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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

If your reality were getting stopped and frisked statistically more because of your color or pulled over more for “looking suspicious”, your viewpoint might change. There have been plenty of cases where Black men were “suspiciously” going into their own homes.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/07/29/missio...

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Did you read the article? Or forget the title of this thread?

Anecdotes aside, there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police (and whether they want more or less of them in their neighborhoods).

Yes and I’ve also read other articles. From the conservative Cato institute

https://www.cato.org/blog/do-police-treat-all-races-equally

Roughly seven-in-ten white Americans (72%) say police officers treat racial and ethnic groups equally at least some of the time. By way of comparison, half of Hispanics and just 33% of black adults say the same

It's worth noting that Cato is right-libertarian, not simply conservative.

Fair point.

That doesn't mean 66% of black adults want to defund the police.

I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with funding (or "abolishing" as the root of this thread wondered about).

The link was in response to this.

there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police

I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability,

Is “improved accountability” a nice way to say “stop shooting and beating unarmed Black people” or “stop pulling over Black people in neighborhoods where they ‘don’t look like they belong’”?

I'm a black American and I've been pulled over twice here in Japan (in the past 5 years) for what I concluded was basically "Driving While Black". I still think "Abolish/defund the police" are terrible slogans and equally terrible policy positions to take. But I continue to live in Japan because I know that the police here aren't inclined to put a bullet in my ass either. I like the Japanese "koban" model for deploying police forces. I also recognize that the overall baseline level of violence, and the proliferation of firearms, presents a vastly different force protection situation for urban American police than it does for their Japanese counterparts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dban

There's a ton of problems I have law enforcement in the US, and the bulk of it boils down to terrible screening of personnel and inappropriate training. Fixing both of those issues will require more funding, not less. Better psychological screening (to eliminate sociopaths), higher pay (to retain quality personnel, and be able to rotate people off the streets more frequently), longer training and with different curriculum (stop learning tactics from Israeli counter-insurgency personnel), etc...

That happens in every country. We call it "Illegal face possession", it's called profiling.

That still doesn’t negate that if you are on the receiving end, you might be a little hostile to the police.

I'm no friends with police but they have been way more times in my side that against me.

But if that one time they are against you they short you in the back seven times, suffocate you for nine minutes, or arrest you on trumped up charges, it doesn’t really balance out does it?

That’s about like an abused spouse. “He doesn’t always beat me”.

What form does it take in your country? Is it based on the amount of melanin in the profiling victim's skin, or are there other arbitrary factors?

Sex, race, clothing and general aspect, like everywhere else.

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