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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

There was a stretch from 2014-15 that made it really difficult to go to work on a day to day basis for me. There is something psychologically triggering about seeing people who look like you routinely killed by the state, regardless of the circumstances or politics.

I began to feel some contempt for my white co-workers despite knowing that they had nothing to do it. I did not expect nor wanted to have a conversion with them about race and police brutality, and I don't know many of my black friends who would to be honest -- perhaps Google just has an argumentative culture.

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> perhaps Google just has an argumentative culture

I think this is probably the salient point here. Google is trying to create a "cool culture" where everyone can speak their mind and spend endless hours around each other. I don't like to work at companies where everyone "is a family" or uses their coworkers as their primary friend group. As much as I respect and enjoy the company of my coworkers, there is a strong chance we are not all compatible as close, personal friends but can still make progress for the company together. I prefer that my close relationships are not intertwined with what I use to pay my bills.

> I don't like to work at companies where everyone "is a family"

Same. In my experience, employers describe themselves that way to create a sense of obligation in their employees.

As a non-American I don't see this. The American police kills roughly as many whites per day as the Norwegian police have killed during their entire existence (it is 1 if you wonder). Making this about race only hides the elephant in the room: the American police is extremely brutal. It shouldn't be this way in a western nation, the police doesn't kill that many except for third world countries and USA. Even if we eliminated the racism and thus halved the number of blacks killed by the police it would still be a horrible amount of blacks killed!

https://www.businessinsider.com/norway-america-police-killin...

I think it's really difficult to see this as a non American, especially from a nation has homogeneous as Norway. The question must be asked: why is American policing so brutal? Why is the criminal justice system geared towards punishment instead of rehabilitation? Why are so many members of Congress former prosecutors? Why did the 13th amendment -- which abolished slavery, make an exception for those convicted of a crime?

> as homogeneous as Norway

I don't understand why this would matter. Why would homogeneity of the population have anything to do with how many people the police kill of the privileged race? Does the existence of black people in America increase the number of whites killed by police?

When we compare crime and such between USA and Europe you always say "But USA is so diverse!", isn't that racism? I mean, you are basically saying that you have to live with crime, murder and such when you have a diverse population. Or do I misunderstand you?

It's my belief that racist discriminatory policies have led to an "underclass" of people, who are primarily minorities, that are criminalized more often and deprived of services that would ultimately reduce crime. So yes, due to discrimination, the diversity of the US contributes to higher crime rates.

There was a study recently produced that showed that simply installing street lights in a neighborhood reduced crime dramatically, when you take into consideration that installation would be funded by local property taxes, and that majority minority neighborhoods have lower property values, partly due to post war discriminatory housing policy, it is clear that there is somewhat of a self fulfilling cycle here.

Homogeneity generally engenders more trust. More trust generally means less crime. This effect can be observed across the world. There are benefits to diversity, of course, but there are also downsides. Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Bosnia, and and Burma have all been riven by ethnic conflict as a result of their diversity, to give a few examples. The USA (and now also the UK, and some other Western European countries) are outliers when it comes to peaceful diversification, aka large-scale migration, and even there I would say the experiment has yet to deliver a conclusive result.

> Homogeneity generally engenders more trust.

Note that studies have confirmed this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...

What do you mean by homogeneity? Do you mean as opposed to heterogeneity such as what is found in the many different cultures, peoples and language across Swiss cantons or German landers, or is it really just "people looking different from one another"?

I would refer you to the Putnam study from another comment, which defines homogeneity/heterogeneity in terms of ethnicity.

Certainly ethnicity is a fluid concept. The language, value system, and cultural context of a Texan may differ from that of a Minnesotan. However, I think we can agree that your average Texan or Minnesotan will likely have a greater common understanding if paired together than with your average Swiss or German person.

Your study is based in the States, which has a long history of segregating cultures and even language according to ethnic lines. On the other hand, I mean is that both Switzerland and Germany have a diversity of peoples, cultures and languages (e.g. Switzerland itself has 4 official languages and German has a myriad of dialects) and many citizens of these countries consider themselves pretty diverse in that regard though they are mostly white, but is that what people mean by "diversity" when they talk about "population heterogeneity"? Or is it just "diversity is when people have different skin tones and the more skin tones there are the more diverse it is"?

