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Comment by noarchy | Hacker News Reader

People want security. That means different things to different people. Law enforcement is not necessarily the same thing as security. Law enforcement means just that, and the laws themselves may not be what many would consider just. The laws are likely to reflect the prejudices of those in power, which may lend itself to why we're seeing the clashes we're seeing in the US right now.

Those with the resources to do so have on-site security. This ranges from gated communities, to some condo/apartment buildings, and even shopping malls. Even this isn't necessarily free of problems, but it needs to be seen as something fundamentally different from law enforcement. So when we talk about "abolishing" the police, we have to ask what we really want in its stead.

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> Law enforcement is not necessarily the same thing as security

I'm having difficulty finding my source right now, but it appears that in cases of homicide by someone unknown to the victim, a police officer is the perpetrator in between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 incidents. These statistics don't consider whether the killing is justified; they just observe that if people know of someone who was killed by a stranger, there's a 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 chance that stranger has a uniform.

And as we know, people's perceptions of safety are more important than actual statistics. We rewrote the nature of air travel in response to 9/11.

How would that imply lack of security? Wouldn't it be perfect if every single homicide by a stranger was by a cop? It would mean that a cop was there every time to stop the criminal before they hurt someone.

That's assuming that the only people cops shoot are criminals.

in point of fact, legally, almost everyone the cops shoot are innocent people in the eyes of the law.

Innocent in the eyes of the law, meaning what? No prior convictions? Not convicted of the crime for which the police officer is looking for the perpetrator? Of course they're not; they haven't even been arrested yet. And once they're dead, nobody's going to bother to prosecute and convict them.

For example, we recently had an armed robbery outside a bar here. Police came looking for the perpetrator. They found a man who they suspected might be the robber. He ran from them. They chased him. He turned around with a gun in his hand. They shot and killed him.

Now: Was he innocent in the eyes of the law? He wasn't convicted of that robbery. He wasn't even arrested for it. They would have arrested him (or at least detained him), but he fled, and then turned around with a gun.

So I'm not sure that "innocent in the eyes of the law" says very much. Other than escaped prisoners, everyone the police encounter is innocent in the eyes of the law, at least on the issue for which the police are confronting them.

> Was he innocent in the eyes of the law?

Yes.

> I'm not sure that "innocent in the eyes of the law" says very much.

It says that we still believe in the rule of law, not in just allowing cops to be judge, jury, and executioner on our streets. To be sure, shootings due to self defense happen, but we have entire protests and riots in the United States right now over how often cops kill innocent civilians without justification, and are protected by the system from any consequences.

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