Police Post Racist and Violent Messages on Facebook, a Review Shows | Hacker News Reader

Police Post Racist and Violent Messages on Facebook, a Review Shows

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135 pointsboapnuaput63 comments

> "Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10% of families in the general population," the National Center for Women & Policing says. "A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24%, indicating that domestic violence is 2-4 times more common among police families than American families in general."

http://womenandpolicing.com/violenceFS.asp#notes

Surely there's a segment of the population with similar personality traits predominant to police officers that don't become police officers. One would think they'd also have similar incident of domestic violence if this were a personality trait?

Personally, I would have no interest in dealing with the horrible things people do to one another, on a regular basis, as part of my job. No thanks. Reading the news is bad enough, I wouldn't want to live it.

No one is claiming it's a personality trait, though that absolutely could be a part of it. More likely, it's because police officers can act with impunity in pretty much every scenario. Add in a high-pressure job, and you've got a recipe for abuse.

Nevermind the fact that steroid abuse is common in the police. The BMJ has a lovely factsheet on anabolic steroid abuse: https://bestpractice.bmj.com/topics/en-us/987

Risk factors: "employment as nightclub bouncer, professional male dancer, professional wrestler, or law enforcement officer"

> Surely there's a segment of the population with similar personality traits predominant to police officers that don't become police officers. One would think they'd also have similar incident of domestic violence

Funny enough, casual criminals fit that picture quite well. That would explain why they are attracted to "the horrible things people do to one another, on a regular basis" - to a non-trivial extent, they share the character traits of the people who do these things in the first place.

honestly, is this really surprising? people become police officers not just to "help others" but to do it through the use of force, weapons and authority.

if you group people by profession and gender, you can probably find 1000 things that are specific to that group. it's like saying that programmers/engineers have a higher probability of being good at math or being introverted vs the general population.

Not as a counterpoint to the domestic violence issue but to broaden the picture of symptoms of widespread mental illness, the suicide rate is also higher than the general population.

> “The Ruderman Family Foundation, a philanthropic institution, also found that first responders die by suicide at a higher rate than people in the general population, according to an April 2018 report.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/for-third-straight-year-polic...

> Common threads between suicides have been cited, including pressures of the job.

Most important is probably access to means and methods - easy access to guns.

Plus familiarity with using a gun.

If you follow the footnotes, you'll see that the only references for this claim are almost 30 years old. One of the two is just a Congressional hearing.

Do we have evidence around whether this is a selection effect or a transformation effect?

That is, do racist assholes disproportionately gravitate towards the police force? Or does the police force disproportionately turn ordinary people into racist assholes?

This would be both extremely interesting and very difficult to study.

> This would be both extremely interesting and very difficult to study

You’d have to get a department to consent to the random sampling of its officers’ social media histories. (Can’t just use public data due to the selection bias it entails.)

The data are there, being dutifully logged by everyone’s cell phones and flung off to servers across the world. Ethically accessing them is the political problem.

Alternatively, do heavily prejudiced people commonly not know how to operate social media privacy settings?

When you don't ever face consequences, why hide? It's just extra work. And then no consequences or even positive reinforcement from your Facebook friends validates them and makes folks even bolder.

There's 120,000 law enforcement officers in the US. It'd be pretty easy to find 10-15 people blowing off steam and joking on FB about their jobs in ways non-officers may find offensive. Combined with a couple straight up racist ones. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find similar relative numbers in Canada and the UK.

These individuals should be punished no doubt and likely will be as a result of this article.

> I wouldn't be surprised if you could find similar relative numbers in Canada and the UK

I don’t have the source on hand. But the elevated rates of domestic violence (like 4x baseline) in policing households is unusually prominent in the United States.

I’m curious how that compares to other violent and dangerous jobs (ie, military, prison guards, etc) and other country’s law enforcement.

If the US or job is higher that could be a serious problem that they need to look into (if it isn’t already, which I doubt). There has to be more to this than the police are just over-selecting for evil people.

Although the US has to be one of the highest numbers of police dealing with people with weapons. I remember the WaPo database of police shootings showing that almost all of them (95%+ except one or two involved people with weapons). Adding all the people who didn’t get shot but still had a dangerous weapon, that can have some PTSD. Which famously rears its head in many unexpected self-destructive ways.

The first, you'd think. Police forces have a recruitment problem, if they began firing those who have a history of excessive force use they'd be short-staffed.

