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Comment by tw600040 | Hacker News Reader

Police using violence against someone who is not violent is insane. Anyone doing so should be disqualified from ever being a cop.

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Monopoly on legal violence is the job description.

Don't want things smashed, don't use a hammer. Don't want violence, don't send a cop.

Such grasp of the point - monopoly of legal violence - completely perverts it. Who is given powers to perform a function, plainly must not abuse them.

The police is entrusted with a power to use violence, which means it is given a special responsibility associated with the special power: to abuse it is corruption, which is treason against the mandate, against the role and against the Entity empowering and entrusting.

One is given a hammer, one is entrusted not to smash things. Don't want thing smashed, hire reliable personnel. If a cop is sent and you get gratuitous violence, that individual is unfit for its job, its behaviour is corrupt and it is treason.

You're speaking from the position of how it should be, while everyone else is talking about how it is.

It's not hard to find plenty of instances of police abusing their power and getting away with it. In many departments, "Internal Affairs" works FOR the police, rather than as a neutral 3rd party. The "We investigated ourselves and found no wrong-doing" is a common meme because it's often true.

Where that is tolerated (including accepted as a fact, or put aside as a background fact), the involved societies have a much bigger problem to deal with first.

And if that fact is forced to fit into someone's mind through monstrous excuses for thought (with reference to that involving undefined association with violence), to problem (1) - the corruption in the state -, and problem (0) just above - the corruption of the members of society -, you get an even bigger damage (-1) - thought pollution, the corruption of clear cognitive function.

Weirdly enough in Europe I would be not even remotely afraid when a cop stops me. The likelyhood they would do something weird or violent is pretty slim and most traffic police is quite friendly.

Then again police school is harder to get into, takes much, much longer than in the US etc.

From what I understand weapons is the main cause. I literally know 0 people of my friends who own a gun in Europe.

How many cops are getting killed in US vs Europe? They kind of have the right to be super cautious.

I grew up in a city with a major Glock factory and a thriving gunsmith industry, with every other person being a hunter. My father showed me how to shoot when I was 10.

The idea that the unique problems the US has in with guns are a simple result of the numbers of gun owners is wrong. There are tons of gun owners in the Alps and in Scandinavia, and not a single region has comparable problems. Over here if at all guns are usually used in suicides and domestic murders, someone robbing you at gunpoint is so rare that it is newsworthy.

I'd say this has more to do with how we deal with poor, sick and/or criminal people than with the existence of guns.

That's like most of what cops do in the US

Do you mean "like what most cops do" rather that "most of what cops do"? Because weighting by time, the latter seems implausible to me.

Do you think most cases of violence by cops are against violent people?

Remembering that when they're called to a violent crime, usually it's already over, but when they're called for a non-violent offense the perpetrator is more likely to be there?

I mean this completely unironically: cops are mostly armed bureaucrats. The vast majority of their function is to basically hand out tickets, police reports for insurance reasons, and to a lesser degree arrest people for whom there is an arrest warrant. Actually stopping crime in progress is more a factor of luck than an intended role, and not one they have any legal obligation to do.

The fact that we tolerate this level from people who probably don’t even need to be armed is insane.

Hell, red light cameras and speed cameras could probably save a lot of lives purely by eliminating unnecessary police/civilian interactions, let alone whatever road safety function they’d perform.

I guess it depends on what police behavior counts as 'violence'.

So the first part of the question is, are most policing hours spent "using violence" or not? I'm not sure.

Then the next part of the question might be, of the hours of policing spent "using violence", is the violence being used against someone who is not being violent most of the time? This one I feel pretty safe saying a big yes to. And I think is mainly what the original comment was getting at.

I assume that by "violence" we mean, like, physical violence, things like beating, choking, tazing, tear gas, shooting, etc., things by which one is exerting power over another through physical exertion, in a way that can directly cause injury or pain.

