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Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

The police culture in the United States, enabled by these absolutely absurd legal protections, is consistently the most embarrassing thing about our country. We're famous for our police corruption and brutality, to the point that the state departments of foreign countries have to warn their citizens of interactions with police while visiting the US.

The portuguese-american community that I grew up in mostly consisted of people who fled the fascist authoritarianism of Antonio Salazar, with the promise of freedom and prosperity. They found the prosperity just fine, but lived here long enough to see America become even more authoritarian than the Portugal that they fled. It is interesting to me that many of them are leaving the prosperity behind to return to Portugal, as it is now more free than we are.

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Parts of the US government also know not to share certain information with law enforcement.

"[FBI] policies have been crafted to take into account the active presence of domestic extremists in U.S. police departments."

"White supremacists and other domestic extremists maintain an active presence in U.S. police departments and other law enforcement agencies."

https://theintercept.com/2017/01/31/the-fbi-has-quietly-inve...

I admire the work of the FBI against hate groups and extremists. However, one only needs to look at their work against BLM or the Civil Rights Movement to see that they are part of the same structure.

Workers unifying across social divisions is the greatest threat to oppressing the people. It is the most powerful method we have of gaining material freedom and our most basic human dignities, regardless of ethnic identity.

Some of our most deeply exploited white citizens are convinced that they have it better than others while they experience collapsing infrastructure, life on government benefits, prescription epidemics, growing government overreach, and erosion of their working rights. They also make up the heart of white supremacists and domestic extremists, while more fortunate liberal territories are convinced to despise and separate themselves from their fellow workers.

In short, our nation is divided by hatred and the result is a populace that is easier to control, oppress, and economically exploit. Overcoming this hatred and unifying is the key to securing our future and basic liberties from corporate and government authoritarianism.

I consider every interaction and encounter with our law enforcement officers as a potentially life threatening situation. I can’t imagine how it is for people of color.

It is a war. Everyone has an ethnicity, and our ideas of race are shaped by a long legacy of racial hatred and exclusion.

Our white working citizens need to realize that all workers are unified in our exploitation for basic human necessities. That is a practical way that we can overcome the hatred that is dividing us and facilitating the destruction of our liberties.

That's plainly hysteria and you're only encouraging unnecessary distrust.

The overwhelming majority of interactions with police for any race are benign. You've been manipulated by a race baiting media.

The overwhelming majority isn't great when you're talking risk of death.

Someone survives playing Russian Roulette the overwhelming majority of the time too. 5 out of 6 times, nothing bad happens at all. 1 out of 6 times, you die. Is that also not something you would consider a "life threatening situation?"

It's actually an interesting question. At what point does the risk of dying in a situation make it "life threatening"? I believe something like 1 in 291 police interactions end up with someone in the hospital or dead.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-07/b-upk072116....

1/6 is literally 2 orders of magnitude smaller than 1/291. Nonsensical comparison.

More importantly, how many of those hospitalizations/deaths are justified? You realize that police are typically responding to crimes and dealing with criminals who tend to be a little more violent than the average person, right?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a bootlicker by any means, and I acknowledge there are serious policing problems in the US. But seriously questioning whether you're going to survive a traffic stop if you act reasonably is irrational paranoia.

I do formal risk assessments as a part of my job, in a context where people are often risking their lives. Both 1:6 and 1:291 as the chance of of severe injury or death are both firmly in the highest risk category under most calculations, meaning that for decision making, you should assume that it will result in death. Yes, they are two orders of magnitude different. But the comparison is not nonsensical.

Well then you are no doubt aware that these statistics skew overwhelmingly toward those who are noncompliant, combative, and/or felons, correct? Such that the actual rate for "average" people (including minorities, although their rate may be higher) is probably miniscule.

OP > I consider every interaction and encounter with our law enforcement officers as a potentially life threatening situation

Which translates to: at any given interaction with the police, there's a non-zero chance that it come be a life threatening situation

You > The overwhelming majority...

Which also implies some non-zero chance...

So I'm confused as to how to OP's situation is hysteria by the "race baiting media"

Please keep this off of HN, thanks

The implication of OPs post was that this was a frequent enough occurrence to legitimately fear interactions with police.

My point is that this is excessive, and partly a result of the eagerness that the media to latch onto and sensationalize stories of blacks being killed by police.

It is relevant to the discussion.

Edit: all of this particularly when negative interactions are going to very heavily skew towards people who are combative and/or noncompliant. This is total paranoia.

> all of this particularly when negative interactions are going to very heavily skew towards people who are combative and/or noncompliant. This is total paranoia.

But also in multiple times a year with people who are non combative and compliant.

What is the acceptable loss rate _you_ are willing to accept on others behalf?

Multiple times per year in a country with 300MM people and what, tens to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of police interactions yearly?

Obviously in the ideal case it would be 0 but that's not realistic and, again, the current rate is far lower than the original poster implied. That's my entire argument. A couple times a year in the news does not justify worrying about being killed during a traffic stop or some other typical, mundane interaction.

If it's that rare, then shouldn't police be stripped of immunity completely?

Let's follow your logic. You claim that police abuse of power is exceedingly rare. In that case, to earn the public trust, and to punish the few rare cases that police do abuse their power, shouldn't the people be as free as possible to pursue justice in those cases?

If police abuse is rare, that argues for even more strict laws against police abuse, less legal protection, and more empowerment of the citizenry to address those few rare cases.

>You claim that police abuse of power is exceedingly rare

I made no such claim. I said that being hurt or killed by an officer is an unlikely occurance for a typical person. That's all I'm arguing and there shouldn't be anything controversial about it.

This isn't legal advice, but I've only ever heard from lawyers and judges that you should never talk to police for any reason whatsoever.

If we dig deeper past the shame, we find a power structure that is intentionally and fundamentally evil. In every economic crisis the facade becomes weaker, and more people wake up to the political and economic reality of our nation. This is when fascism shows itself, promising to take us to our former glory while people struggle to survive.

Fascism is a disease that slowly infects its host. We should remember how America fought so bravely against German fascism. My mother's family came to America to escape the fascist authoritarianism of that nation, and I can't see myself moving to Germany.

>We should remember how America fought so bravely against German fascism

About that...

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

We should more accurately remember that it was the express policy of the United States to rehabilitate and support former fascists in postwar Europe, Southeast Asia, and in Latin America. The US opposed German nationalist imperialism (quite late into that campaign), but never meaningfully fascism as such. During the Red Scare, several people were even investigated and blacklisted for being "prematurely antifascist."

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:tAcKhl...

I am aware of this history. We can't forget the veterans that fought with our allies to successfully defeat the Nazis.

German nationalist imperialism is Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Abeiterpartei, the namesake of the Nazi Party. The immigration of my own family is a product of German fascism.

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