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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> Everything most middle-income Americans think about our police forces is wrong.

That statement is a bit vague, everyone is going to substitute their own interpretation in. The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist. People who want power over others sign up for policing - and then go after groups who have the least ability to fight back.

The middle income might know the symptoms, but they are missing the cause. The cause is that if a fellow wants to hurl someone else to the ground, kick them and keep them down without a fair fight then their best chance as getting to that situation is to sign on to the police. This is an inescapable structural pressure that needs constant attention.

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> inescapable structural pressure

I agree it's a severe problem, but I don't agree it's inescapable.

It's a job that attracts brutal people only because it's a job that lets them get away with brutality. If the cycle of allowing brutality and attracting brutes could be broken, there's a good chance it'd stay broken.

The police fraternity knows all about getting other cops to fall into line - just look at the "blue wall of silence" and police union "get out of jail free" cards. That same pressure couldn't be applied against brutality.

I wonder if part of why it seems particularly bad (for a developed country) in the US is the local police force system. In countries with national police forces, misconduct investigations are often conducted by specialist staff who may be from the other side of the country, who likely aren't really in the same org chart, and so on. It seems intuitively less likely to produce a fair result if the people investigating work in the same place and under the same org structure as the people being investigated.

The reason why it’s particularly bad in the US is that we’ve got insanely high levels of violent and organized crime. Baltimore, where I used to live, the homicide rate per 100,000 people is 30-50 times higher than in say Berlin, Madrid, London, etc. It’s almost double the rate of Bogota. That creates a police force that treats policing like its war, and public systems that give wide latitude to errors or misconduct, just as we would give soldiers in war.

Cause or effect? I would argue that the warrior cop mentality escalates violence. That style of police training was banned by the mayor in Minneapolis, yet it continues to be taught and implemented.

You have a very sick society and until you realize it is not all the fault of one group it will persist.

I think it’s a cause, not an effect, because the US has always had very high levels of violence compared to Europe, long before we even had professional police forces and formal police training. It’s definitely not the fault of any one group, though, because the problem has been widespread across various times and various groups.

That more aggressive policing causes an order of magnitude more crime seems like a theory that doesn't pass the smell test to me.

Is there a good reason to believe that it's true?

More aggressive policing does not imply more solved crimes. It does not imply that actual worst wrongdoers get caught with some kind of effectivity.

However, it implies antagonized population where even innocent people will avoid police contact, whether reporting of crime, informing to police or otherwise cooperating with them as much as possible. It implies that people dont see police as an institution to protect them and dont use them as such.

More aggressive may mean quotas for arrests - leading to arrests that have nothing to do with public safety. It is easier to arrest someone apparently poor for loitering or sorta kinda open bottle of alcohol then someone actually violent.

Same with fines. For example, if the masks are mandatory outside, cops can either issue warning or give you a find. In most cases, warning is enough to make people comply and take it seriously. Fine is used only when people refuse to comply. If cops were aggressive and issued fine immediately to everyone who had half nose out of mask, we would not be safer.

More aggressive means exactly that and nothing more.

Yes, the entire spectrum of fiat crimes such as "the war on drugs". Without the existence of these, or without the will to aggressively enforce them, large swaths of crime would simply disappear. The disastrous results also spill over and create real crime, as people are unable resolve commercial disputes through the courts, but have to DIY.

At any rate, even if general society is more violent, that is not a justification for supposed police to add to the mayhem. When police officers are not bound by the law they purport to uphold, then they are actually just another gang.

It's a cause: we here in the USA are pretty fucking nuts. I've heard a group of off-duty police discussing their work talking about going into a house and literally not knowing if the folks inside are going to open fire with automatic weapons. FWIW, I agree that "the warrior cop mentality" is a problem, and professionalism in police work is crucial, e.g. the Peelian principles ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles )

> You have a very sick society

Yeah, but it's slowly getting better. Not this week, obviously, but the trend is there.

We are a nation built on genocide and psychotic slavery. Check out "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Indigenous_Peoples'_History...

And yet police officer are number 16 of the most dangerous jobs in the US just behind first line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers and before construction workers.

So the reasoning that they act like this because of their dangerous job is a myth.

Source: https://www.ajc.com/business/employment/these-are-the-most-d...

I'm curious if anyone has a data source on this that actually breaks down by duties? A "police officer" can be a beat cop in Baltimore, or a desk sergeant in Omaha, or an IA reviewer etc.

