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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

Trying new ideas in low-risk ways is generally a good idea. Government is generally incentivized to keep the status-quo and not take many risks.

Your political position shouldn't affect your view of this effort, so long as it's novel, low risk and follows the data.

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Low risk until a mental health professional gets shot.

Would you rather try it out on an entire state first? It is low risk compared to the alternative options to experiment.

The net deaths might still be lower. 978 people have been shot by police in the US in the past year.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Exchanging a larger number of deaths of civilians for a smaller number of civil worker deaths is a good trade. Dead civil workers mean less people willing to do that work, which means less help available to people overall.

Out of how many police-citizen interactions? The raw number is meaningless without context.

I think your sentence is missing a "because" at the end. Why do you think that deaths are meaningless as an integer here but would be useful as a ratio? Usually I've heard this line by folks who want to minimize the perception of police killings.

Wow, I wasn't aware of this data. 978 shot and killed in a year is way lower than I would have expected. Like, order of magnitude lower, possibly 2.

Between 2003 and 2007, there were an average of 13 deaths of emergency medical workers in the line of duty. 57% were ground vehicular accidents and 31% were aircraft accidents.

https://www.jems.com/2011/10/31/studies-show-dangers-working....

89 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty in 2019, 48 as the results of "felonious acts."

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...

"X bad thing could happen" is an bad argument because it can be applied to literally any scenario. I could choose not to go get groceries because it's a great idea, until I get hit by a car.

When making policies on serious (and dangerous) topics for a large population, a single death is not a large risk. Even if this policy is wildy succesful, I'd still expect people with mental illness, police, and mental health processions to be occasionally killed in interactions (as they are today).

The point is these are difficult situations and the goal would be to decrease the rate of bad outcomes, likely not eliminate them.

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