"using violence against someone" doesn't refer to "taking advantage of an implicit threat of violence", it means actively doing violence (or actively directing others to do so).

What about an explicit threat of violence?

If someone who is not the police does that, we generally consider them "violent" and (ironically?) support police violence against them. Like if someone points a gun at someone (an explicit(?) threat of violence, but not yet violence itself?), if the police shoot them, people consider that a justified violent response to violence.

Then we can ask if, say, imprisoning someone is "violence" on it's own -- again, if someone that wasn't the police kidnapped you and locked you in the basement, we'd probably consider it a violent act, even if they didn't have to punch you to get you into the basement?

I think it's interesting to talk about because I think what's violent and not is not as clearcut as we sometimes assume, and is worth interrogating. (I don't mean to suggest that anything anyone finds emotionally uncomfortable is "violence" either... there is lots going on culturally around "violence" these days...)

Still, regardless, I think it's probably true that the majority of policing hours are not spent in the active use of violence (although some are spent preparing for use of violence, or looking for opportunity to use violence), and also, that the majority of times that are use of violence are against people who were not being violent.

I think I would consider whatever process they used to get hypothetical-me into their basement to be violence, but not their keeping the basement door locked or whatever is used to keep hypothetical-me in. (Possibly if I was actually in this situation my opinions would change, and I would conclude that what I’m saying now was mistaken. I don’t know.)

The point about a clear/explicit threat of imminent violence is a good one. Yes, we typically would call such a person violent, and want someone to deal with the situation.

Do we consider the person to be violent because we regard them as doing/engaging-in violence / “being- violent as-an-action”, or because their threats lead us to conclude that they are the type of person who would be likely to do violence, and therefore a violent person?

And many (most?) people do support direct violence used in response to an explicit threat of imminent violence. If they also believe that violence should not be done to people who aren’t doing violence, then that would seem to indicate that they consider an explicit threat of imminent violence to be doing violence.

So, it seems there are good arguments that suggest that “violence” is perhaps generally used in a way that includes imminent threats of violence.

Overall, my feeling is that it is probably kind of a borderline case.

Edit: also, yeah, my claim wasn’t on the basis of “because they aren’t so bad as to spend a majority of their working time doing it” so much as on “spending the majority of one’s working time doing that would be exhausting, and I’m not sure anyone is even physically capable of it”. (Well, someone standing in one place and repeatedly pulling a trigger on a gun for a total of 4.5 hours of each day is probably not exceeding a person’s physical limits, but that’s not the relevant situation)

And I guess that's exactly the challenge. Who "we" think are "the type of person who would be likely to do violence" or even posing "an explicit threat of imminent violence" is not only subjective, but in our society very based on the social positions of the judgers and the doers.

No doubt the police in the OP will swear that they had good reason to think that deaf guy was "the type of person who would be likely to do violence" and posed "an explicit threat of imminent violence"; if you take them at their word, then the police 100% of the time only use violence against such people because that's always what they'll swear they were doing.

I don't take them at their word. Or even if they honestly believed that, they've trained themselves to see that in people who are not that, and they are terribly terribly wrong, And are in the majority of times they are using violence against people in the USA.

nitpick : posing a threat and making a threat are different things, and I meant to be talking about making a threat, as the thing that seemed borderline as to whether it is considered "violence". I don't think whether someone is making a threat is subjective.

Cops have a bad reputation in most places, but this might be media bias or media coverage. I can't say in the countries I've lived in (most countries in the UK, France, Germany and now Australia) are anything like what you see covered in the US.

It depends on what kind of law enforcement you are dealing with. City police have a poor reputation but county sheriffs often have a more positive reputation in many areas. Federal law enforcement is a whole different can of worms. The incentive structures and relationships to the population are different, and that leads to different behaviors.

My experience in several jurisdictions matches the heuristic. Encounters with city police were always default adversarial, even when I had done nothing wrong; interactions with sheriffs were uniformly pleasant and reasonable, not adversarial, even in a couple cases where I was inadvertently breaking the law.

