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Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

A common assumption is that when dealing with the Police in the US the problem isn't that they will operate within the law and apply it as intended to punish you but rather that they will not operate within the law which almost invariably end with someone getting needlessly harmed.

So the issue isn't that you're speeding, the Police stops you and writes a $50 ticket. You voluntarily speed and voluntarily stop for the fine because you voluntarily try to avoid a bigger punishment under that system. The problem is that you're speeding, the Police stops you, overreact, pretend they saw something dangerous (smelled marijuana, something looked like a gun, you were acting suspiciously, had the wrong skin complexion, etc.), you get pulled out, roughed up, hurt, or killed.

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Even if I were to assume that all police officers are perfectly honest and reasonable, virtually anybody who is choosing to break the law would also choose to not voluntarily subject themselves to the consequences. Nobody chooses to speed down the highway then calls the local cops to confess and accept the fine. And if police sirens were nothing more than polite requests to pull over, not demands backed by implicit threats of violence, virtually nobody who is choosing to break the law would heed those requests voluntarily.

As someone else mentioned, this is complete BS.

It certainly does not represent the vast majority of interactions between citizens and police officers in the U.S.

Of course, focusing on sensational outliers as if they were common occurrences is a great way to generate clicks and sell newspapers.

But policing requires the trust of the public. How often, what percentage of interactions go not by the book, before people are worried that it will happen to them? Look at 9/11, so many people terrified of "terrorists" from a desert on the other side of the world while ignoring the local ones who had a pretty strong spree in the 90s.

Trust is earned, not given. Police and supporters can cry all they want about how rare it is for a police officer to shoot you with no reason or warning and get away with it, but the fact that it can happen more than once is enough to destroy any faith in policing for plenty of people

> A common assumption is that when dealing with the Police in the US the problem isn't that they will operate within the law and apply it as intended to punish you but rather that they will not operate within the law which almost invariably end with someone getting needlessly harmed.

This is complete bullshit.

I read a lot of nonsense about the US on Hacker news everyday to the point that it doesn't really bother me that much anymore (I assume it's just temporary ignorance that enough real life experience and context will clear up), but this does bother me for some reason. It's one thing to misrepresent the scale of something or not understand the nuance of something, it's another thing to literally make things up.

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