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Comment by ancode | Hacker News Reader

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.

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