"are anything like what you see covered in the US."

Judging US police from media coverage is really not useful.

Having lived experience of living in the US I think does illustrate some things, and then, more importantly, having access to 'good data' (which is hard, but nevertheless possible) is even better.

I believe the police in the US overall take a more aggressive tone and posture. I also believe US citizens are far more likely to act in defiance. The things I've seen American individuals do ... I have never in my life seen in Canada, UK, France, Germany and couldn't even imagine it happening.

The scenes of a man, with two police officers arresting him - four hands on him, putting cuffs on him - and he goes for his gun (!!). Or the number of times people race away from police after being pulled over and resulting high-speed chase. It's absurd.

It's an issue I think people often don't tend to want to think about, but if we use car chases as an example - I think this is worthy because these are generally not situations in which arbitrary police aggression is going to be a 'root cause'.

You can see total deaths in the US from car chases is ballpark 2/million/year, where as in he UK it's about 0.2/million/year. [1][2]

High speed chases are a cultural phenom [3]

(FYI about 1/2 of the people who die in high speed pursuits are innocent bystanders.)

Obviously, this will be affected by police police in terms of pursuit policy (i.e. in many forces they won't pursue if it's too dangerous) - but there's no doubt that Americans have a much greater propensity to run from police, in cars, which is an extremely dangerous thing to do for those involved, but also for everyone else. It's nary impossible to get the data, but I believe that this applies to all other forms of confrontation as well. I think that they are related, i.e. civilians more aggressive posture - combined with the fact so many people have weapons - makes the police more 'on edge' and combined with their more systematically aggressive posture, you have considerably greater chances of 'small things' escalating into 'big things' - as we have in this article.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/319294/deaths-during-or-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/727008/vehicle-pursuit-r...

[3] https://www.lamag.com/longform/how-high-speed-car-chases-bec...

Or, maybe cops behave differently in the US other than those countries. Even just comparing the UK and America provides an illustrative example; wouldn’t you expect differences in policing between a country where every cop is armed, and one where very few are?

I can say as an American there is a very, very strong pro-cop bias in American media. This is slowly changing, but it’s not a completed process yet. Take a look at what tortuous lengths most newspapers will go to to avoid describing officer misconduct in the active voice; “officer involved shooting” has become a dark joke in this country for a reason.

All or most cops have guns in Australia for what it's worth. That they're not used as often is likely due to training and the likelihood that the person you're arresting won't have one though.

Yes, it’s more subtle and multi-faceted than the example I picked. I just figured that was an easy one to point at as a difference.

I personally think that police mentality matters a lot more than anything else. German police departments for example still have a lot of shame over their extensive involvement in the Holocaust, which affects how they see themselves and how they behave today. Doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but it’s a huge factor that changes police behavior from one country to the next.

In the US you have the constant threat of gun-violence, which basically processes all police into a army-band-of-brothers troop in what feels to some of them like a low level civil war.

You can not remain good police in such a environment and stay alive till retirement unless you are outside of the urban areas.

This is what cops want you to believe, yes. The statistics do not back this up. Roughly as many cops are dying per year from 9/11 related illnesses as gunfire. In 2020 5x as many cops died from Covid than died from gunfire the year before.

The fact that cops demand the right to use lethal force without consequence and the ability to not get vaccinated from something that’s killed 5x as many cops as guns have kind of gives the whole game away. It’s not about public safety or the cops safety; it’s just about power.

In reality the group that should be really terrified of everyone is pregnant women, who are much more likely to be shot to death than a cop is. Given the prevalence of domestic violence among cops (estimated as high as 40%), being a pregnant woman married to a cop is probably more dangerous than being a cop.

