Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

Some communities have also been disproportionately persecuted by the police for, a very long time. Maybe it's a legacy of slavery and later segregation. Maybe it's a lack of unifying national spirit (the melting pot of cultural assimilation and a desire to be a small spice in a greater whole) which might have just been wishful thinking on the part of history book authors.

I suspect most of the non-anarchist who feel that way would agree with my take that "defund" might be better expressed as RE-form.

Re-form the Police in a de-militarized way. Structure community interaction so they are helpful, rather than penalizing. (E.G. more like Japanese neighborhood branches.) Split out social and mental health crisis, maybe with domestic violence response teams that include a mix of branches. Also, for mental health, make it easier to get interventions earlier, before assault with a deadly weapon leads to regrettable and unavoidably bad sets of outcomes.

View on HN

I agree yet am not really confident in that the police can be de-militarized in a country where every minor criminal has a gun and living is segregated in a way so some neighborhoods actually are much more dangerous than others.

The police haven't always been as militarized as they are now. We could easily go back.

I think ending the drug war with legalization and decriminalization and ending no-knock warrants without extreme circumstances would go a long way.

As for this - yes, I'm rather sure. The drug war is evil. I'm glad some states are legalizing psychedelics already. I would add that zero-tolerance policies by which people loose jobs and schools for trace amounts of light drugs found in their urine samples after a weekend should be banned too.

Drug tests should be banned for most folks.

Additionally: What is a trace amount after a weekend? Can you tell if someone smoked pot on Sunday rather than Monday on a Wednesday drug test? Does it matter if it is a "heavy" drug (say, mushrooms?)? Does it matter that someone did a couple of lines of coke saturday rather than be drunk and high from Friday to Sunday?

> Can you tell if someone smoked pot on Sunday rather than Monday on a Wednesday drug test?

I don't really know. I thought there would be difference in concentration.

> Does it matter if it is a "heavy" drug (say, mushrooms?)?

Mushrooms are not a hard drug. Fentanyl/heroine and crack are.

> Does it matter that someone did a couple of lines of coke saturday rather than be drunk and high from Friday to Sunday?

IMHO the second is worse.

There is no such thing as a "hard" or "heavy" drug. These terms are not in pharmacological literature and are not defined by any property of the chemical or their pharmacological action.

Nevertheless it is rather easy to tell them apart. Hard drugs quickly cause heavy addiction in almost everybody who tries them, destroy their health and can even kill them easily. Psilocybin does not, it can actually be used to improve neural health and cure addictions (just search it here on HN, there are many papers to reference).

There are things which are hard to define precisely nevertheless easy to distinguish intuitively.

I guess we can consider alcohol a hard drug then. Time to make it illegal? I don't know anybody who uses it responsibly, therefore those people don't exist right?

I know many people who use alcohol responsibly and even people who use meth responsibly (it's great for heavy ADHD if you have enough willpower to only use tiny doses occasionally) but I seriously doubt there are many who use crack responsibly.

Believe it or not I have met people who use cocaine, in both salt and base (crack) forms, responsibly. Just because you don't know them doesn't mean they don't exist. Same with methamphetamine and heroin.

Do you think Dr. Carl Hart uses heroin irresponsibly? You may want to look him up.

I don't really know. I thought there would be difference in concentration.

That concentration depends on the person: A person with more fat will show a higher concentration for a longer amount of time. If you don't smoke often, you might find that you get it out of your system rather fast. In short, tests aren't all that helpful with pot, and you won't realistically be able to tell if they smoked last night after work or last saturday during off time.

> Does it matter if it is a "heavy" drug (say, mushrooms?)?

Mushrooms are not a hard drug. Fentanyl/heroine and crack are.

Mushrooms and LSD are classified that way by many folks, though - including the US government. Fentanyl isn't instantly addictive - if it were, they wouldn't use it in hospitals. People do heroine occasionally without being addicted, too (most folks don't shoot up). Same with cocaine. I don't know as much about crack, but there was a time when folks did meth on a more recreational basis instead of all the time (I've never personally done it, no desire).

And that's the issue. "Hard" depends on some combination of use, effect, and what frequent use does. Regardless, plenty of people do "hard" drugs occasionally and you'll never know. And if it is better to you that someone do some cocaine - generally accepted as a hard, addictive drug (through propaganda) - than be drunk all weekend, in some ways, you already know this. A drug test isn't gonna help most of these, though.

I'd outright refuse to work at a place that imposed them on principle, body integrity is one of my strongest-held values. There's enough creepy corporate manipulation of our private lives as it is, the only piss they'll get from me is a swift "piss off" and I'll work somewhere that respects personal boundaries.

Me too, but we are privileged to choose a job according to our preferences. Meanwhile, there are many people for whom it is way harder to find a better job in their life circumstances / places they live. Losing it can easily ruin their lives.

Yeah, I'm definitely aware it's a luxury to be able to turn down jobs and that this sector-specific good job market isn't going to last forever either.

I really think we should ban drug testing in the vast majority of cases to protect people who are less fortunate from the ridiculous puritan corporate culture many places adopt. I can see a case for it in roles where heavy machinery or other potentially deadly outcomes are a possibility but for the overwhelming majority of jobs it's just controlling behaviour for the sake of being controlling in my opinion.

Even the thin veil of "heavy machinery" isn't really enough: Your average factory worker deals with "heavy machinery" and trash compactors, commonly used in retail for boxes, are the same. Folks employed in these positions in other countries don't have drug tests and do not have bad safety records, so the danger isn't as high as the employer makes it out to be. I think employers should prove that there is either a federal mandate for drug testing the position OR that drug use, even outside of work, affects work.

