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Comment by defaultprimate | Hacker News Reader

I agree that this capability should never, ever be in the hands of the state, but don't extrapolate isolated instances and debunked statistics about the police as truths. Your own article demonstrates one of the major flaws of the domestic violence statistic, but doesn't discuss the most egregious methodological flaw: the criteria used for domestic violence, which includes shouting in the cited study.

Cops are sourced from the general population, so incidence rates need to be compared to the general population, and you'll find that police have significantly lower "negative" behaviors compared to the general population in virtually all aspects. That doesn't mean they should be allowed to remotely disable your car though.

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> Cops are sourced from the general population

They are notably not. Usually, immigrants are drastically under-represented compared to general population (at least in Germany, you have to hold German or European citizenship to join the police force).

> so incidence rates need to be compared to the general population

Oh hell no. Police officers act on behalf of the government and with powers that are both far greater than those of ordinary people and not immediately appealable. As a result of that, police officers in Germany are actually held to extremely high standards by law (§34 BeamtStG - https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/beamtstg/__34.html) and receive at the very least two years of training.

I won't say our police are perfect (because they aren't, they still are a bunch of bullies), but they are orders of magnitude better than the trigger happy, barely educated (seriously, 360 hours of training?! - https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_9dd5d48b-2152...) morons that make up the US police force.

My point still stands. The fact that police exhibit extremely low detrimental behavior rates compared to the general population illustrates that they are held to much higher standards.

Police in the US have far higher post secondary education rates than the general population. Over half have a bachelor's and over 80% have at least an associate's. And that's overall. Many states and larger localities require post secondary education, particularly in urban, higher crime areas.

>but they are orders of magnitude better than the trigger happy...

Can you prove it? Tens of millions of police interactions a year and less than a thousand deaths is pretty damn good and not at all indicative of the narrative you're spewing, especially when you account for how much violence the police experience at the hands of criminals. Sounds to me like you've bought into a narrative completely unsupported by data.

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