Wow. I never commented I HN before, but I just have to now: Bias and prejudice IS human nature. It has nothing to do with racism. People can and do naturally discrimate on all sorts of differences like class, nationality, skin color, etc. I seen it first hand growing up in a almost completely homogenous society how any visible difference increases distrust and tension. Mind you, this is all natural human behavior, but it doesn't always make it right.

So it's completely natural that a country as diverse as America would automatically balkanize itself along class, national, and racial lines.

> Why did the 13th amendment -- which abolished slavery, make an exception for those convicted of a crime?

Because conscripted labor was an independent tradition going back thousands of years. Compare the legal status of compelling people to work on the roads.

There was also an exception for the military, though that wasn't written into the 13th amendment.

> the American police is extremely brutal.

Have you seen the homicide rate in America? You cannot quell that level of violence with hugs.

Police in the US operate in an environment where every person they encounter may have the means to kill them within seconds. This is not to ignore police brutality, but these details matter.

To compare the situation to a tiny homogeneous country where guns are illegal is silly.

The homicide rate in the US is about 10x that of Norway. The rate of killings by the policy is about 10,000x higher.

Also, guns aren't illegal in Norway, there are 31 per 100 inhabitants.

You need to look at gun homicide: Norway has a rate of 0.10 per capita. The US is 4.46!

Gun violence is a 45x bigger threat in the US which explains at least some of the disparity.

45 is still quite a lot less than 10,000.

Police killing is 16x higher in the US. In a country with a 45x higher homicide rate. The 10,000 figure is nonsense.

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

Mea culpa, my figure of 10,000x was not per capita and assumed that the above comment stating that Norwegian police has only ever killed 1 person was true, when in fact rate has been about 1 per seven years for the last couple of decades and there is not data available before that.

But your 16x figure from Wikipedia is also not accurate -- it overestimates the Norwegian rate by about a factor of 7 for some reason. Using the historical data at the bottom of the page suggests that the rate of police killing in the US is around 60x higher than Norway, or 150x if we assume that there were no killings in Norway between 2017 and now. This is considerably greater than the 10x difference in homicide rate (you quoted that as 45x but as I said previously that is for gun homicide only, and you haven't given any reason why that is more relevant).

A couple of paragraphs of back-and-forth and we're already adding some nuance to the stats.

This is my point. The data needs to be understood and contextualised before we form conclusions as to why the disparity exists.

As for the reason to focus on gun homicide: in 93% of cases where US police use deadly force the suspect is armed with a weapon[0]. This extremely high prevalence of lethal weapons, and the immediate threat to life it implies, almost certainly contributes to the high number of police shootings.

This threat simply doesn't exist in other countries, where even if there may be a high level of gun ownership, gun use is restricted and citizens are predominantly unarmed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-s...

Easy for Norway to say. America is 60x bigger population-wise, 30x bigger geographic-wise, and some order-of-magnitude more diverse (10x? 100x?) racially.

While I agree America can do better, comparing the US to Norway is like saying "Yeah, our Norway.com servers have only crashed once. Twitter.com would do well to copy how we do things; they seem to have servers crashing way more often than we do" which completely ignore issues that come into play at orders of magnitude higher scales - for if you put Norway.com under the same strain as twitter, Norway.com's servers would be crashing left and right as well.

> America is 60x bigger population-wise

Right, so if they had the same level of police brutality you would have 60 deaths in the history of American police, or about 1 killing per year. Even if the police were racists and killed twice as many blacks, that would still just be one black dead every few years, then it wouldn't matter.

The rest of the differences are not important here. Racial diversity shouldn't be related to crime or shootings.

> Right, so if they had the same level of police brutality you would have 60 deaths in the history of American police, or about 1 killing per year

Only if problems scale exactly linearly and there are no side effect emergent behaviors you have to account for. Otherwise when a big tech company goes from 1M to 10M users, they just need 10x as many servers, right? Problem solved.

Nope, in real life each order of magnitude has required serious, difficult engineering to overcome the challenges, you should read up on how companies like Amazon/Facebook have scaled with users. I'll give you a hint though - they didn't just draw a line and extrapolate how many servers they would need for each year.

