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Comment by Ballas | Hacker News Reader

As an outsider, it seems that the way the police in the US react is the consequence of interaction with the public.

In places where the police have an active role in settling disputes, they also enjoy more respect from the community.

It's because you only hear about the bad things. Sure there are some crazy cops like everywhere else. But all in all I'm certain most cops are good people who just want to help citizens and remove the bad guys.

Why are you certain of this? I do not think Police deserve the benefit of the doubt at this point.

I don't know how many cops are there in the US but thinking most of them are psychopaths is absurd.

Nobody thinks that to my knowledge, or at least thats not the general opinion about cops.

A friend of mine explained his viewpoint as... Sure, there's only a few bad apples doing horrible things. But then there's a LOT of cops, and their union, that help/stand up for those bad apples. If you're not taking a bribe, but you are actively looking away when your partner is; you're the bad guy. There's the well known blue wall of silence, and everyone that makes up that wall is part of the problem.

Precisely.

Defenders of police misconduct tend to cite the "it's just a few bad apples" line without noting the full adage is "a few bad apples spoils the barrel".

Ok, some are great, but when you see that the ‘bad guys’ in the police face no consequences for their actions, the police force looses respect in the eyes of the public. And that’s a normal reaction. But they can earn it back, though it seems, through their training and instructions, they quite often prefer intimidation over respect.

Call me when the Fraternal Order of Police stops defending bad cops that were found guilty in a court of law, declaiming the “injustice“ that took place.

These guys are supposed to uphold the law, instead they prop up murderers and accuse the justice department of railroading “innocent” cops. See “Police union blasts ‘sham trial and shameful’ Van Dyke guilty verdict” [0]

0: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/10/5/18460941/police-union...

I'm not so sure: I think there's a cultural problem with American policing. I get the sense that US police expect immediate compliance with their Any failure to comply is met with escalation of force rather than with reason. This is the "Ask, Tell, Make" philosophy of policing.

Contrast this with the principles of policing by consent [0] that define the ideals (though not necessarily the reality) of policing in the UK and many other countries.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

You obviously don't live in america then. Police are heavily trained to DE-escalate the situation. I know, I'm a person of color and the few times I've had to deal with the police, they were polite, courteous and professional.

The thing is is survivorship bias often shows in the media. most police encounters are not reported in the media because it's common and everyday. But the very few that turn into a big production get reported because it gets ratings. So through survivorship bias, confirmation bias, and availability bias, the problem seems bigger than it actually is.

Are you a “person of color” or are you Black? How tall and big are you? I’m Black and 5 foot 5. No one sees me as a threat. My step son is s big guy who immediately is seen as threat until he starts talking - he’s lived in the burbs all of his life.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, some jobs can’t have bad apples. No one would accept it if the Delta CEO said “most of our pilots are good people, some just like to fly into mountains every now and then.”

But you're going to hear a lot about "a few bad apples spoil the barrel" as if it's okay to talk about people like disposable fruit. Think for a moment, would those people be okay with letting the police use that reasoning?

Classic chicken or egg...

Violent crime was at extremely negligible levels in the fifties. In just 3-4 decades to the 90s it ended up increasing (per rate) by around 800%. That's a part of where the hyper-tough on crime laws came from, and it's also when you started seeing an increasing militarization of the police.

Violent crime then decreased by about 50% to 2014, though that still of course leaves us at a level multiple times higher than where we started. And it's now back on the rise. Here are the raw numbers [1]. They're quite interesting to consider.

Something I'm quite curious about on Hacker News, preempting the downvotes can people explain what they find offensive about data?

[1] - http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Eh. This might be a case of not really having good data.

Looking at the "data", one would conclude that Autism is on the rise. But we didn't even know what it was not too long ago. And we sure as hell didn't check for it. There are more diagnoses of Autism because we're actually looking now.

Today, domestic violence would be classified as a violent crime. In the fifties, it was called keeping your wife in line.

Lynching a black man was a way to keep him away from your pristine daughter in the fifties. Now. It's a crime.

I think this is a rather extreme mischaracterization of a society, but proving things like this statistically is not possible. Because, while it may be a mischaracterization, you are certainly correct that domestic violence was much more normalized (even if still extremely rare) and you likely would have seen a much lower reporting rate because of this. So that problem does cause an issue with getting down to the very exact number.

Fortunately, there's a much simpler response. Just referencing the data from the provided link (starting in the 60s) [1], the increase in crime is for literally every single category of crime. And most saw very dramatic increases: robbery 400%, assault 500%, burgularly 300%, theft 300%, auto theft 300% increase, etc. You can cast uncertainty on some of the figures but the extremely high rate increases paired with the fact it was spread across literally every single crime leaves little 0 doubt that there was absolutely an exponentially increasing crime rate between 1960 and 1991.

As one aside, that 1991 date is really quite peculiar. Nearly every single crime hit its peak in that year. You'd expect different crimes to decline at different rates or even statistical noise to have played a role. Yet at a glance the only crime that didn't hit its peak in 1991 was forcible rape, which peaked in 1992. The 'Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act' [2] formalizing the increasing militarization of police (which would really go into overdrive after the North Hollywood shootout) was passed in 1981.

[1] - http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cooperation_with_Civi...

I didn't downvote you. In the past I have referred to the same table that you link. But it doesn't substantiate your point about crime rates in the 1950s because the data set starts at 1960. You may be correct, but your link doesn't show it. I would be interested in US violent crime rates in the decades before 1960 if you can find a similar table covering that time range.

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