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Comment by talldan | Hacker News Reader

But I didn't replace "cops" with "black people", you did.

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.

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The same rationale used to blame police as a whole for the corruption of a few is also used to justify the attitudes of the police presented in this article, on the basis that any random black individual is more likely to be violent or prone to criminal activity.

That the police and black people are not precisely the same sort of entity is irrelevant.

Just because you can't see the difference, it doesn't make it 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.

>Now apply your logic to black people, and you'll find that your views are worrying.

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.

That's fine. I don't really understand why you have an issue with concepts like zero tolerance for corruption, police reform, collective responsibility, police accountability.

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.

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