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Comment by whamlastxmas | Hacker News Reader

The issue isn't that he stole a shirt, the issue is that he ran from cops, which is a pretty serious crime. Trying to evade arrest and capture is extremely dangerous and if police were to say "well he ran I guess we'll just let him go" crime would skyrocket because thieves would know all you have to do is run and you're home free.

edit: I'm not sympathizing with cops or trying to say the use of force here was justified (it wasn't). I'm just saying we need to make attempts to pursue (within reason)

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This is the police policy we have in the Netherlands – and I believe in much of Europe – and last time I checked crime is not "skyrocketing" here.

I am not claiming the police should just give up once someone runs, but there is a cost/benefit ratio to these things, and endangering random people in a high-speed car chase to catch a shoplifter does not seem a good cost/benefit ratio.

It's also hardly the case that you can just "run and you're home free". There is CCTV, license plates, the guy can be caught next time he shoplifts, etc. etc. There is more than one way to catch criminals than this kind of brute force.

A lot of what is wrong with America seems to boil down to broken short-term thinking that places too high a value on "heroics" with a big emotional zing attached to it over actual solutions.

We tend to want to "help the homeless" rather than designing a system that reduces the incidence of homelessness. We get all bent out of shape about "justice" and "righteousness" for some detail, like a stolen shirt, completely missing the big picture.

America is a fairly religious country. That's probably related. We have this Puritan ethics thing going on, which is often about guilt and shame and being judgy rather than creating a civil environment.

We're a young country, founded by misfits who so couldn't make life work in Europe that a very dangerous move to a new land made sense to them. I think this still impacts the culture here, a la the biblical phrase about "the sins of the father...unto the fifth and sixth generation." But I usually get a lot of negative reactions when I try to talk about that. Other people seem to see no connection between the details of how America was founded and the culture it fosters.

My own – perhaps controversial – take is that a lot is explained once you realize that the United States, as a country, is deficient in empathy.

One example is The American Dream: the idea that anyone can be rich if they just work hard enough, which also implies that being poor is a personal failure: you didn't work hard enough. What this misses is that in the end, you're still going to need people to pick up the garbage, and serve McDonalds, and so forth. turns out not all of society can be composed of lawyers, doctors, and computer programmers. Who knew?

There are many more examples, but I don't want to sideline this too much by various political issues.

I'm not entirely sure what the source of this is, or if it's recent or more rooted in history. It's just my observations of the US as an adult.

the United States, as a country, is deficient in empathy.

That doesn't really contradict what I said. Social misfits often do lack empathy. This is sometimes at least partly biologically based, but is frequently compounded by more "normal" types behaving monstrously towards them because they are different.

I've raised two special needs sons. They don't intuitively get a lot of social stuff. I've had to carefully explain many things.

But the reality is that a lot more social stuff is learned than most normal people want to admit. Needing to actively and intentionally teach it to some people who don't readily pick it up without instruction isn't as bizarre and alien as the world wants to pretend it is.

Plus, the lesser emphasis on empathy in America does have positives. Differently wired people tend to have a higher tolerance for things more empathetic people can't cope with. High empathy is not a good thing for being a soldier or a surgeon, both important roles in the world.

the idea that anyone can be rich if they just work hard enough

The origin of that idea is that we had escaped entrenched class structure in Europe. America was conceived of as the land of opportunity.

This was a positive thing, not a way to blame poor people for their poverty.

For a lot of people, that proved to be true for a long time. Those ideas aren't fundamentally broken, but some things have changed and we aren't coping so well with some of those changes.

I think we can resolve our problems. It's not hopeless.

I'm just not entirely sure how we get there from here.

I didn't intend to contradict your post, but rather add to it, or have a conversation.

> A lot more social stuff is learned than most normal people want to admit

People tend to have an innate ability to socialize with their immediate surroundings: family, friends, coworkers, and other people they personally know.

Beyond that, things are harder, and more learned. Fiction probably plays a very large role in this by the way.

> High empathy is not a good thing for being a soldier or a surgeon, both important roles in the world.

I'm actually not so sure about this; empathy isn't some sort of binary toggle, or uninfluenced by intellect; we have some control and choice over it. All other things being equal, a surgeon empathic to a patient's concerns (rather than indifferent) would make for a better surgeon, and a soldier highly empathic towards their fellow comrades would probably be a better soldier.