Otherwise you could just say: "Oh, New Hampshire has a homocide rate of 1 per 100,000. New Hampshire has a population of 1 million, therefore that's 10 deaths per million, therefore by simple extrapolation, the USA should only have 3000 homocides per year!"

This is a very narrow view of things. If scale in real life worked like that, easy and obvious solution would be to break up US into 60 pieces and you'd have 60 Norways, right? Nope. US problems are due to culture, not size.

In fact, the US is broken up into 50 pieces, and some pieces fare much better than others in terms of violence/suicide per capita depending on the region.

> Nope. US problems are due to culture, not size.

Probably a combination of both. Culture isn't a thing that can be easily changed, though.

that's true, but I don't think a scale issue is the heart of the difference. Otherwise, for example, you'd think there would be very little police violence in rural America, but that is not true.

I am assuming that Norway was chosen to provide an extreme comparison. Go ahead and compare the US to a few other developed nations. Hell, compare it to a few under-developed nations too. Hopefully you will notice a pattern.

In what way can you compare the US to other countries fairly? That's like comparing Microsoft to small businesses and showing that the small businesses have lower bug counts and more efficient processes. Well of course! It's not easy to run a huge company as efficiently as a small one.

All the dogs in my neighborhood are barking now: "and some order-of-magnitude more diverse" means "because we have non-white people."

The US has zero excuse for brutal policing.

> The US has zero excuse for brutal policing.

The police are brutal because the civilians are brutal. It's a two way street. Has a Norwegian police officer ever died at the hands of an angry driver? And no, it's not always "cause guns" (though it certainly exacerbates things). In Colorado, a civilian (hunter) killed another civilian with a crossbow on the side of a highway after a fit of road rage. It could have easily been an officer (and indeed officers frequently die at the hands of civilians)

This justification of brutal policing is disgusting in any context. There is no excuse for brutal policing. And the "diverse population" justification has been racist from the moment it was first used.

This is the factual context: The number of police feloniously killed each year is under 50 and falling. The number of people killed by police is over 1100 per year and rising, despite overall falling crime rates.

US police have abysmal performance in this. They are brutal, savage, and unprofessional compared to any other developed country. Militarization, the Drug War, and recent political exhortations to be "tougher" do not help.

> There is something psychologically triggering about seeing people who look like you routinely killed by the state, regardless of the circumstances or politics.

Then you'll be glad to find the coverage is exaggerated:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/27...

Interestingly, seeing it is what is really difficult and triggering. 2014-2015 wasn't some unusual flareup in police violence, it was merely a flareup in visibility.

Absolutely, during this period videos of black men being killed by police became a viral trend. Really hard to absorb.

> There is something psychologically triggering about seeing people who look like you routinely killed by the state, regardless of the circumstances or politics.

Yes, the media indeed loves to intentionally psychologically trigger people.

Police brutality happens to white people and latino people as well (at lower rates, but in greater numbers), but such stories wouldn't psychologically trigger/racially divide people and so they remain unpublished.

> such stories wouldn't psychologically trigger/racially divide people and so

being profit-seeking corporations, american news is pursuing eyeballs and clicks. truthiness, accuracy, bias, etc. are all variables in the profit equation, and not always a major influence. if idpol (or whatever) is stirring up the viewership, it will influence how they approach the "news", in different ways depending on who the producers view as their principle audience.

inserting the whole "seeking to divide" as a concrete motive seems like a dogwhistle (particularly being a narrative beloved of antisemites).

It was literally a national story 2 or 3 weeks ago about a cop who suffocated and killed a white guy who called the cops on himself because he was off his medication, having a mental health episode, and needed help.

Also we are currently at a point where you can find weekly stories about police abusing Latino people (typically in conjunction with ICE). No idea how you came to the conclusion that these stories are unpublished.

> Police brutality happens to white people and latino people as well (at lower rates, but in greater numbers), but such stories wouldn't psychologically trigger/racially divide people and so they remain unpublished

Law enforcement abuse stories about treatment of white and (especially) Latino people are published regularly (rarely, with white people, is there a basis even for suspicion that the act is racially motivated), and frequently are divisive (even, if when it is about whites, not usually about race/ethnicity).

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