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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

The article is about a sub-group of these people, but the tone to me as well was one of sweeping generalizations.

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.

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I'm originally from Brazil and I hear that same argument about cops over there, that bad ones are a minority, that we shouldn't generalise.

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.

Well the saying is bad apples spoil the bunch, and obviously in some cases the whole bunch is spoiled but we refuse to believe it, and instead still think we’re at the few bad apples part.

Any member of the force, its leadership, or the surrounding politicians who is not 100% supporting the investigation and calling for heads to roll, is complicit. If that's a large enough group, then a sweeping generalization is absolutely warranted.

"Bad apple" arguments only work if there's actual evidence of "good apples" working to expel the bad ones.

There's no evidence that even 1% of all police are complicit. What is your standard for "large enough"?

Is there evidence of 99% of supposedly non-complicit officers standing with victims, insisting on justice for those guilty?

Because that's the standard I'm calling for.

"Is there evidence of 99% of supposedly non-complicit muslims standing with victims of terrorism, insisting on justice for those guilty?"

"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.

But police _as an institution_ are entrusted with the public safety. The relationships between the officers and the institution and the institution and the public are both totally different than for the other groups you named.

It's not the same at all.

First of all, police in the U.S. aren't an institution--they're beholden to local governments (and state governments in the case of state patrol). Ergo you can't [reasonably] generalize about police nationally based on a handful of malfeasants.

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.

As long as police unions fight reform it's the institution as a whole that's the problem, not a small sub-group.

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