> The origin of that idea I that we had escaped entrenched class structure in Europe. America was conceived of as the land of opportunity. > >This was a positive thing, not a way to blame poor people for their poverty.

I appreciate that, but that was almost 250 years ago and things have changed rather a lot since then. Especially in modern context, "it's your fault if you're poor" seems to be a natural (though often unspoken) consequence of "you can be rich if you work hard enough".

> For a lot of people, that proved to be true for a long time. Those ideas aren't fundamentally broken, but we some things have changed and we aren't coping so well with some of those changes.

I think they are, because at the end of the day what a society needs if a fairly small group of people doing knowledge work, and a fairly large group of people facilitating that. One reason we can work as computer programmers is because other people do our food growing and construction and cleaning etc.

None of this is unique to the US, but in a lot of countries there seems to be more recognition of this in the form of worker protection, better social welfare, etc.

I think they are, because at the end of the day what a society needs if a fairly small group of people doing knowledge work, and a fairly large group of people facilitating that.

The industrial revolution changed that. We now need relatively few people growing our food.

At one time, you needed like twenty farmers for every non farm job to feed that non farmer. Thanks to modern technology, modern farmers provide food for many people per farmhand.

This frees people up to be teachers and scientists and any number of other things that are about developing new knowledge or preserving and passing on existing knowledge.

There is a long history of human cultures collapsing. Some of them collapsed when people no longer knew how to effectively maintain extensive irrigation systems that supported farms and helped keep the people fed.

If our current system collapsed, the sudden die off could be to the tune of billions of people.

There is no shortage of work that can be done. What needs to be done varies as cultures evolve.

There are endless people with problems too trivial to address in a subsistence culture that can be worked on by more advanced cultures that have freed up workers to do things more trivial than just try to come up with enough food to not die of starvation this year.

Sexual satisfaction.

Emotional contentment.

Good social relationships.

Health issues.

> This frees people up to be teachers and scientists and any number of other things that are about developing new knowledge or preserving and passing on existing knowledge.

I think the problem with this is that not everyone is cut out to be a teacher or scientist, or other kind of knowledge worker.

I left school at 16 and before I worked as a computer programmer I worked various minimum wage jobs for about 10 years. Some of those people are suitable for knowledge work (like me), but the vast majority ... yeah nah. At the risk of sounding condescending, but I don't think they have the interest, aptitude, or both.

I mean, in principle I agree with your reply, but I think it will be a lot harder than it sounds.

> all you have to do is run and you're home free

But you're not. Police might get you in half an hour, or tomorrow, or in 2 weeks.

Of course that requires proper documentation of the case (photos or even videos, fingerprints, ID of the stolen goods, ...) and follow up, both of which is less exciting than trying to outrace the perpetrator on the highway.

Retail videos are garbage 99% of the time.

You aren't going to get reliable or useable prints from the scene of a retail store.

Even if you did, you have to have a match in AFIS for them to be useful.

Even if you do, congrats, you know the guy exists, his name, and social. Now you just have to find him before he robs someone else at gunpoint, and/or ends up killing someone.

Every non-tiny police department has a pursuit policy. It tends to be some form of one of the following:

1. Only pursue if the danger of the pursuit is less than the danger of this guy to society. Consider the crime, how easily we can find this guy, current traffic conditions, weather, etc. Guy robber a liquor store and is going 100mph on a well lit, perfectly straight 5 lane highway at 1am on a Wednesday with no other traffic? Get em. Same guy is going 100mph through a residential as the school busses are about to drop off kids? Terminate pursuit. Sadly, it is never that cut and dry

2. Don't pursue unless it was a murder/attempted murder, and the conditions are safe for it.

3. Don't pursue.

#3 Works amazing for about 5 years. Somewhere 5-10 years later, the local gangs and career criminals learn that if they just drive fast enough to endanger lives, the cops will leave them alone. State police departments, which usually spend more time on highways, tend to have a policy closer to #1. Because of this, they will often assist local agencies that have a policy of #2 or #3, when they are doing stuff that they expect a vehicle pursuit may ensue.

