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Comment by plank_time | Hacker News Reader

The militarization of the police in the US is a huge problem that is out of control. I was extremely disappointed that Obama didn’t not only rein in this militarization but effectively made it worse. We are now having to deal with a generation of cops who think they are GI Joe but don’t have the training. This is why so many unarmed people are getting shot by the cops, because they start their day thinking they are in Fallujah instead of Cleveland.

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Training isn't the issue, it's the lack of accountability. Military members are under the threat of being court martialed and spending time in military prison. They know they have less rights in military court than they would as civilians, and that punishment can be harsh.

Cops, on the other hand, know that the system will bend over backwards to accommodate whatever transgression or crime they commit. They can and do act with impunity, because they're actively aware of that impunity. They know that if they get caught, in the worst case scenario, they'll get a paid vacation, their boss will allow them to resign, and they'll have to work one town over.

I'll second this. In the military (or at least in the Marine Corps, from my experience), the person to your left and right is not only there to help you, but to hold you accountable too. It's started early in training that you don't "let your buddy off the hook", you f** them up if they do something stupid. The goal is to uncover all the dirt and get it cleaned up, not to hide it. And your buddy will testify against you, because they know it's the right thing to do, and you'll spend years in the brigg. It's a hard culture, but it's built to be self-filtering, self-cleaning. That's where the idea of honor comes from.

From everything that I've witnessed and heard, police culture is the polar opposite. You "do favors", "hook each other up", and "overlook mistakes". All of this breeds the bacteria, rather than killing it off.

There is money (and usually in cash) in the police line of work. It's much harder to make any money from the public in the army. So there is much less at stake.

Police can make arbitrarily good amount of money if they are corrupt. That's what is unbalancing things.

I don’t understand why normal community police are armed at all. There’s absolutely no need for it.

It's a sad fact in the USA that you might encounter an armed criminal almost anywhere. I have personally seen a bunch of crimes involving gunfire, rather than mere brandishing of weapons.

On the other hand, police carry a lot of weapons, typically a handgun, pepper spray, a taser, a baton, and a heavy switchblade knife, plus a shotgun or rifle in the car. But they're relatively poorly trained and (even taking police claims at face value) deaths of civilians have resulted from confusion involving use of the wrong weapon.

Another factor is that urban areas are often policed by people who live in surrounding suburban towns, and end up feeling like they're going to work in a war zone every day because they are not embedded in the communities they ostensibly serve.

The vast majority of police never actually need their weapons. So why are they routinely carrying them?

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/08/a-closer-lo...

There's tons of dangerous things we could carry around just in case, but we don't because they'd be seen as aggressive.

Same reason I have 3 fire extinguishers although I've never had a fire situation; you don't want to find yourself without if you suddenly need it.

Aer they over-armed, poorly trained, and often unreasonably paranoid? Yes. Being armed doesn't defend one against being surprised, and radios have saved far more police lives than guns on hips. But the work is by nature unpredictable, and the US is an unusually heavily armed society.

You're going to have a hard time recruiting or getting people to pay taxes for unarmed security. That gap is filled to some extent by community volunteers, but sadly that's not a very effective response in political terms.

This same argument could ostensibly be extended to anyone. There are armed criminals everywhere, why aren’t you carrying ${armory} on you at all times?

It seems to me like a police station, as well as select trained officers could be stocked with lethal weapons, while regular patrol officers carry nonlethals. Cops generally do not need a gun to pull someone over for speeding. If they are pursing someone known to be armed, it makes sense to do so.

Much like I don’t carry my laptop at all times, there are appropriate tools for appropriate situations and I’d like to see that extended to police.

>>This same argument could ostensibly be extended to anyone. There are armed criminals everywhere, why aren’t you carrying ${armory} on you at all times?

Many people do. I regularly see people walking around open carrying firearms in my rural town in WA state. People will have gun on their hip walking around Walmart or getting coffee at here.

I would like this too as I do not enjoy living in a heavily policed society, not to mention all the racial/class bias that seems to pervade policing in the US. But like I said, I think you'll have a very hard time recruiting or financing unarmed security as a public service in the foreseeable future. Investing more in alternative social services seems like the best approach for reducing demand, but you're probably looking at 5-10 years to produce statistically significant changes than you can rally voters behind.

