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Comment by ssklash | Hacker News Reader

Or you could, you know, protest police brutality and misconduct and support police reform. Respect the reality that police are public servants, accountable to us, whose job is to keep us safe, and who have been endowed with great powers to do that job. The second they stop doing that job, they become incredibly dangerous because of those powers.

I've always been amazed at the law and order, respect my rights, follow the Constitution types seem to have so much trust and demand so little accountability from the single greatest threat to those rights, the police.

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How do you support police reform? The majority of the people aren’t affected by police misconduct. It mostly affects minorities. If a politician goes against the police, not only will they be seen as “weak on crime”, they piss off a quasi-military force that is known to harass and threaten politicians who go against them. A large part of the population see the police as their protection against those “thugs” in the inner city.

Ok but it's a pretty hard job and mistakes are unavoidable just like with any job.

I'm pretty fine here, when I make a code mistake I can fix it, and I'm paid so much more than a cop.

I suppose that would be a good reason for me to bitch about cops in general right ?

At least, that's what it seems when I read comments on hn the last days.

The problem is that cops (and prosecutors and judges) protect each other from accountability. If you saw your co-worker hit a pedestrian because they made a mistake driving would you lie for your co-worker and say that the pedestrian jumped out in front of the car? I hope not. Likewise, if you saw your co-worker intentionally hit someone with their car would you lie to protect them? If you did, that would make both of you bad, even though you never hit anyone with your car. That's what people are protesting: the fact that police can brutalize people without consequence.

Because it's a hard job that doesn't pay well we should expect mediocrity? And mediocre is probably a good outcome, considering that bad policing often ends in death. Being president or a member of Congress is a hard job, yet we expect, rightfully so, a damn good job done, or we find someone else. Sure we should pay them better, and I suspect salary increases would be plentiful if you took them out of the military equipment fund they all seem to have.

The police unquestionably have a hard job, and are granted immense powers to do it. We all know what comes with great power. But if the single group of people endowed with the authority to deny you your rights is not held to the highest of standards, can anyone be surprised that so many are having their rights, and even their lives, taken from them?

What makes you think we should expect mediocrity ? Just because a few cases here and there make the front page of tabloids ?

How exactly do you plan to absolutely eliminate any mistake from policing ?

You know, what we explain to antivaxx people, is that the benefits largely outweight the inconvenience, that's just basic pragmatism.

No one expects perfection. Obviously. No one said anything about no mistakes. You pulled that out of nowhere. The issue is accountability for those mistakes. Of which there is not enough. Hence the current protests. What incentive do police have when they investigate themselves and there are no consequences, or slaps on the wrists, transfers to other departments, etc? You would at least get fired for repeatedly shipping buggy code and showing no desire to change it. Except in the case of the police, it would be like your boss investigating the bugs, agreeing with you that they are not in fact bugs, and saying good job, you did what you were supposed to.

No other job functions this way. Why do we let the profession with the power to use deadly force function this way?

Seems extremely disingenuous to label it as "...a few cases here and there make the front page of tabloids..."

I'm kind of unsure of your point here. If you make a coding mistake, you fix it, and you move on. Presumably, that mistake didn't kill anyone.

Kneeling on someone's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds is not a mistake. Shooting someone in their own home after you serve a no-knock warrant is not a mistake. Shoving an old man to the ground and walking past his bleeding body is not a mistake. Even if the officer didn't intend to kill someone, someone is now dead.

If we trust police with the authority over life and death (and really, I don't think we should), we should at least hold them to the highest and strictest standards of conduct.

Look at it this way, what would you think of a development team that shipped bugs to production and had...no code reviews...no unit tests...no bug tracking system?

And every time they shipped a bug someone died?

You might be inclined to improve the process, right?

I won't belabor the analogy. Campaign Zero has a great summary of the policy changes that can help: https://www.joincampaignzero.org/solutions

Why do so many people need to be so extreme? Zero is impossible.

If you want to make the development argument, then you should know that bugs are unavoidable. Even from the best developers in the world. No amount of code reviews, tests, or processes will change that.

Can you reduce? Of course. By a really large amount? Probably. But "zero" is an impossible goal. The statement "We can live in a world where the police don't kill people" just makes you look dumb and naive.

8cantwait.org at least has a realistic number backed by studies.

Norway manage it: https://www.businessinsider.com/norway-america-police-killin...

Zero is the only reasonable target. Every death should be treated as a process and policy failure. Every death should lead to an improvement.

It will be a long way to get there, but as JFK said, we do these things not because they are easy.

A country with minimal diversity that's less than 2% the population of the US. A country whose largest city has an extremely lower population density than US cities (10x less than NYC, 7x less than LA). You can't just cherry pick data and think it's applicable.

Stop. Think. You're making a "perfect is the enemy of the good" argument which ultimately supports police brutality and systemic racism.

(I'll also point out that 8cantwait.org is a Campaign Zero project. Thank you for linking it.)

Do you truly think that there are zero cases where a police officer firing a gun is justified?

My dude, that ain’t even remotely why people are out in the streets. You’re sitting on the sidelines confused why everyone is shouting.

I have no idea what you're saying with this comment.

I said that we should take actions that have been shown to improve the situation. 8canwait.org goes over many of them, and I'm sure there are lots of other actions we can take as well.

Zero is impossible without a perfect populous. It is the enemy of 8canwait (and I know, it was created by people who think zero is possible).

Someone saying "zero is possible" makes it seem like they don't understand the situation enough to have a real conversation about it.

Explicit in your original question "Why do so many people need to be so extreme?" is the presumption that standing against police brutality is an extreme position to have. It preserves the status quo. It preserves a world where literal Nazis are accepted as "very fine people".

To answer your question directly, to address systemic racism in America we need to shift the Overton window of discourse. That _requires_ dissemination of values and ideas which many consider radical or unthinkable.

Beyond that, to say someone is dumb and naive because they don't think cops should be allowed to kill people is callous and ignorant when you consider blacks are three times more likely to be killed by police than whites. [https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/]

"Zero is impossible" is implicitly saying, "Cops should be allowed to kill people." Easy to say when it's not your community in the crosshairs.

These are not "mistakes". The police are unwilling to disambiguate between peaceful protesters and looters. I live in NYC, where looting has largely stopped and every single protest I've been to has been peaceful — yet police begin indiscriminately assaulting protesters as soon as curfew ends, and threatening reporters who dare document it.

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