Someone usually brings up "Oh, well if you have the license plate why not just arrest them later." Because it doesn't work that way. You see a masked guy rob a store, jump in a car, and peel out of there at 1am, and don't pursue? If you run the tag, go to the registered house at 1:30am, find the warm vehicle in the driveway, knock on the door, registered owner can answer, and will tell you that a lot of people have keys to his car, he doesn't know anything, he was home asleep.

And theres not a thing you can do about it. The only way you can prove it was him was if you saw the driver and are 100% sure its that guy, or you convince him to talk himself into getting caught in a lie, or give up his cellphone, or some other dumb decision.

> If you run the tag, go to the registered house at 1:30am, find the warm vehicle in the driveway,

More likely, the car was stolen.

>Trying to evade arrest and capture is extremely dangerous and if police were to say "well he ran I guess we'll just let him go" crime would skyrocket because thieves would know all you have to do is run and you're home free.

Talk about minimal returns. There are 1000 other factors (in police, laws, and culture) to fix before crime skyrockets from not "catching with excessive force random guys who did minor/no offenses and tried to run away". Starting from social support for poorer districts and a legal/prison system that doesn't encourage recidivism...

While we're at it, in no civilized western or eastern country is "getting out of your car when stopped by a traffic cop" something that's met with a shooting...

It's like the police force is not professional over there, but just a joke with a gun, and on the first adverse situation (which could be as "adverse" as merely meeting a black guy) they get their guns out rather than doing any critical assessment, handling of the situation, etc. Sorry, un untrained thug can do the same exact thing. There should be higher standards from police officers...

that doesnt mean there isnt discretion. running over a baby to catch someone who stole an apple is letting principal get in the way of pragmatism.

if your choices are "put everyone in the vicinity in massive immediate danger" and "let someone non dangerous escape" Id hope the need to make running itself a serious crime doesnt overrule the duty to the public's overall safety.

Generally police must assess the risk to public safety (including the suspect's and their own safeties) and balance that with the need to apprehend the criminal.

Capturing a non-violent criminal would not typically justify a high risk of causing a deadly road traffic accident. In the UK for instance, the National Decision Model must be used to evaluate whether to pursue a criminal; authorisation must be requested to conduct a pursuit.

Armed robbery probably doesn't count as non-violent.

>issue is that he ran from cops, which is a pretty serious crime.

That isn't the issue either (that he ran from cops), the issue is that he began shooting his gun at the cops.

Why did I have to scroll so far down to see this comment? It most likely would not have escalated to that level had he not shot. It probably doesn't help that they later mistook something else for being shots too.

Yes but for a shirt? Capturing a shirt shoplifter is worth the same effort and potential damage to innocents as a murderer? Or a bank robber? Or an organized group hitting electronics retailers? If someone refuses to pay a parking ticket, how much collateral damage is worth getting them to pay their ticket?

Also I feel your comment may be implying that this sort of hyper aggressive enforcement is the only thing keeping crime down - I would suspect that crime at the level of shoplifting a shirt is more often due to need and desperation than to purely malicious intent, and while hyper aggressive enforcement may have some deterrent effect those crimes would probably be better resolved by trying to eliminate the core issues driving them in the first place.

no, it's just ridiculously punitive to go scorched earth in order to recoup $10 for some already uber-profitable business.

hell, there are no chase policies in washington DC among other cities because it's dumb as hell to engage in military style warfare, bystanders be damned, for things like illegally riding an ATV in the street/sidewalk.

i'm not sure where this attitude for vengeance/retribution comes from but it's eerily deeply ingrained in the US.

I'm generally pretty fair and balanced when it comes to police versus public issues, but this is the same kind of shit that excuses the cops that shot the fleeing 16 year old in the head.

Cops are public servants. They have a duty to the public to safely enforce the laws and apprehend lawbreakers. This "get the bad guy at all costs" shit has to stop.

I think all cops are bastards and I don't sympathize with them. I just want a rule of law along with accountability. I'm not of the opinion we need to use overt force when pursuing, but we need to pursue.

High speed police chases are also dangerous and police should not engage in them.

I agree.

In most departments now the officer is required to weigh the crime against the potential danger of the chase. Traffic infraction? Don't chase. Felony warrant: Chase?

Source: Family members that are in the CHP.

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