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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely true. However, there is not much assuming being done. The absolutely stark, clear, and unassailable fact that many police in the US are violent, racist thugs has been repeatedly shoved into my face over the last few months. Not all of them are, by any means. But even the good cops are part of a system that enables and rewards racist, thuggish behavior.

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“Good” cops regularly stonewall investigations into bad cops, and vote for police unions that will do everything in their power to literally allow bad cops to get away with murder.

Well I can't argue with that since you said 'many' police in a country of 350+ million people. But what is many? 5? 100? 1000? It's easy to pick these instances and assign blame retrospectively when in reality, things like this almost never happen. If the guy had pulled out a gun and shot the cops in the head, we wouldn't have heard a thing about it. Business as usual.

If it happens once that's once too many.

This is a nonsense argument. Police in the United States kill civilians at a rate more that 3x the rate of the next first world nation. In almost all cases of police acting with bias, those same officers are surrounded by other officers who do nothing. All of these bystanding officers are guilty of the same crime. These cases are just the ones that are brought to the national attention there are many more that are not. In very many of these cases several police body cameras just stopped working or were not on.

"in reality, things like this almost never happen" I am willing to bet your life experience is very different than those of minorities.

" If the guy had pulled out a gun and shot the cops in the head, we wouldn't have heard a thing about it" Not sure what you base this on, I feel like to could be based on nothing but the narrative you are attempting spin. Is your argument that police should be more aggressive based on what could happen? Should police just gun everyone down because they may have a gun and pull it out and shoot them in the head?

In this country, police have godlike life or death power, every instance of police killings should be heavily scrutinized by neutral parties and stringent protocols put in place to prevent it with harsh criminal penalties for those that dont follow the rules. How you can just shrug and accept any cases of police brutality is beyond me.

1. I am black. 2. There is no police brutality in my area, or crime for that matter. 3. I don't shrug and accept police brutality, those are your words. 4. I am not trying to spin a narrative, merely point out a narrative that is being spun by the media that directs attention away from actual solutions in favor of self-dealing sensationalism.

Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made.

What area is that? Can you link to some stats.

There are very few areas on the United States with no crime...

"Cops are humans. It is illogical to assume that there will be no mistakes made." They are but when they make mistakes people die or are sent to jail for decades or are stripped of their property. To give people this much power and shrug and say its a mistake is not acceptable. Very often these same cops have many / dozens of complaints against them and they still continue to act with impunity because they know that they are not going to be punished. A mistake is a mistake, 10 / 15 mistakes in and it is a pattern, extrapolated out over tens of thousands of officers and it is a systematic problem.

>It's easy to pick these instances and assign blame retrospectively when in reality, things like this almost never happen.

In reality USA has 3-10x the number of police shootings per capita than a random western country (heck, worse than many developing countries of even dictatorships).

So, yeah, the metrics are off.

If your counter-argument is "yeah, but US has more crime too", then maybe think long and hard if your whole legal system, approach to crime, society goals, etc, are justified then....

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