To be clear, I'm not saying police should be heavily armed, but you have an uphill struggle persuading people who do think that, which includes many of the police themselves.

> This same argument could ostensibly be extended to anyone. There are armed criminals everywhere, why aren’t you carrying ${armory} on you at all times?

Some people do, and the rest of us have armed police a few minutes away. Also worth noting that in some states, legally carrying a gun is very difficult, such that lots of people practically can’t carry if they wanted to.

Disclaimer: I’m not a gun nut, nor do I have a desire to carry a gun.

> There are armed criminals everywhere, why aren’t you carrying ${armory} on you at all times?

I am, along with around 10% of adults in my state. Concealed carry by law-abiding citizens is more prevalent than ever, and I'm very glad this is the case. When I lived in the bay area, I was attacked several times a year. The only reason I wasn't crippled or killed was because I managed to outrun my attackers. Police were absolutely useless. Criminals knew that civilians weren't allowed to carry weapons, so they did whatever they wanted to anyone who was smaller, weaker, or alone. Now I live in a state with concealed carry permits and the only people who attack others unprovoked are the mentally ill. When a crazy person does this, there's a decent chance they'll be shot. This has happened at least once in the past year in my neighborhood. The crazy man died. The DA did not press charges as it was justifiable homicide.

Assuming you now live in PA (matches the 10% concealed stat you gave[0]), there's a much higher death rate by gun than CA[1].

FL and CO also have 10% of their populations holding concealed licenses and their gun death rates are worse than PA's.

The consensus is that guns reduce safety in communities[2].

[0] https://www.usconcealedcarry.com/blog/the-most-armed-states/

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/guns-crime/news/2019...

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

I don’t live in Pennsylvania. I live in a blue state that has lower crime than California.

I don’t believe most of the studies about guns and violence. The people doing them are almost always ideologically motivated. (Including the “guns reduce crime” studies.) If you look at the details, you find them counting suicides as “gun violence” to boost their stats. Your second link makes that “mistake”. Another common mistake is to ignore all confounders. Yes people who own guns might be more likely to be murdered. Perhaps they own guns precisely because their fears are justified. Lastly, studies almost always conflate legal and illegal gun ownership. There is a huge difference in risk between a law abiding citizen who gets a concealed carry permit and a gang member who illegally carries.

The sad truth is that nobody is doing good research on this topic. Moreover, studies like these are barking up the wrong tree. I’m certain that restricting some rights would lead to improved outcomes, but that doesn’t mean we should restrict freedom of speech or voting. So too for the right to defend oneself from violent criminals.

The second link clearly breaks down gun deaths into two separate charts for the leading causes of these deaths, homicide and suicide. Where does it make that mistake and why do you have the word "mistake" quoted?

You should read the last link, it addresses pretty much everything you bring up, including the handicaps placed on research, adjustment for gun suicides, and the conflations that might tilt the arguments either way.

Maybe some people performing these studies are doing so for ideological reasons, but there's a clear reason why the pro-gun lobby has made it increasingly difficult to do good research and have clear-minded debates over the topic and it is not ideological, or even logical, unless you understand they're only doing it to maximize their sales and de-regulate their industry.

Gun ownership, and use, just like your arguments, tend to center around emotions and compensating for insecurities than around science and research (and common sense imo). They also tend toward low empathy justifications, like writing off gun suicides as not real gun violence.

> Same reason I have 3 fire extinguishers

Do you carry 3 fire extinguishers on your hip?

Or do you have them nearby and reasonably available to you for rare times that you do need them?

right, "its a sad fact that gun nut propaganda prevades Merica mentality making them think everyone needs a gun"

> The vast majority of police never actually need their weapons. So why are they routinely carrying them?

Your link doesn't support this. How many police have drawn their weapons?

Police in the US seem to draw their weapons as a normal part of many interactions with the public, so I guess it's 100%.

But I have absolutely no idea why they do that - it seems bizarre and terrifying to me. I'm certain they don't need to be doing it.

If you're drawing your weapon every day but never actually needing to use it... maybe stop drawing it?

