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Comment by x220 | Hacker News Reader

>less than 30% of people believe that police behave lawfully

If you ask someone if they think a large collection of individuals behaves lawfully, the answer should always be "no" because with a large enough group there will always be criminals in that group.

If you're instead thinking about whether police break the law in an organized and collectively deliberate fashion, that's an entirely different question.

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Perhaps, but the impression is reinforced when the police organize themselves to break the law in an organized fashion. For example, consider the police of Oakland, California. Every one of their patrol motorcycles is modified with a loud, unlawful exhaust muffler, through actions that body deliberately undertook. Clearly there are numerous criminals among the ranks of that police department, but it's also true that the department itself is corrupt and makes corrupt decisions as an organized body.

Edit: which is to overlook the most glaring examples of NYPD corruption: parking placards and get-out-of-jail-free cards for friends and family (recently reduced from 30 to 20 per officer!). It is not a great exaggeration to claim that the NYPD is America's largest criminal gang.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. OPD is positively plagued with organizational problems and has been under a consent decree for over a decade.

More background on Oakland: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Oakland-PD-s-Harleys...

See, now we're talking about something more specific and useful. Those are pretty interesting.

Uhm, what? Even if someone commits a crime, that does not make them any less able to recognize that the police break laws.

Yes, the police break laws. Republicans break laws. Democrats, Muslims, Trump supporters, and Python programmers break laws. Any large group of people contains law-breakers. It's not a useful statement.

The difference between police officers and the rest of those groups is that all of them but police officers are self-selected and unenforced. It is entirely feasible to have a police force that break laws only negligibly by enforcing the removal of individual police who break laws.

I think I agree with you entirely. I'm pointing out that that statement is very different than "the police break the law".

The fact that the police exist specifically to enforce the law and that they are invested with enormous powers to do so makes them fundamentally different from the other groups you mention. Please do not insult our intelligence with such specious arguments.

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