The drug war is what ruined policing in this country. If a large part of what you do is brutally enforce laws against essentially harmless behavior disproportionately against minorities, you’re only going to get sociopaths and racists who want to do the work.

I highly recommend David Simon’s talks on policing (he is the creator of The Wire).

He talks at length about how the skill sets necessary to investigative work and community policing have largely been lost as a result of the focus on meeting drug war quotas.

Do you have any links?

"do racist assholes disproportionately gravitate towards the police force?"

This one, probably, as usually racist+fascist assholes are the ones who dream of wearing an uniform and carry weapons so they can "feel the power" over other people. It's a selection problem, which I'm sure those responsible are very aware of and have no intention to change. A violent cop is a perfect weapon for corrupt governments and politicians: he does nasty things for you and when he retires he becomes part of your private "police" as eternal gratitude for having saved his ass multiple times for those nasty things. That is also very likely the reason why there are many accounts of cops abusing steroids (side effects very similar to cocaine) but so far it seems no serious investigation has been started.

> It's a selection problem, which I'm sure those responsible are very aware of and have no intention to change

Do you have evidence for this?

"Do you have evidence for this?"

If anyone of us had evidence of this the cat would be already out of the bag, so unfortunately I don't. There is however evidence that selection is deeply flawed, so I wonder why the same criteria that would have me sacked in no time by any company HR department if I behaved as such can't apply there. Racist violent people aren't usually that smart at hiding it, I know some of them and usually 30 minutes of chit chat is more than enough to expose their ideologies and how wrong would be to give them that power.

The pattern with "the racist+fascist assholes" typically is that the craving for power (and sometimes for brutal violence) comes first, and then ideas are sought in a bid to normalize it. A position of authority, or purposely fanning widespread hate towards some socially marginalized or despised group that few people will bother to counter, are two things that are very often used to get away with all sorts of brutality and inhumane behavior. It's essentially a smaller-scale version of what the Nazis did, and the sort of thing that should actually be decried as such, in the strongest possible terms.

The police shouldn't be associated with the Nazis here. There's no wide scale organised plan to wipe out an entire race. The number of truly rotten officers is in the minority or there would be more bright line evidence of horribles. Most actions caught by police aren't outright actions of intentional corruption or malice, they are improper or bad policing that goes unpunished, which is the real problem.

You can't be expected to punish the police when you need them to do your job, which is the position DAs are in. If they were to lose the trust if the police then they wouldn't have the super they need to go their job. A statewide role of internal enforcement that's separate from the DA and is an unelected role appointed by the governor or legislative body would likely be the best one could do for this role and provide the freedom to do the job effectively.

Add to that punishments should come out of the insurance funds for the force meaning police organizations that are truly terrible would get shut down when they could not afford their insurance. Also a national police database with all punitive actions against officers that is permanent and not removable unless ordered by a judge would go a long way to prevent officers who get punished in multiple locations from just moving to a new job.

I'm pretty sure both are going on. If someone joins a new group of friends who have strong opinions, they'll usually adopt those opinions, or at least act like they're normal and shouldn't be challenged. I think most officers start in the police in their early 20s and will be mentored by the older ones who will explain that their racist attitudes are what save their life, etc. Good questions for empirical study.

Ans: That overused word from early 90's business speak; Synergy.

Serpico the movie is based on real life corruption. I don't think this is a solvable problem without changing humanity it the role entirely. There's a saying, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. While there are most likely some officers who are above and beyond the best of humanity, most are likely average or below average due to the selection process and the type of people who would go into the field.

Direct link to The Plain View Project itself: https://www.plainviewproject.org/

Which is itself part of Injustice Watch: https://www.injusticewatch.org

"a non-partisan, not-for-profit, multimedia journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality"

Now can you imagine what they say in perceived safe spaces, like WhatsApp or the local, cop-friendly dive bar?

I can, because I've been in their midst in both of these places and it's as bad, and likely worse, than you'd imagine. It's happened more times than I can count, but it still never ceases to amaze me what some of these people will say to someone who they don't know, but could pass for one of them.

As it turns out, when you have a position in society that allows people to get away with hateful violent actions, it will attract hateful and violent people.

Having grown up in a poor community I got to know a lot of police officers and their children. Racism and thuggish behavior was definitely a huge problem. These posts sadly don't surprise me.

That being said, Buzzfeed and their ilk routinely make excuses for people on the left posting the same type of racism and thugish messages. "Ironically" calling for old white men to be punished, routinely calling for violence against Trump and Trump supporters (not ironically), sexist comments against men and so on.