When people say "being a police officer" is risky they obviously mean the part where you go around physically enforcing law and order, not the other parts that are actually the majority of many long-term police careers. But the fact that the current beat cop will in 5 years have a much safer job doesn't mean that the current job is not very risky.

> just as we would give soldiers in war.

I’m not sure if soldiers in war actually are given all that much latitude over murdering civilians; if caught they do tend to be punished.

The national police force in Canada rapes and murders native women with complete impunity. It might be a bit better in that there are less extrajudicial murders, but it's far from being great.

It's hardly inescapable. Police in the nordic countries acts and behaves more or less as a service branch of the government rather as a bully. But they have several years of training whereas US has only - what, a few months? I would say it's about skimping costs in the wrong place. US system is weird that in it's local search of frugal solutions it creates inefficient systems (like the medical sector).

What’s the situation with Nordic police and minorities? Because in the not really Nordic but reasonably civilized Netherlands the supposedly well educated police force is also a known hotbed of racism. Members of the police force in The Hague refer to themselves as “exterminators of Moroccan vermin”. Ethnic profiling is rampant and on at least one occasion a man of color was held down by a group of cops until he died as well.

At least part of the problem is cops themselves.

Police in Denmark are bullies too. Breaking basic rights, assaulting citizens, covering for each other, lobbying against body cams and visible identifiers on cops like numbers, etc. Profiling is legal and used extensively.

Until we realize that tribalism is human nature, it won't change.

Racism is universal amongst humans. We are tribal primates, after all. We need to admit the biases exist and address them head-on.

It stands to reason that having a bias against out groups once increased an individuals chance of survival. Now it is actively harming society. If we can't rise above our primitive impulses, we are doomed.

I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's important to understand that the actual politics of reform pose a serious obstacle to admitting biases exist. If a police department produced a document saying "10% of our officers are moderately to severely racist, we're aiming to get that below 3%", they'd be eviscerated.

Bigotry is universal amongst humans. Racism is a systematic application of that bigotry such that it can operate on an "undesirable" population with or without the consent of the people supporting and maintaining that system. Racism is not a natural sociological phenomenon; it is a deliberate effort to twist the nature of human behavior and cognition towards cruel, cynical, violent, and destructive ends.

We need to stop telling ourselves these lies about who we are and what we're capable of.

Profiling is seen as bad, but I honestly don't think many grandmas will be the ones committing violent crime (or females in general). If you have some statistics to prove otherwise please show me them.

Someone once explained it to me like this:

Let's say 1% of the population commits crimes.

Let's also, for the sake of argument, say all crimes are committed by black people.

Of the general population, 10% is black.

If you profile all black people, you will indeed profile the 1% of the population that commits crimes, but you will also profile 9% of the population that does not commit crimes.

And before you say "not the entirety of the 10% black population is profiled": maybe ask some black people about this. It's not 100% of the black population that gets profiled but certainly a very significant percentage.

And even if it's just half or even a quarter of the black population that you're profiling, you're still profiling a lot of innocent people.

This is the reason why profiling is bad.

(and note that in reality the figures are even worse).

The conclusion doesn't really follow from the premise. If all crime were committed by one racial group it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures.

If there are credible reports of a white man committing murders it doesn't make any sense to waste resources listing mainly female Asian suspects, for example. There are also other similar issues. For example, if a crime happens on my street I expect to be treated as more of a suspect based only on my proximity.

The issue of racism is (and needs to be) grounded in things other than rational resource allocation.

The majority of crime in America is committed by white people, in terms of absolute numbers of arrests, value of stolen goods and funds, etc. By your logic, it would be most effective to target white people. This is without even taking into account that white suspects tend to avoid arrest, prosecution, conviction, and long jail sentences at higher rates than other racial groups (that is to say, when brought to a particular level of the justice system, they are less likely than others to proceed further).

However, it's clear that the vast majority of resources are devoted to black areas and poor areas, and to responding to directly "violent" crime. A mugging is more sensational than white collar crime, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint, I'm not sure it's rational to devote more resources to catching the mugger when, for example, there is widespread wage theft depressing incomes in the mugger's city. Which causes more damage in the long run?

A dead reply to this post expressed incredulity at the disparate treatment of Bernie Madoff and countless black convicts when comparing the scale of the damage they respectively caused. They illustrated this with the erroneous "factoid" that Madoff stole more than the value of all robberies and burglaries by black people in the country's history. This is probably untrue, due in no small part to the nature of his scheme. That said, the trillions in value lost during the Great Recession, which was the result of completely unpunished malfeasance by executives and regulators across the financial industry, and which stripped black families of roughly half their wealth, almost surely eclipses whatever figure one could come up with for the proposed above. I agree with the spirit of his comment.

