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Comment by valleyer | Hacker News Reader

> One plaintiff, Bianca DeLoach, described being swarmed by police with their guns drawn at a gas station in March 2021 while her children watched from inside the rental she’d paid for.

> When he opened the door at least 4 officers had guns pointed at him.

> Darnay Taper spent two nights in jail last year after being pulled over in March 2021 by eight police cars while during a Hertz rental and held at gunpoint, according to the complaint.

Why are guns such a reflex for cops in scenarios that clearly do not warrant them? Can't we find some better cops?

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Police in the US (broadly speaking, of course there is variance from department to department) are trained this way.

Here's an article about a particularly controversial training program: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/11/police-trai...

Historically they haven't suffered much negative consequences when they shoot and kill suspects. And they have no personal liability.

>Can't we find some better cops?

I feel like cops in the U.S. are just bitter Army rejects that didn’t make the cut due to their overly unhinged behaviour.

They're trained to be afraid by watching videos of cops getting shot, then they're trained to react instinctively at a perceived threat.

Overzealous and primed for violence

So, trained killing machines.

so we give a bunch of paranoid scaredy boys guns and authority - nothing bad will happen I bet

And permission to do almost anything they want to almost anyone. (Well, guaranteed forgiveness, close enough).

I see I’ve hit a nerve there - helps to confirm my suspicions.

Grand theft auto is a felony. Drawn guns is standard procedure for “felony stops.”

Your quarrel in this case is with the training, not the cops.

The cops are a system- it comprises both its rules and those who enact them. The quarrel is with the cops.

It’s a system that exists in a society that established that system.

One need only look at the differences in police departments across various countries to see that the context in which they exist matters.

It’s right to question the rules, but overly simplistic to reduce the problem to “cops”. You’ll need to zoom out a bit more.

> It’s a system that exists in a society that established that system.

It's also a system that now resists any efforts by that society to rein it in.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo...

> When Steve Fletcher, a Minneapolis city councilman and frequent Police Department critic, sought to divert money away from hiring officers and toward a newly created office of violence prevention, he said, the police stopped responding as quickly to 911 calls placed by his constituents. “It operates a little bit like a protection racket,” Mr. Fletcher said of the union.

> Unions can be so effective at defending their members that cops with a pattern of abuse can be left untouched, with fatal consequences. In Chicago, after the killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke, it emerged that Mr. Van Dyke had been the subject of multiple complaints already. But a “code of silence” about misconduct was effectively “baked into” the labor agreements between police unions and the city, according to a report conducted by task force.

> When liberal politicians do try to advance reform proposals, union officials have resorted to highly provocative rhetoric and hard-boiled campaign tactics to lash out at them. This past week, the head of the sergeants’ union in New York posted a police report on Twitter revealing personal information about the daughter of Mr. de Blasio, who had been arrested during a protest.

I am not arguing that the organization doesn't have emergent/systemic problems - that part is clear. But I still don't think any conversation that simplifies this problem down to "cops" alone can really get anywhere.

If you look at why they are insulating themselves, the climate in which these "us vs. them dynamics" are unfolding seems to be at the center of this, and the cops are just another tribe in the culture wars at this point. Albeit a tribe that is authorized to carry guns, and the power dynamic is obviously a big problem.

That just makes this issue more complex, not less.

If someone pulls a gun on me my quarrel is with them.

Largely because officers don't know what situations will warrant them. and over 2,500 cops are assaulted with firearms, with 250+ of those resulting in the cop being shot each year in the US, and this often happens during routine traffic stops.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9133.12... [2] https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/dallas/news/pre...

This is a good point that I thought about but clearly don't appreciate enough. Thanks for the stats.

But in the case with the lady with 4 kids? Sounds a bit overblown for the situation indeed.

But here in Europe cops rarely even draw their guns (and in some countries don't even carry them)

Isn't it crazy they couldn't just follow her until she stopped and got out of her rental and then assess the risk of contact? We should probably change our police hiring and training processes.

Unless they can assess the situation without being observed, that could end up worse. If it's a carjacking, it could lead to dead hostages. They're trained to move fast once visible.

Police isn't even in the top 20 most dangerous jobs. Crossing guards get killed more per capita. Crossing guards.

You're also more likely as a civilian, on a per capita basis, to be killed by a gun than you are as a cop.

That's one of those things that sounds relevant when you first hear it, but then if you spend a moment thinking about it you realize it isn't.

That job Y is higher risk than job X has no relevance to whether or not steps should be taken to mitigate risks on job X, unless either for some reason mitigating risks on job X would prevent mitigating risks on job Y and so those resources would be more effective going toward mitigating Y's risks, or you want to argue that there is some threshold and people in jobs whose risks are below that threshold should not try to mitigate those risks.

Crossing guards should be armed and trained to unload on any car they think might not stop fast enough. If cops can do it without repercussions, why not them?

Another problem with offering higher risk to crossing guards as an argument against police having guns is that the exact same fact, crossing guards having a higher on the job death rate than police, works equally well or better as an argument for police having guns.

When a given fact supports both sides equally well in an argument that is pretty much the definition of an irrelevant fact.

Crossing guard death rates on the job appear to be around 19 per 100k. For police in the US the rate varies quite a bit year to year, ranging from around 14 per 100k to around double that. The average depends on over what time period you look, so it is not clear if it is actually higher or lower than that of crossing guards, but whichever it is it is not very far from that of crossing guards.

But that is the rate for police with guns. The comparison you want if you are arguing against police guns is the rate without guns.

Using the rate with guns to argue against guns is like arguing that golf tournaments should not shut down when a lightning storm passes over because the rate of people being killed at golf tournaments that shut down during lightning storms is so low.

How many people do cops kill because they have guns and are trigger happy? If we remove their guns and their death rate goes up by less than the number of people they kill, that’s a net positive. Cop lives aren’t special. It should be a dangerous job. It shouldn’t be dangerous to merely exist as a citizen around cops.

Wait, I think I've read this on HN before, and debunked it. Can you refresh my memory where you read that, so I can re-find the problem in the hole in the statistic that I found before? Thanks.

I suspect if the officer believes the vehicle to be stolen, it's likely to be a dangerous scenario

That’s why what Hertz is doing is so dangerous. Every false report is a life threatening situation. Their own lax inventory controls are the problem and they’re putting their customers’ lives at risk. Don’t ever rent from them.

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