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Comment by stjohnswarts | Hacker News Reader

Similar situation here in the USA. The cops are sitting on their laruels and sipping coffee in parking lots because they feel betrayed by "black lives matter" movement. I know it's anecdotal but I have certainly seen it here in Austin, TX where crime is up like 30% year-over-year. 911 won't even send a cop out for less than a homicide any longer, they just tell you to file a police report online. It's all very deliberate and the city government isn't doing anything about it.

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> where crime is up like 30% year-over-year

> won't even send a cop out for less than a homicide any longer

You might have cause-and-effect backwards here.

Talk to an actual cop and you'll quickly learn how wrong your theory is.

I think the scary/unfortunate thing is that the lack of enforcement is causing some really perverse incentives. You hear stories of hit-and-runs caught on dashcams, with full view of license plates and a good view of the driver, and police still won't really do anything if there isn't a major injury. Makes it seem like the best thing to do is actually to run if the consequences are worse for sticking around.

>911 won't even send a cop out for less than a homicide any longer, they just tell you to file a police report online. It's all very deliberate

what you describe is basically a blackmail by the cops. Blackmailing the public that way kind of suggests that it isn't just few bad apples - it is the whole police system which is morally corrupt.

Or the police are responding to your claims that policing is racist. Where I am for example traffic stops for bad registration / stolen cars etc was found to disproportionately effect some groups. The cops were deemed racist.

I'm not saying they weren't, but especially for quality of life type calls where a cop used to come out, no way is that worth responding too. And if you paid attention to what BLM etc have been demanding, it's to reduce disparate impact on certain groups of police calls (FAR more calls for black males for example then middle aged asian females)

Agreed, at one point there were teenagers playing baseball in a half full parking lot. I told them to stop and they told me to f off and call the cops if I felt like it. So I did call the cops, and sure enough the support person got on my case and told me it wasn't an emergency in a really harsh manner.

I have to ask, did you call the emergency line or the non-emergency line? Because if you called 911, I can completely understand them getting on your case about it not being an emergency, because it wasn't.

It was the emergency line. However, to me it was an emergency as they had 2 baseball bats and were in a group that I deemed as threatening. I began filming them at which point they became more aggressive. This was to have evidence in case they were damaging cars (including my own which was 3 feet away).

You said the reason for your call was that they were playing baseball, not that they were threatening anyone. There isn't anything about that that strikes me as an emergency and the 911 operator was correct in telling you off IMO. Police have a non-emergency line for a reason.

That's just stupid, the operator could just as well connect you to the people taking car of non-emergency situations. They are still the police and one would expect them to at least try to help

Thank you. In my experience, policing extends into a number of mundane areas of life, few of which are life threatening emergencies. People can get police called for vomiting in the road, illegally selling sandwiches, or having a radio on too loud.

I think that part of their job is resolving violent or potentially violent conflict.

It’s true that perhaps my situation as described to the dispatcher might not have met a certain threshold, however, it would’ve made sense for them to ask more questions and give guidance as in general people have a bit of adrenaline when calling and might not be in the best shape to give a clear description. Immediately dismissing such scenarios could lead to some harmful results.

> You said the reason for your call was that they were playing baseball

That's an interesting interpretation. They also said that "they were damaging cars" and "they became aggressive".

> They also said that "they were damaging cars

You should reread the comment, this wasn't actually said.

At least where I am cops really can't come out for this type of thing - especially if some of the kids are minorities.

There are just too many cases where a quality of life type call like this (you haven't yet been actually beaten) or a white person feeling "threatened" turns into a major issue -> police respond, end up needing to use force, the thing escalates.

I don't think you'd be very excited to do your job either in the environment they're in. The BLM movement has been given far too much latitude to kick up dust over police encounters that aren't worth getting bent out of shape about.

Perhaps you could try to be a police officer and help out.

BLM has every right to “kick up dust” about police brutality. On the other hand, the police have a job they get paid way too much to do (just look at police budgets around the country!) so the least they could do is actually do it instead of acting like petulant children.

Yes BLM has this right, the police in America are racist.

If they won't do their jobs then they should be fired.

And hire who?

Its not like the job is very appealing in current environment. The risk of either dying on job or getting imprisoned due to domestic disturbance calls gone wrong is very high. Not to mention, a lot of cops not showing up situation seem to be in line with the demands of general public who instead want to mental health workers to show up for handling a variety of scenarios.

Do other jobs of comparable death rates have higher pay? My understanding is that there are a number of jobs with higher death rates which aren't typically thought of as like, super "in the line of danger" jobs.

Are those stats wrong? or maybe misleading by focusing on the wrong slice of the population? Or something like that?

Or is the compensation for those jobs more than it is for police officers?

> If they won't do their jobs then they should be fired.

No need: they are just quitting and getting other/better jobs. Civil servants (teachers and police, among others) aren't slaves after all, they have plenty of options.

