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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Does it matter?

Where crimes, such as burglary and assault, are being committed, police will generally be called upon to act. A subset of those responses will involve police violence. One would hope that such police violence only occurs in self defense, but we know that to not always be the case. So yes, the two things are mathematically correlated. One drives the other. It would be interesting to be able to tell what the incidence rate is, rather than just seeing a group of cherry-picked incidents designed with the sole intent of satisfying the public's appetite for a specific narrative.

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It’s one thing to say “given there will be crime, and some criminals are violent, cops may have to be violent sometimes to stop criminals”. That’s a pretty bloodless analysis.

Let’s get to the fun part: “if cops perceive someone to be a criminal, how violent will we allow them to be, relative to how violent the perceived criminal is?”

In the case of the cops assaulting that vigil for Elijah McClain (it was a peaceful gathering with people listening to a couple violin players) I’d argue that the cops were perpetrating violence at a level about 100x relative to the people they were trying to police (even if you consider that folks may have been “yelling mean things” at them).

Personally, I would consider 1.1x acceptable, maybe 1.5x in some situations. And so every time I see cops blowing through that threshold and being even 5x or 10x more violent than the people they’re policing, I perceive that as a massive injustice, I think those cops should get fired, and I get pretty angry.

Serious question: do you think that police officers should have to accept themselves to getting hurt as part of their job? Meaning, that it's actually an expectation the public has of police officers that they will get hurt if someone is fighting with them. To me, that seems like the inevitable consequence of not quickly taking control using decisive force. That's the issue I think exists with 1:1.1 response. It doesn't stop the unlawful behavior. No?

You seem to be misconstruing people's condemnation of the police use of force. The condemnation is due to the police not responding with force appropriately.

My interpretation is that the majority of people are simply responding to the trend of police responding with extreme violence more and more readily in situations which absolutely do not require it.

We can talk about that when they get down to like, 3x to 5x force.

Right now we are seeing video after video of cops tear gassing civilians for throwing empty water bottles at them, running over civilians using SUVs for "refusing to disperse" and knocking out old folks who are going "Hey man, what if this is a bad idea though?".

The ratio right now is so high, the kinds of conversations you may want to have aren't even relevant.

Much of the evidence we're seeing has absolutely nothing to do with "getting hurt as part of their job". At the most extreme, there are cases of bean bags and rubber bullets fired at people filming the police from inside their own homes though closed windows.

Yes, obviously? Of course they are going to get hurt doing their job. A lot of their job involves performing odd manuevers in traffic, for example. Do you have a suggestion for how to do policework without police officers ever having to accept the possibility of getting hurt?

I would say that "quickly taking control using decisive force" is part of the problem, this approach is often escalating problems instead of deescalating them.

I see what you mean.

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