You can use a weapon without firing it. For example, in this video[1] a rioter stole an M4 carbine from a police car. A security guard pointed a pistol and ordered the rioter to drop the weapon. He did. No shots were fired and the police carbine was recovered. Had the security guard not had a gun, I doubt the situation would have ended as harmlessly as it did.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVAMUejexa0

And in other situations pointing a weapon escalates the problem, causing people to respond like their life is in danger - because it is!

Also that example is a funny one to use, because if the police didn't have carbines in their cars people wouldn't be able to steal them, so this whole situation would never had happened in the first place!

Yes, sometimes introducing a gun escalates a situation. Sometimes it de-escalates by forcing compliance.[1] Sometimes it saves people's lives by stopping a threat. My point is that every country on the planet allows some people to carry guns. Different places just draw the line at different levels of screening, training, and places and times in which one can carry a gun.

There's also an issue of path dependency. What works for one country won't work for others. We learned from the war on drugs that banning something doesn't make it go away. There are more guns in the US than people. A lot of people here don't want them to go away. Unless the federal government wants to fight a civil war, Americans will be armed for the foreseeable future.

Several times in my life, I've had men who were bigger and stronger than me use violence against me. When a man tried to stab me in Oakland, I really wish I'd had a gun instead of nothing. When a stranger in San Francisco pushed me to the ground and tried to beat me with his bare hands, I wish I'd had something more effective than pepper spray. There were other occasions that I don't want to get into. As I said in another comment, the police were absolutely useless. They never caught any of these people. I'm certain that after my encounters with them, these violent criminals victimized dozens of others. These things happen so often that many people don't even report them to the cops. Why waste more of your time when you know nothing will come of it? The statistics in the SF bay area are definitely underestimating the magnitude of the problem.

I've seen similar crimes happen to others. A few years ago I watched a man try to kidnap a woman at knifepoint. The woman was powerless and so was I. The only reason he was stopped was because men with guns showed up and ordered the man to drop the knife. He decided he'd rather be in prison than six feet underground.

Now I live in a place that lets law-abiding citizens carry firearms for self-defense (after background checks, training, and fingerprinting). The difference in people's demeanor is night and day. Civilians aren't scared here. Homeless people exist, but they're not aggressive like they are in SF and Oakland. After moving, my girlfriend (a California native and lifelong Democrat) was so shocked by this that she revised her position on guns. She's now learned to shoot and is interested in getting her own concealed carry permit.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/onpu1m/conc... Here's a News article explaining what happened: https://www.fox6now.com/news/demanded-a-refund-man-charged-a...

Combat vets aren't the problem. They are less likely to shoot. It's the wannabes doing paramilitary cosplay who are the heart of the issue.

Statistically, combat veterans are 6 percentage points more likely to shoot than non-veterans. (32% versus 26% have discharged their service firearm while on duty, other than at a gun range or during training.)

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/08/a-closer-lo...

That stat doesn't mean much to me though. I'd want to know about unjustified discharging of weapons. I'd imagine cities like LA, Baltimore, Detroit, etc are more likely to assign combat veterans to the places with higher crime, particularly gun violence, than anyone else on the force. I'd also expect former military to be involved in S.W.A.T. more than non-veterans. And for that reason I expect their likelihood of discharging a weapon to be higher.

\\ This is why so many unarmed people are getting shot by the cop

How many unarmed people are killed by the police each year in the us? When I ask this question, most people guess "thousands" or "tens of thousands". The real number is around 50.

Of course the ideal number is 0 but the US is very far from having a " police killing unarmed people " problem.

Who decides if the person killed is unarmed again?

That's an interesting point. So how did we decide whether there a real problem or not?

Source?

This article says it was almost 1000 last year. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

A few years ago police shot a man neareby when they mistook a water hose nozzle he was holding for a handgun.

That’s total, not unarmed.

My brother is doing research on suspicious usage of "Suicide by cop" as a cause of death, a phenomenon where police departments and coroners may be overly broad in their application of the label. I hadn't thought about this, but apparently this imaginative labelling _may_ be hiding unfavourable statistics .

Although I doubt this would change the number from 50 to 10,000.

The Washington Post says the police killed 413 unarmed people from 1/1/2015 through 7/16/2021, about 63/year.

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

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