Yes it does, because this is about profiling.

If all crime is committed by South Asian women, you're right that it would be madness not to use that information to target crime-fighting measures such as, for example, only looking for suspects that are female and have a South Asian suspects.

Profiling, however, where you preventively search if not outright harass people, is something entirely different: if one in ten South Asian women engage in crime, every time you preventively search and harass one of them, you have a ninety percent chance of searching and harassing someone who is innocent.

So it better to target 99% of the population that don't commit crimes rather that 9%? You haven't convinced me. Interesting that you chose black people for your example, its almost like you are profiling them.

it's better not to target any fraction of the population until you have some reason to suspect that an individual has committed a crime.

I don't know about minorities but the level of unprofessionalism obvious in the most egregious cases of police violence would feel improbable to me in countries like Sweden ,Finland or Norway. Yeah, they are tiny countries so the sample size is really small. But the police culture is different. Guns are not used, and if they are, their use is strictly monitored.

For example, Finland has a large number of firearms, but police don't come to a crime scene guns ablaze unless they have a very good reason to think there is a need to use them.

The US has underfunded education and training at every fundamental step of life.

It's the root of many of our problems.

Yes, underfunding education is the real root of the problem as it hampers the democratic process later on.

I would love to see better funding for education everywhere, But, no, that's not the real root of the problem.

To see the real root of the problem, compare the USA to other western democracies such as in Europe. The structure of society is very different, the nature of poverty, the number of people living as an economic underclass, the acceptance in the USA that poor areas of cities will just be fucked and that's normal, the presence of a never-ending source of ignorant, and often racist, people from small-town America, and the presence of a never-ending source of guns. Of course a lot of the above is related to the lack of a strong belief across the voting population that government should protect and support the poorest in society.

Things won't change in America until the above changes meaningfully. That would require the majority of the population to start thinking more like the liberal half, and there is no reason to think that that will happen any time soon.

"the acceptance in the USA that poor areas of cities will just be fucked and that's normal"

This is certainly not limited to the USA and you will readily find it in European democracies as well. A significant portion of French people have long since assumed that the banlieues are hopeless and there is little sense trying to improve them. In Eastern Europe you will find the same attitudes about Roma neighborhoods. Even in the Nordic countries which are held up as models of social equality, one finds the genesis of immigrant-heavy neighborhoods that, local people tell themselves, will forever have the problems that immigrant-heavy neighborhoods stereotypically have.

That does not seem to be the case. The US spends more on education than any other country. $16,268 a year per student vs global average of $10,759". It's evident that money does not translate into better results.

"According to the Washington thinktank the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), the average student in Singapore is 3.5 years ahead of her US counterpart in maths, 1.5 years ahead in reading and 2.5 in science. Children in countries as diverse as Canada, China, Estonia, Germany, Finland, Netherland, New Zealand and Singapore consistently outrank their US counterparts on the basics of education."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education...

What's the money actually spent on? I'd argue that massive American football stadiums for grades 9-12 are perhaps incorrectly prioritized as compared to e.g. teachers.

A decade ago, I was a high school teacher in inner-city San Bernardino. At the time, the district had more administrative personnel than teachers. I’d wager that kind of spending surpasses stadiums.

The problem with these sorts of averages is that it doesn't paint an accurate picture. There are schools with buildings in disrepair and schools without the same resources as other schools. And some have waaay more resources and spending per student than most schools. This is, in part, because a lot of states don't fund their schools by redistributing money across all schools. Instead, they rely on the school district's tax base - which means if you are in a poor neighborhood, you probably won't have as much funding. The same goes for being in an area that doesn't utilize the public schools as much as other areas (using private schools) - this decreases federal funding that is reliant on the number of children going to your school.

All this means that it isn't really evident that money doesn't translate into better results. It isn't strictly funding, that is true - poverty seriously affects how well students can perform, for example - but it should be quite obvious that a school that cannot afford maintenance, proper computers for students to learn on, or enough staff so that classes are a manageable size can't really teach as well as a moderately funded school.

