Hacker News Reader

Comment by crakhamster01 | Hacker News Reader

I get that more context is always better, but the notion of "context" is infinitely expandable.

What were these reporters doing in the hour prior to the arrest? Oh, nothing? Well, where were they at the start of the riots? Just getting to the scene? Hmm well, what's the police officer's story; has he had bad experiences with the press in the past? And so on...

Most people have seen enough coverage of police officers doing unreasonable things in order to make a judgement call based off the provided context here. By asking for even more context, it comes across as though you're trying to cast doubt on this situation and undermine what's honestly a national issue at this point - hence the downvotes.

View on HN

> Most people have seen enough coverage of police officers doing unreasonable things in order to make a judgement call

Bingo! That's the problem. People are making "judgement calls" based on highly publicized, recent cases of police officers doing "unreasonable things". Those cases represent < 0.1% of the police officers in the country. Making judgement calls based on what others have done is called prejudice, and last I checked, people are still innocent until proven guilty in this country. That goes for the reporters and the officers involved.

As for the amount of context we have relative to the video that's been published, I think any reasonable judge would conclude that (1) the person operating the camera was almost certainly recording before what we've seen published, (2) the events on published video obviously seem to refer to events that happened before what we see, and (3) those events that happened before are not just circumstantial details - they could easily swing the case in either direction. So yes, more context in this situation is absolutely necessary. Make no confusion - I'm not asking about what they ate for breakfast.

> People are making "judgement calls" based on highly publicized, recent cases of police officers doing "unreasonable things".

Define recent? Uneven application of force from the police based off of race is a known issue, and has been one for quite some time. In the past decade or so we have been able to witness more of these incidents due to the ubiquity of smartphones, but look no further than policies like stop and frisk as examples that illustrate the unjust policing of minorities [1].

In business, we have a philosophy of building goodwill. We do things to establish trust with our users so that when we inevitably screw up, they will give us a pass. But it's important to remember that goodwill is a finite commodity. Screw up one too many times without making concessions, and you will no longer get the benefit of the doubt.

No one is debating that there are plenty of good officers in the US, the issue is with the bad ones, and the lack of repercussions/changes in policy to address them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com