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Comment by dzhiurgis | Hacker News Reader

Not a US citizen either, but I feel there something wrong with US citizens to begin with. Policing is just a reflection of it.

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Care to elaborate on this? I am a US citizen, and I find it hard to understand the implication that US citizens are responsible for the violence and aggressive tactics of police.

Not the GP, but my personal impression is that US culture glorifies violence and conflict, as conflict, rather than co-operation, is seen as a way to get ahead on an individual level. That spreads through all layers of society including law enforcement.

It is obviously not something that can be blamed on any specific individual, and it's only based on what things looks like from the outside, but the impression is there regardless.

The ridiculous amount of wars the US wages upon other countries also contribute to that image, but I suspect that's more related to the US fighting seemingly neo-colonial wars with European support than anything else. If European contribution had been on the same level, that factor would probably not be included.

As an American living in Europpe, I can say that Americans glorify violence, greed, individualism, more than any other country in the world.

For the most part this isn't true. The difference is that Americans are more willing to express themselves on these topics than people in some European countries. And I say this as an American who's been living in Europe for over 12 years now.

I guess? But that's a fairly huge generalization to portray a whole country, isn't it? And even it were true to such a degree that it influenced policing, that does't really address the concerns of disproportionate use of violence towards people of color, or repeated instances of corruption and illegal tactics.

In my view, the US citizens are too polarized in almost any category to work their issues with one another. Most have very limited capacity for compromise and it's not always limited by internal rationalization. You are either left or right, cop or a citizen, black or caucasian, etc. God forbid you say the word "social" if you are a republican or you'll be labelled as a traitor to your party, that kind of polarization. There is no middle ground with where you stand. There was an interview on Ben Shapiro's channel on youtube where people on the street which identify as liberal where asked if they would consider compromising in order to get along with the right. They said, "Yes, we must be united." However when they were asked to choose on some policies to compromise, they disagreed to do so on every single one of them. Obviously this was targeted interview and I don't agree with half of the things that Shapiro is saying. However for citizens to live in peace with the rest there must be some kind of process of discussions and resolutions through compromise. And in your case those usually start with a discussion and end up with "f* you", "no f* you". My theory is that you have not had enough experience with negotiations and that is attributed to the limited foreign encounters that you had in your history. In Europe we had so many conflicts and wars that we had to negotiate all the time to keep the status quo which meant sometimes compromising with the opposition. The US way to handle things is usually to go straight to the active and aggressive approach. I've seen this in my business meetings and IT meetings with US clients. In itself this way of handling things is neither correct nor wrong, however it must be applied only when it is suitable to do so. And in my opinion this is usually all that you have in your deck of cards. I have some other theories as well on why your social approach is usually more aggressive.

The is a problem with the power structures, not the people. American hierarchies give power to people who glorify those things, and those people exercise that power to prevent or suppress the spread of opposing ideas.

I don't know if that's true. Look at the Rambo movies. The first was a harrowing story of a man dealing with ptsd. The rest were just violence porn.

A lot of you are armed.

This does not excuse or allow the frequent and extreme violence that is perpetrated by police on unarmed citizens, which is the reason they feel the need to document their experiences with officers.

It was a violent encounter with police officers that led to the proposal that they wear body cameras (https://www.wired.com/story/body-cameras-stopped-police-brut...)

Even with the use of them, the release of them is often blocked or their existence is denied.

From the above article: " In Baltimore three years ago, one of the devices caught a police officer as he planted drugs at a crime scene; he was later convicted for fabricating evidence. After Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by a cop in Atlanta on Friday, body cam footage of the incident was quickly released, and the officer was fired. "

The problem is that when you don't know if a citizen is armed or not, you just default to thinking they are. Because that is the safer assumption for you to make as a police officer. If citizens are not allowed to carry guns, that default assumption changes. It is a whole different dynamic.

> If citizens are not allowed to carry guns, that default assumption changes.

I am not sure this is entirely correct. Generally speaking, law-abiding citizens are not the ones that police have to worry about anyway (regardless of if they are carrying guns). Citizens that are not law-abiding (criminals), on the other hand, are the people that police generally need to be concerned about. It does not seem like a great idea to assume these people are not armed simply because they "are not allowed to carry guns."

Admittedly, the absolute saturation of American culture with guns is not making the cop's jobs any easier, but the answer to these problems is way more complicated than disarming law-abiding citizens.

I find your distinction between law abiding citizens and criminals hilarious.

There is no difference between the two and to pretend like there is a difference is how we get the same people chanting both "we need to punish criminals more severely!" and "It's shameful the US has so much of it's population in prison"

edit: But also, how do you expect a COP to be able to differentiate between the 2 in the field? They are essentially the ones that gets to decide who is a criminal or not which brings us back to how the police are given the ability to abuse their power.

> There is no difference between the two

Certainly there is no difference between them in terms of their human dignity and (unless otherwise specified by law) their rights as citizens. But it seems illogical to assert that there is no difference at all between a person who has broken a law and a person who has not...

It's not way more complicated. Get rid of the guns, and you will get rid of a lot of problems. It is really that simple.

But I would not know how to get rid of guns in the US now, because there are just too many guns around, and "non-law-abiding" citizens will still carry them.

A citizen should not carry a gun. Doesn't matter if they are "law-abiding" or not.

If it was likely the other person has a gun, I would think twice before doing something. It makes more sense to me to be more wary when I assume that the person I may be thinking of robbing has a gun on them, vs. knowing it is extremely unlikely that the person is not going to have a gun on them.