I feel the need for freedom of speech is so great that we shouldn't censor any of this stuff but neither should we endorse or support it in the media regardless of what side of the political spectrum it's being perpetrated on.

I don't think its a hard distinction to make that the bar is higher when you are issued weapons and authority by the state.

Leftist asshole talking about "old white men" online = bad

Cop who has the power to use force against you or arrest you talking about how "thugs deserve slugs" = worse

This isn't hard.

The media is extremely powerful and has amplifying effects on violence. Both they and the police are strong and dangerous.

Classic whatabouttism. Does it really make you feel better to imagine two sides, one of which is "left", the other "right", and placing them on a balance? The two sides here are the police and civilians, not police and "leftists on the internet".

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological warfare. If one is already heading there, either take it in the opposite direction, or simply don't reply. This community is about curiosity, and scorched earth doesn't interest or benefit anybody.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, please don't use the 'whataboutism' label in arguments here. It falls under the guideline that asks people not to call names in arguments. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Fair enough. I felt I was trying to pull the conversation back out of the ideological by re-humanizing and making relevant the actual victims.

I’d say the opposite. Intolerance should not be tolerated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Despite all the sentiment analysis algorithms those posts are not routinely spotted and taken down...

> "A Facebook page called Chicago Code Blue attracted attention for inflammatory comments — such as “Every Thug Deserves a Slug” — after an officer was found guilty in the death of Laquan McDonald."

Oh dear, speaking of "people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"

... because one comment on social media becomes a just characterization of all members of a class?

Depends on the number of likes I guess.

what is wrong with these people

Most of these comments aren't racist but "just" inhuman and they show how astonishingly incompetent some cops are in social situations.

>“I would of pulled the trigger.” This sentence on its own does not show any racism.

Did you scroll down?

That was covered in the headline...

"Police Post Racist and Violent Messages on Facebook, a Review Shows"

Sure, there were non-racist comments that were troublesome... but also a lot of racist ones. What is your point?

It shows really poor grammar though.

People who face little to no consequences from being violent endorse violence. Water is wet. More breaking news at 11.

Lots of things are 'obvious' but we do the research to both confirm them and to exclude our biases.

When you have enough evidence one way or the other then you can begin addressing the problem properly.

Evidence lead policies are the most rational way to addresses things.

Exactly, I've seen for a long time that cops have the most toxic online forums. I mean, I've felt that they're often as bad or worse than the Neo-Nazi ones I've come across. But how do you know that these are real cops, and how representative are they of the force? Proper study shows that they are real cops, many of them are of higher rank in their departments, they make it hard for their coworkers to be treated with respect, they disproportionately harm civilians, and they cost their municipalities tons of money.

Are you suggesting we ignore the problem?

Or being in violent environment will often make you numb to violence.

Given a lack of per capita numbers and comparison to the general population this seems like concern trolling by an advocacy organization.

From the article:

  Of the pages of officers whom the Plain View researchers could positively identify, about 1 in 5 of the current officers, and 2 in 5 of the retired officers, made public posts or comments that met that threshold — typically by displaying bias, applauding violence, scoffing at due process, or using dehumanizing language. The officers mocked Mexicans, women, and black people, celebrated the Confederate flag, and showed a man wearing a kaffiyeh scarf in the crosshairs of a gun.

Of the pages of officers whom the Plain View researchers could positively identify, about 1 in 5 of the current officers, and 2 in 5 of the retired officers, made public posts or comments that met that threshold — typically by displaying bias, applauding violence, scoffing at due process, or using dehumanizing language. The officers mocked Mexicans, women, and black people, celebrated the Confederate flag, and showed a man wearing a kaffiyeh scarf in the crosshairs of a gun.

That's an incredibly broad range of subjective infractions. Looking at the examples from the article, one is the "I would of pulled the trigger." - that's in response to an armed robber, a clear case of hypothetical self-defense. The other is "Execute all involved," - is it wrong to believe the death penalty is appropriate punishment for the murder of a six year old child?

I wouldn't characterize using lethal force when someone pulls a gun on you, or advocating for the death penalty for child murderers, as unreasonable positions.

Translation: "80% of officers never wrote a single thing that we could paint in a negative light."

"no worse than the general population" would be a damning indictment on its own. The police have, notionally, a monopoly on state violence, and you want to set the bar so low?

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