The article is about people literally trying to get away with murder. The last two sentences are references to well-documented cases of police officers killing non-dangerous citizens. There's no reason to be polite about this.
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.
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.