That seems unlikely given there were an estimated 61.5 million encounters between police and the public in 2018.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cbpp18st.pdf

My nephew just started as a police officer in a small town recently. He hasn't cracked a skull or kneed a chest in an entire year of service. Most of his time is spent as a medic, social worker or civil servant but also has to be ready in case shit hits the fan. The scope of work is too much for a single person and we get what we get as a result.

> He hasn't cracked a skull or kneed a chest in an entire year of service.

What a powerful sentence.

Yeah this video still haunts me(1). The cop was acquitted by jury, saying the victim, committed a misdemeanour by leaving the house without identification(2).

They did win $1.75m in the end though so at least there is that.

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_SSGa7-6BQ

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sureshbhai_Patel

That Wikipedia article is almost certainly inaccurate. I would need much stronger evidence than a link to photographyisnotacrime to be convinced that not having id when walking around is even a citation, much less a misdemeanor anywhere in the US.

Much more likely someone got their wires crossed in hearing the detail of the story.

It's accurate, it's misdemeanor for a permanent resident to not carry ID in public.

https://www.al.com/news/2016/01/judge_throws_out_case_agains...

> I would need much stronger evidence than a link to photographyisnotacrime to be convinced that not having id when walking around is even a citation, much less a misdemeanor anywhere in the US.

Or just do a basic search. If you're a green card holder it's a misdemeanor to be without your id.

As an LPR myself, this is true. I keep mine in my wallet. It is handy as a secondary backup identity card when (for whatever reason) I don't have my drivers license on me.

(PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong!) I understand there are some weird situations you can be in though (caused by poorly written legislation), for example, not having your LPR Green Card is a *strict liability* federal misdemeanor, without any exceptions or legislated consideration if someone stole your card off you, or even if the card was confiscated by a federal or state/local official. So you could be stopped by a cop, who asks for your Id and confiscates your GC, and then immediately charges you for not being in possession of your GC. However I gather that this has never been tested in court, but it's still an unpleasant possibility.

...and if you lose it, that's $600 (!!!!) to renew it, which means having to go to your nearest USCIS building in-person (which can be hundreds of miles away) to have your fingerprints and other biometrics re-taken - I don't know why but USCIS simply won't re-print an existing GC unlike how WA's DoL has been re-issuing my drivers' license using the exact same biometrics and other info unchanged from almost a decade ago... it still says I weight 140lbs (lol... I'm 90kg now, ugh).

And you're on-the-hook for that $600 regardless of the reason for reissuing it: whether it was your fault or not (though if it was someone else's fault I guess you could file a civil claim for damages at least)

LPR rights are not exactly high on the priority list - but the law should be changed to not require us to carry the GC; and misplacing a GC (or being the victim of a crime of GC theft) should certainly not cost $600 and a half-day spent at a (depressing) USCIS building every time.

It's super-absurd: I understand the "must carry" rule also applies to children: so rambunctious kindergarten kids too young to even tie their own shoelaces need to carry a $600 hologram of past presidents' heads. Surely there must be some way this is an unreasonable burden or maybe even unconstitutional because of the power-imbalance it introduces?

------

...also I could be horribly misinformed about all of the above.

"If you're a green card holder" is a pretty big caveat to be leaving out! Suddenly the framing of the crime is less "walking around without ID" and more "being a foreigner who can't produce documentation of legal presence".

Both are shitty situations, but do you see how much more surprising it is to hear that a court will uphold the criminality of something that everyone seems to do all the time with no consquences, than that there's apparently no political will to fix what amounts to, on the happy path, a trivial inconvenience for a small class of politically unpopular noncitizens?

> Both are shitty situations, but do you see how much more surprising it is to hear that a court will uphold the criminality of something that everyone seems to do all the time with no consquences

The court didn't "uphold the criminality" of anything because Patel was never charged with anything, and the cop had no idea he was a foreigner when he partially paralyzed the man by throwing him into the ground.

And the court definitely didn't uphold the criminality of the police officer's behavior, where apparently "strong though disputed evidence that he jerked his arm" is sufficient license for the cop to then do whatever he wants.