Are you sure the problem is guns? What makes you so sure? I am genuinely interested, because Serbia is known for having lots of guns, too, but firearm-related death rate is low, vs. Honduras, which has much less guns per 100 inhabitants and extremely high firearm-related death rate that is homicide.

In any case, here is the table:

  | Country  | Homicide | Guns per 100 inhabitants |
  | US       |     4.46 |                    120.5 |
  | Serbia   |     0.72 |                    37.82 |
  | Honduras |    28.65 |                9.9-11.24 |

Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r....

What do you think explains this? Curious to explore.

From the Harvard Injury Control Research Center:

"Where there are more guns there is more homicide."

"Across high-income nations more guns = more homicide."

"Across states, more guns = more homicide."

"More guns = more homicides of police."

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...

I would be careful with this information, because correlation != causation, as well as the fact that cause and effect might be reversed. And to be fair to the HICRC, they don't claim the causation.

Could it be that states with high homicide rates lead to people in those states buying more guns to feel more protected at home (and not the other way around)?

For a real life example, I live in Seattle, and we had a giant spike in the first-time firearm ownership numbers last year. It was driven by a lot of people who previously had zero interest in owning guns who suddenly became more concerned about their safety due to all the violence happening adjacent to protests, as well as due to the local District Attorney refusing to prosecute a lot of violent criminals with many repeated offenses and letting them out (to clarify: when I say "violent", I am not talking about protests, I am talking about people with multiple battery and assault charges, robbery, gang violence, rape, etc.). So in the Seattle scenario, it was indeed an increased rate of crime and homicides that caused a spike in firearm ownership, not the other way around.

And what about Switzerland, with their extremely high rate of gun ownership but low rate of homicides?

I don't have an answer to these questions, but it makes me feel like it is a bit less simplistic than just "higher rates of gun ownership in high-income nations create higher homicide rates".

The problem is, even if people buy guns to feel safer, it doesn't help. (It simply makes crime more violent. Guns don't deter crime.)

Politics is broken if the DA is not effectively enforcing laws. Guns can't fix it. (Just as every surveillance thread on HN has comments about "technology can't really fix this, it's a politics problem", guns are very much just technology when it comes to socioeconomics/politics of crime.)

Switzerland has very high regulation. Not just for guns, for everything. And a very effective (almost direct) democracy. And an almost universal very-very-very high standard of living. (Yet their suicide rate is pretty high! Used to be higher than the US' - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates?tab=c... ) Gun ownership there is more of a cultural heritage, and very much not a safety device.

The thought that someone may have a gun may deter though. How effective is it? I do not know. If it is known that in my area most people carry a gun, then people may think twice to rob. Emphasis on may, because I do not know how effective it is at all.

Crime is motivated by opportunity (eg. if there's virtually no enforcement) and necessity. By the time someone gets to the point of committing violent crimes, armed or not doesn't really matter. (At least this is how I understand it.)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-guns-do-not-...

There are many, many words written on how great guns are or how grave problem they are. I completely accept that if the plurality want this so be it, it's not as deadly as many other problems.

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" as they say. Serbia and Honduras are anomalies. Within the entire data set there's a significant positive correlation between "Guns per 100 inhabitants" and Homicide rate.

Are they really anomalies?

  | Country  | Homicide | Guns per 100 inhabitants |
  | US       |     4.46 |                    120.5 |
  | Serbia   |     0.72 |                    37.82 |
  | Honduras |    28.65 |                9.9-11.24 |
  |          |          |                          |
  | Cyprus   |     0.50 |                     36.4 |
  | Canada   |     0.72 |                    34.70 |
  | Finland  |     0.20 |                     32.4 |
  | ...      |          |                          |
  |          |          |                          |
  | Jamaica  |    38.20 |                      5.8 |
  | Eswatini |    37.16 |                      8.1 |
  | Brazil   |    23.93 |                      8.6 |
  | ...      |          |                          |

Are they anomalies, too, or what do you mean by anomaly? I do not want to edit the table anymore, but someone also mentioned Switzerland, indeed, extremely low rate of firearm-related homicide (0.13) with high rate of gun ownership (27.6-41.2). There are many more.

Why cherry-pick? Just running the regression analysis on the entire dataset.

The fact that just about anyone can be heavily armed means police needs to be extra vigilant or else risk their life.

Otherwise people feel so extreme and polarised. You've got Hawaii and Bay Area liberals vs rednecks. Both are very strong with their opinions.

is hawaii very liberal? more so than bay area?

in my experience it's rather conservative there socially, but overall it's like 2/3 democrat voters there.

The obvious answer to this is firearms. I'm amazed at how little this is appreciated in terms of the extra stress for US police officers. US police officers are a completely different profession to every other country.

Every time they walk up to anyone, or a car, they could be shot and die. This is insane and I don't think many people appreciate this. It completely changes the dynamic of the relationship between citizens and police.

Not to mention, US police aren't trained to deal with this stress. Which is an extra problem.

I loved the interview Jocko Willink did with Joe Rogan shortly after the George Floyd killing. The answer isn't defunding the police. Its more funding. So they can spend 20% of their time training, like the military. So they can get accustomed to high stress situations and DEescalation. These skills need to be learned. And they're not.

There is a good argument too that police should not handle good chunk of social situations that are not violent or criminal. Steer the system so that social workers without ability to use force handle them first and escalate to police as necessary.

How about we keep their budgets the same, and force them to use 20% of that budget for training? They can reduce their expenditures on tear gas and rubber bullets and harassment campaigns against activists and Black people.

Maybe instead of sending 100 SWAT troops to deal with people marching in a street, then can send 20 cops to keep an eye on things and put the other 80 in a training class.

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