If an organization has bad morale then it needs to change. It doesn't matter if the bad morale had some initial justification -- bad morale tends to be self-reinforcing. Even if the public now said very nice things about the police, it is unlikely that would improve the morale of the police. It's a bit like trying to pull a friend out of depression by saying nice things about them -- it doesn't work. A prolonged episode of bad morale also indicts the leadership -- such episodes are impossible without some official support. In the USA the model for turning things around is what the USA military managed to do in the ate 1970s, after the defeat in Vietnam. New leadership needs to be promoted, and the old leadership needs to be forced out. Then the rank-and-file must be given the choice, they can get their head in the game, or they can leave. That spirit of feeling sorry for oneself needs to are broken, and it can only be broken when top leadership is committed to breaking it. And at this point, police forces in the USA generally need the same kind of reforms that the USA military needed in the late 1970s. In particular, it was generally understood that the officer corp had been openly racist during the years of the Vietnam War, and after 1975 there was a growing commitment to transform the military into one of the most anti-racist organizations in the USA. This was achieved by the late 1980s, when the military transformed into an organization that then became the model for other Federal organizations that wanted to transform their internal cultures. That movement reached its apex General Colin Powell became the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989 -- a moment which symbolized how much the military had transformed its culture. And now the USA police will need to under go the same transformation. To the extent that the police currently feel sorry for themselves, the current mood is entirely unsustainable.

It is just not a good time to be a cop. The right says you aren't doing enough, the left says you are doing too much. It is demoralizing and the pay just isn't there while the job market for doing other things is really hot. Cities, their governments, and the people who live in them (who elect the people who run the cities) will have to figure out how to re-build their police departments, but don't expect the police officers themselves to come up with their own solutions.

The USA lost in Vietnam, went on to have a very mixed record in the 1980s, got their confidence back in the early 90s, lost some of it in the mid to late 90s...and...well, the 00s taught the USA military again to be humble. Not a good template for municipal police departments.

Poll after poll shows that the military is the most respected institution in American life. Crucially for this conversation, it has an excellent esprit de corp. The kind of self-pity that we now see among the police is something that would not be tolerated for even 5 minutes in the military. So it is an excellent model when we consider how to reform the police.

> Crucially for this conversation, it has an excellent esprit de corp.

There have been plenty of scandals in the USA military that have sullied its reputation. "Poll after poll" is just anecdotal, and not born out in practice.

> So it is an excellent model when we consider how to reform the police.

Militarizing the police is not the answer. Imagine if the police acted like those MPs at Abu Ghraib.

I don't think the parent is suggesting the police be militarized; rather that they could look to the US military's experience in combatting organizational racism and improving both professionalism and cohesion.

The US military has had its share of scandals but I have yet to see that degrade the normative US opinion of our "soldiers," namely that they do a hard job on our behalf and deserve respect and gratitude for that.

I don’t think soldiers have any kind of special reputation, at least among non southern urbanites. They do a job that they get paid for, some of them are good, a few are bad, etc… there is a swath of the country that holds that in high regard, especially in the south and in rural areas, but that isn’t normative in all areas.

While the numbers might bounce around from year to year, we should look at the long-term trend, which is that the military has been the most trusted institution in the USA at least since 1992:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/06/29/the-in...

Soldiers have a special reputation.

Imagine if the police acted with the military's ROE. I think I'd have seen a lot less civilians murdered by police in the past few years.

These are the ROE's that permits them to bomb a car with water bottles and kill 10 civilians without recourse?

Careful what you wish for there...

You should look up the ROE for a roadblock.

> Poll after poll shows that the military is the most respected institution in American life.

Not even the military is safe anymore:

>Trust in the military is dropping significantly, new survey suggests

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/03...

While the numbers might bounce around from year to year, we should look at the long-term trend, which is that the military has been the most trusted institution in the USA at least since 1992:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/06/29/the-in...

Yup, the cops I know here in San Francisco say it's a bad time to be a cop.

Also, the cops get blamed for things that are outside their control, like car break-ins, "They [the thieves] know that the most they'll get is a citation, so they'll be out on the street in a couple of hours," said Pete McLaughlin, retired.

Also we have a District Attorney (Chesa Boudin) who doesn't like to prosecute non-violent crimes, so rampant shoplifting has caused at least one CVS (at the corner of Eddy & Van Ness) to close.

The inability to lock these people up is frustrating, most of us aren’t blaming the police for that. Heck, it might not even be the DA’s decision (in Seattle, unlike SF, even if the DA wants to prosecute, it can be jammed up at the county level), and often it’s just a resource issue (too many low level property offenses, not enough lawyers and judges, or jail space). We need to be really in in tough on crime to fix those issues, and we still aren’t really. Policing is just one part of that, and right now is a horrible time to hire more police (like it is for hiring in other jobs ATM).

> kick up dust over police encounters that aren't worth getting bent out of shape about.

When every major BLM-esque protest in the last several years was triggered by the death of a black person at the hands of the police, that characterization is "grossly offensive"

Not saying you should be put on trial for it (like in the article's case). Just stating a fact.

We could debate their tactics or the value of property damage to a social cause in terms of convincing moderates. But your presentation is pretty gross.

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