I don't understand why "we could go back to the exact framework we had 10 years ago" is a permanent political impossibility. It implies either there are no experiments or no mistakes in the legislative process - both of which are implausible ideas.

On the big ticket stuff it makes some sense, but no example springs to mind where something was tried then just totally rolled back after a few decades.

cough Prohibition

As I understand it, rolling back even ten years means substantially more people - including black people - being killed by the police, because this has gone down over time in the US and a substantial amount of work went into achieving this. That is to say, there was no perfect time in the past where this didn't happen, and if people think there was and things have gotten worse they've been lead astray by the news media.

Go back to which era ? Just asking out of curiosity. AFAIK, gun violence has always been endemic to the USA - and most especially in places where guns are banned. I suspect this will only change with a national ban on Guns. Yet gun traffickers across the border would love that. The American continents have more guns than anywhere else in the world.

Not "go back to" some era, but roll back the militarization of the police for the present/future era.

A ban on guns wouldn't change anything. There are many countries that are much more violent with much more violent police and bans on guns. Other countries have high gun ownership and low crime and low police violence.

> Other countries have high gun ownership and low crime and low police violence.

I.e. "la comparaison suisse"

It doesn't really hold up. Switzerland has a very low crime rate, but also has one of the highest gun violence rates in Europe (most are suicides).

Around here lots of guns were removed from the equation 10 - 20 years ago and I haven't heard about a corresponding decrease in suicides.

As far as I can see guns doesn't trigger suicides.

The comment you reply to does not claim that there's a causation between fun ownership and suicide.

It merely notes that the gun violence in Switzerland is largely suicide, which is probably simply because the share of gun suicide among suicide overall is higher in Switzerland than elsewhere.

Militarization of the Police happened, strangely enough, primarily during the Clinton Administration in the mid-1990s. Clinton shut down a lot of military bases, and shrunk the military overall as part of wrapping up the cold war with Russia/ex-Soviet Union.

Shrinking the military meant shrinking buying military equipment, which meant fewer dollars going into defense manufacturing, and furthermore, possibly fewer jobs. As part of a compromise of shrinking the military, congress unlocked both military surplus, and new defense equipment sales to local police departments. Prior to this, police were very limited in what they could buy. The photos of rural vermont police owning armored personnel carriers, etc didn't occur before this time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_Realignment_and_Closure

> gun traffickers across the border would love that.

The gun trafficking tends to be from the US into Latin America - see the FBI "fast and furious" fiasco.

Gun traffickers would not love it: It is easy to get guns in, say, Indiana, and then traffic them other places. This is, in general, what has been happening. Chicago has more gun issues due to Indiana's lax laws (and it is right next to Indiana). In a bigger picture, Canada has more trouble with gun smuggling due to the ease of getting weapons in the US. And as others have said, the US tends to supply other places in the Americas, either directly or indirectly.

When guns are more tightly regulated, though, guns are more difficult to get and they get much, much more expensive on the black market. After all, supply has went down and the risk goes up. Australia is the usual example used here (who had a similar gun culture in the past, by the way).

I can't find where gun violence is higher where guns are banned - at least not after the ban, so long as they aren't just one town in the US, which might due to issues above, but that is hardly due to a weapons ban.

> get much, much more expensive on the black market

Gun traffickers (the gang bosses scpecifically) would love this. Smugglers love prohibition.

The overwhelming majority of illegally owned guns you'll find somewhere like Chicago, NYC or Boston are stolen.

The reason they come from places like Indiana, Pennsylvania or New Hampshire is basic economics. There is no market there since guns are so readily available legally. Even if you're a prohibited person a straw purchase is much more accessible and less of a liability to all involved than a stolen gun so the market for stolen guns moves to wherever straw purchases are much less practical. Because guns are more available legally you get a much broader cross section of society owning them which means more get stolen. Supply and demand works is magic and they all wind up over the border where they can be sold.

It's really weird to automatically assume the community's feelings are justified when most violence faced by black people is from other black people. It seems a lot more likely that standing by idiots from bad neighborhoods is simply politically convenient right now and so they're making noise because that's what idiots do when you give them a microphone.

> Re-form the Police

Triple their pay, but also enforce strict no-tolerance rules on misbehaviour and select candidates more carefully.

This is what I would do, if I were in charge:

1) Lawsuit payouts come from police pensions, not the taxpayer. Watch them keep each other in line when it's their money on the line.

2) Body cam not running? No qualified immunity, police then become liable for murder/assault/theft/kidnapping charges like any civilian would be if they committed the same acts. That would give police sufficient incentive to ensure their cams are not "malfunctioning".

3) Police that are fired for misconduct are no longer eligible for hire at any precinct.

4) Falsifying reports and planting evidence are prosecutable offenses.

5) Training becomes far more rigorous, and takes a civic-mindedness approach, not a warrior-wolf approach.

6) Military equipment is largely decommed, with only specialist anti-terror squads getting the heavy weaponry.

7) Civil forfeiture is abolished.

8) Hiring standards are raised.

8 good suggestions that ought to be able to find bipartisan support

Throw in mandatory minimum training standards, preferably longer then a hand full of weeks and including de-escalation.

Good points so.

"Reform" has been the policy for decades now, and meanwhile the situation has been steadily and rapidly getting worse.

The whole point of "defund" is that "reform" has failed. Something more drastic is needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com