?”, people are asking “does this author believe the same things I do?” If the answer to that is “yes,” then not even a follow-up article from a Pulitzer Prize winner will be sufficient to discredit it for many people.
People do that with accredited news already. For example, in communist circles there is some groups that believe that no matter what, everything that Stalin did was justified. They will bring up no amount of obscure scholars, and disregard large amounts of citations from modern scholars and new evidence to protect this world view. The same goes for any world view. Look at all the people hoping against all evidence that bitcoin is a fad.
Ultimately, people will do this no matter what quality of the evidence presented is (aside from one or two people who decide that they like X news source, there is a chance they will reverse with a citation from that news source, but no other, even if the quality of the evidence is the same). 'Fake news' existed long before it came to that name.
Which is really a response to how unbalanced the US political process has become. When the facts disagree with your point of view, ignore them. -> Reality now seems biased.
On "article" though it's inappropriate. The other comment notwithstanding, an article is an article, no matter if it's written by a journalist, an amateur, or a monkey banging its head on a keyboard. There is zero credibility implied by the word.
Example:
> The "food" from that restaurant was awful
Correct usage. You are (humorously, snarkily) questioning that what you received was food at all.
> The food from that "restaurant" was awful
Incorrect. No matter what you thought of the food, the fact is that it is a restaurant (ie, a place that dispenses food, with no consideration of quality implied). This usage betrays a lack of sophistication and should be avoided.
An article is an article is an article. What is it if it's not an article? Imaginary? It just doesn't work.
> The "food" from that restaurant was awful
Incorrect. No matter what you thought of the food, the fact is that it is food (ie, something that can be digested as a source of nutrition). This usage betrays a lack of sophistication and should be avoided.
> The food from that "restaurant" was awful
Correct usage. You are (humorously, snarkily) questioning if the establishment you visited qualifies as a restaurant.
If one thinks of a restaurant as a business that accepts money to serve you food then the comparison is the same. No matter what you thought of the restaurant, the fact is they took your money and served you food.
I would personally never use the first usage as it's kind of lazy and déclassé. But it is at least valid.
The second usage is invalid. If you think otherwise be aware you are speaking non-standard English and others, like me, will notice it.
Some of the worst and most inaccurate articles I've ever seen have been written by career journalists. (Admittedly I live in the UK where the majority of newspapers are on a par with Infowars for honesty and fact checking. Maybe you live somewhere where professional journalism is more respectable).
> It is not just Baltimore cops. It is cops. They will shoot you in the face in front of your infant daughter. They will choke you to sleep for selling cigarettes. They will shoot you in the back for walking away.
This is drawing a false equivalence by assuming the actions of a subgroup represent the group as a whole. It’s no different than citing a few brutal murders from black people and then concluding with “this is black people. They will murder your children...”
No editor would ever allow a line like that to make it to publication. It’s needlessly provocative language that reveals the author’s bias and reduces the credibility of what might otherwise be a decent piece of writing.
I'm sorry, but have you ever read an actual newspaper other than the New York Times? That kind of thing makes it into newspapers with editors all the time. Hell, a lot of the time it's the editors writing it! [1]
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/aishagani/muslim-and-jewish-groups-... to pick one of the more high profile recent examples from the UKs biggest selling newspaper, in a column written by a former editor
When some cops are corrupt, does it matter that the rest might be decent? An individual police officer represents the entire force. They wear the colours and the badge as a representative of the whole establishment.
Would you call the police if you knew there were such troubling corruption issues? It would definitely make me think twice - you just don't know which officer will turn up.
Zero tolerance is the only way forwards when it comes to this, otherwise the few destroy trust for the masses.
Yes. Of course it matters.
However the point that I'm trying to make (maybe badly) is that the Police are different to most other organisations. They're probably closest to healthcare in that the population, or maybe even distinct communities of a country needs to be able to trust the entire police force has its interest at heart.
From an outside perspective, this is failing in a bad way in the US. It is more than likely the actions of a few that is causing it.
That failure has bad repercussions, things get worse because people start taking justice into their own hands ... it leads to riots, clashes and worse. That's why you can never tolerate any corruption in a justice system.
I've witnessed first hands the riots here in London that resulted from questionable Police actions (we still don't know the full story of those events). It feels like society is crumbling when things get that bad.
That argument can be used to attack virtually any minority.
From wikipedia:
"A police force is a constituted body of persons empowered by a state to enforce the law, protect property, and limit civil disorder"
If there are a corrupt few breaking the law, the body of persons cannot be said to be performing its duty.
It's worth reading about police accountability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_accountability
Generally the focus of reform is to hold the entire agency/force accountable.
Of course, if you replaced "cops" here with "black people", you basically arrive at the attitude of the corrupt cops themselves, and those who justify their "zero tolerance" policies, including those mentioned in TFA.
An ethnicity is a completely different thing to a law enforcement agency.
edit: If you want me to explain why, I can. A law enforcement agency is a group of people who have decided to perform a particular duty. An ethnicity is a group of people who are born that particular way.
A law enforcement agency has a strict set of rules governing behaviour, which when broken purposely constitute corruption. An ethnicity does not a have a particular set of rules, they follow the same rules as wider society. If they did have a specific set of rules, it would be considered an apartheid style society.
A member of a law enforcement agency has far reaching powers beyond a typical citizen. A member of an ethnicity is supposed to have the same powers as everyone else.
What's interesting is that by comparing the two you get a good idea of why police corruption is a terrible thing.
That the police and black people are not precisely the same sort of entity is irrelevant.
By the way - the law agrees with me. Please read about police accountability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_accountability
"The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act authorized the United States Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division to bring civil ("pattern or practice") suits against local law enforcement agencies, to reign in abuses and hold them accountable.[9] As a result, numerous departments have entered into consent decrees or memoranda of understanding, requiring them to make organizational reforms"
Now apply your logic to black people, and you'll find that your views are worrying.
The basic issue is, that when the department/agency as a whole is not held accountable, they're able to avoid reforms that circumvent the issues in the future. Punish just the one police officer, and another later is able perform the same levels of corruption. It's systematic abuse of power.
This is why we must hold 'cops' or 'Baltimore cops' responsible, not just the few perpetrators.
I'm assuming based on your comments here and elsewhere in this thread that you're being purposely obtuse, and therefore I'm choosing not to engage with you further.
They are fairly commonly held opinions–that individual actions can destroy trust in an organisation, and that passiveness or tolerance within an organisation of such actions is equally as damaging.
I also think I've made fairly strong points about why your comparison is, in my opinion, incorrect. Not sure I'm being obtuse, but sorry if you think that is the case.