This is false. State and federal funding makes up the discrepancy between more well funded and less well funded school districts in nearly every state. There is obviously differences between states, but states have vastly different costs of living. But even then: Mississippi spends as much on education as France. Overall, the US spends more not just in dollar terms, but as a percentage of GDP than most big European countries: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/15434.jpeg

Some of the worst cities have the beat funded schools. Minneapolis spends as much per student as Switzerland. Baltimore spends more, and spends as much of more than the rich suburban schools around it. The US also has relatively low rates or private K-12 compared to the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc.

Your banks writing $10,000 on a piece of paper, followed by some saying "this basic service costs $10,000" has no relation to value transactions in real countries.

Agreed. I can’t reply to the child comment, but school infrastructure is usually funded with bonds (at least around here).

US police have been receiving advanced training in Israel. The changes in tactics, gear, are all part of this training.

This incident in MN with United States citizens getting shot at on their own porch is a much milder form of thuggery — it was not legal application of force — that Palestinians have been living with for decades.

Karma.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joint-us-israel-police-...

What in the world. I had no idea. How did you learn about this?

This has been covered fairly extensively in alternative press over the years.

> The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist.

This is false. There is a long history of police membership in, involvement and collaboration with explicitly racist groups.

I just saw a video with cops throwing up distinct white supremacist hand signs. I guess nobody told them they aren't racist.

Are you by any chance talking about the OK sign?

Racism is in all our hearts — what’s important is in developing calm relations with your own strengths and weaknesses so that you can work on yourself if you choose.

Embracing this human weakness is part of developing the structures to keep us accountable.

Having internal prejudice which you wish to understand and eliminate, versus actively and purposely organizing or facilitating violence against people of color, are drastically different things. The long history I'm referencing is not people who have hidden prejudices and need to face their demons, it's people who are malicious toward groups of people for their race on purpose.

These are just different extremes in the expression of racism, which is the unjust treatment of other human beings due to race.

Those who are vehemently racist are likely only a minority of the expressions of racial injustice which minorities face as a lifestyle in America. The answer to both should point to structural solutions rather than making this an individual moral matter, asking people to monitor whether they're consciously racist.

> These are just different extremes in the expression of racism

No, they're not! One is quite obviously extreme, the other is quite obviously not. Some things are, and some things are not. Something that isn't can't be. I apologize for paraphrasing a disgusting piece of crap guy in this context, but... please understand that your nothing-matters philosophy is helping people get killed/the people killing them go without accountability.

Racism is not in our hearts - it's in our brains. A combination of in/out group bias, categorization error, inductive thinking and belief perserverance. Understanding these cognitive errors, and yes, that most decision making processes are made in our emotional centers, thus needing emotional intelligence training; this would all go a long way towards a more conscientious society.

These things can be taught directly. There is nothing special about it, and it's not about strengths or weaknesses. Most human brains work pretty similarly and have the same strengths and weaknesses, all of which can be managed or improved.

This is an empty comment.

"If you give the police unaccountable power to fight the criminals, the people who'd otherwise become criminals will join the police."

  The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist.

To the contrary, implicit bias has been shown to effect policing decision-making and outcomes. You're beginning from an inaccurate premise.

I know a number of cops and don't believe any of them signed up to be cops because of what you're describing. you are missing the cause, and are misattributing it individual malice.

The police exist to preserve the established order. If you believed a social order can exist without being preserved by violence, then i'd call you an anarchist, (i'd call myself one too.) If you believe anything remotely resembling the present social order can be preserved without violence then you're naive, and very few people are that naive, least of all the police. Under what circumstances violence is required to preserve the established order may be shocking, but the individual police officers aren't pushing the system around, the system is pushing them around.

Sociopathic bully cops would ve weeded out. They are covered for instead. Video of them murdering people would prompt action from the system to get rid of them, but the system declines to prosecute them, and i'd guess a third of the country hmms and haws and theorizes about what the murder victim should've done to avoid getting murdered. The victims of these bad cops would be treated by the media the same as any other person whom tragedy befell, instead the media digs up dirt on them.

Individual bad cops can't exert the kind of pressure on the system needed to do all that. It's the established social order expressing itself.

> The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist.

Depends on what you mean by “they.” Individual officers are a mixed bag, but someone else mentioned the ties between police and right-wing/racist groups. “The police” as an institution however is definitely racist.

> The police don't target racial minorities because they are racist. People who want power over others sign up for policing - and then go after groups who have the least ability to fight back.

The fact that racial minorities have the least ability to fight back is a significant component of institutional racism. Why are they in that position in the first place? Because the USA has not yet excised from its culture the racist policies, values, and attitudes that it has held since before its foundation.

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