> there's apparently no political will to fix what amounts to, on the happy path, a trivial inconvenience for a small class of politically unpopular noncitizens?

I'm assuming the assault by a police officer and the complete lack of recourse aren't the trivial inconveniences you're referring to?

> Anyone doing so should be disqualified from ever being a cop.

Preferably by ending up in prison, among the general population.

Great idea! Let's punish extra-judicial punishment with... extra-judicial punishment

Should we not hold the people who are given a higher amount of power to a higher standard? I feel like the only way that it makes sense to have some sort of Leviathan-esque system is if we have assurances that the enforcers can be trusted.

>Should we not hold the people who are given a higher amount of power to a higher standard?

You don't need extra-judicial and/or cruel and unusual punishment to do that.

How is putting cops in prison extra-judicial or cruel and unusual? I do think cops should get harsher sentences for abusing their power because, again, they're given extra power. If we cannot trust the enforcers of the law, then I am skeptical of the concept of enforcers. But of course I think there should be a standard trial and whatnot, I'm not suggesting we go to Mad Max or anything like that.

I'm not saying we summarily execute every cop who has run a red light, but I'm saying that if a cop does a bad thing, then it shouldn't be an outlier case for them to go to prison for it.

>How is putting cops in prison extra-judicial or cruel and unusual?

It's not, but GP's exact words were (emphasis mine):

>Preferably by ending up in prison, among the general population.

Which I've taken to imply "...so they'd get beaten up by fellow inmates". I'm not sure why he'd bring up that detail other than to imply that.

As for the rest of the comment, I'm not disagreeing with you on those points.

Fair enough! I misread your intent. I would be against cops being abused by the inmates (just as I would any other prisoner), though I would be in favor of cops getting increased sentences for equivalent crimes.

> Which I've taken to imply

Unless you consider the interpretation "since they are part of the general population, they are picked from it, they are not outside the set of the "little people", they have a provisional mandate given under conditions, "equality" in modern societal systems means "all are the same in front of the law" and practical exceptions do not constitute substantial exceptions".

So, you're saying that putting cops in jail is cruel and unusual punishment... Probably means we shouldn't do that to anyone.

Or, perhaps, judicial punishment. The official carve-outs for police misbehavior are unacceptable. And, unofficially, prosecutors are strongly disincentivized to prosecute cops: they're the DAs primary witnesses in many cases.

>Or, perhaps, judicial punishment

I don't think that's what the parent poster was advocating. see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28713675

>The official carve-outs for police misbehavior are unacceptable. And, unofficially, prosecutors are strongly disincentivized to prosecute cops: they're the DAs primary witnesses in many cases.

Don't disagree with you on any of those.

The carve outs make sense on paper and maybe more so at the time they were written. But now the mountain of evidence displaying how humans can not be trusted with that type of power/responsibility is overwhelming.

Let’s do prison reform too then.

Great, now you made the reform 2x harder to pass because now you'd need to get voters on board with prison reform. I'm not sure what the point of "let's give corrupt cops extra-judicial punishment by putting them in dangerous situations, but that's fine because we'll also simultaneously fix the dangerous situation!"

1. Doesn’t have to be the same legislation or regulation effort. It’s okay to say “crime penalties shouldn’t be dangerous” as a response to “people who impose penalties on others should be subject to their own penalties” -> “those penalties are dangerous”.

2. Why should I care more about the extrajudicial punishment of cops more than the extrajudicial punishment of the people they abuse?

3. One of the best pieces of political advice I ever got was “demand the impossible”. Anything less is selling short whatever compromise you can achieve and reframing your next attempt. It doesn’t mean you stick to your demand, it just means you start from your principles and adjust from there.

>1. Doesn’t have to be the same legislation or regulation effort. It’s okay to say “crime penalties shouldn’t be dangerous” as a response to “people who impose penalties on others should be subject to their own penalties” -> “those penalties are dangerous”.

