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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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