In other words, you're for extra-judicial punishment?

>2. Why should I care more about the extrajudicial punishment of cops more than the extrajudicial punishment of the people they abuse?

Because we as a society don't believe in "eye for an eye".

>3. One of the best pieces of political advice I ever got was “demand the impossible”. Anything less is selling short whatever compromise you can achieve and reframing your next attempt. It doesn’t mean you stick to your demand, it just means you start from your principles and adjust from there.

There's a limit to this, right? If you believe in a full communist revolution, "start from your principles" will get you absolutely nowhere, whereas advocating for some pro-social policies might actually do (eg. medicare expansion, free daycare).

> In other words, you're for extra-judicial punishment?

You’re being a jerk and there’s no reason for me to pretend otherwise for discussion. There’s no reasonable way you could conclude that from the quote you responded to.

If general population is good enough for normal people illegally committing violence, it should be good enough for the police illegally committing violence.

Does that mean I don’t need to pay taxes and they should never use violence to coerce me?

Does that mean I don’t need to pay rent, because so long as I’m not violent they can’t remove me?

Edit: Y’all are evidently missing the point that passive resistance can require violent force to overcome. Ultimately the difference between a law and a polite suggestion is that the former is backed by the threat of whatever force is necessary to enforce it. Suppose I prefer not to be arrested and I don’t attack the police, I just don’t let them cuff me and take me away. Are they justified to overpower me, regardless how much force it takes to overcome my noncompliance?

First of all, your first question is a strawman because local police, as being discussed here, are not the ones performing arrests in cases of tax evasion. Rather, federal authorities would be the ones handling tax evasion.

As soon as a warrant goes out from any source, local police are potentially conducting arrests.

You're conflating the academic definition of "violence" (e.g. "Nationstate monopoly on violence") with the colloquial and context-sensitive word "violence" ("That violent cop tased me for no reason.").

Yes, and yes.

There is a difference between the use of force and the use of excessive force. When people talk about violence, they are usually referring to the latter.

Then there is the question of when is the use of force appropriate. Failure to pay taxes or rent rarely involves the use of physical force. It would be used as a last resort, after other methods have failed. Likewise, the alleged failing to stop for a stop sign should not have led to a physical confrontation unless it was initiated by the person being ticketed. Even the refusal to comply with a police officer should not result in the immediate use of force. There are other ways to handle it.

>Does that mean I don’t need to pay taxes and they should never use violence to coerce me?

If you're not violent during the arrest and don't resist, they shouldn't(and usually don't) use violence to arrest you and transport you to prison. There is no coercion to pay taxes by beating you up like the mafia.

>Does that mean I don’t need to pay rent, because so long as I’m not violent they can’t remove me?

Again, you're conflating leading or carrying you out as violence.

If the police use the bare minimum necessary physical force to carry out their duty, I don't think that qualifies as violence.

> If you're not violent during the arrest and don't resist, they shouldn't(and usually don't) use violence to arrest you and transport you to prison. There is no coercion to pay taxes by beating you up like the mafia.

The key part here is "not resisting". The fact that it needs to be specified is in it self saying that there is a threat of violence. "You don't pay taxes, we will attempt to arrest you. If you don't comply we will, beat you up." All laws are eventually backed up with the threat of violence. If they weren't, you could literally just ignore them without recourse.

No, because beating you up isn't a goal in itself to punish you for your crime. "Resisting arrest" or 'don't comply' are weasel terms. They can range from just refusing to walk or wear handcuffs, to running away to threatening to injure or kill the police or actually doing so. The beating up part normally happens only with trying to escape or threaten the police. And even in those cases, if they only use the minimum physical force necessary to take someone into custody, would you call that violence?

If they don't know that, what's the incentive for anyone not to rob, not repay debts, murder and rape as they wish, and then just refuse arrest for the rest of their lives? What do you think the law and police should do in those cases?

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