For police PR flacks, quack lives matter | Hacker News Reader

For police PR flacks, quack lives matter

radleybalko.substack.com

113 pointsgreyface-153 comments

These pieces don’t diminish the necessity of police reform, or excuse the actions of other people wrongs.

And I think some people do need a reminder that it’s not helpful to generalize large groups of people. Humans have a natural tendency try to fit their ideas about the world into neat little black and white boxes. It’s important to have balance and remember that the world is more complicated than we all sometimes want to believe.

If all police were bad, it would be easy to solve police brutality, just get rid of them. The hard part is fixing an organization that has some good people and some bad people.

These pieces enrage people because it makes them feel they are being manipulated. Because as it shows they clearly are.

> it would be easy to solve police brutality, just get rid of them

It is that simple - what exactly makes you imply that it is not? I don't see argumentation here at all, it's left as an exercise for the reader. Which is a little unsatisfying as it is the core point of your post.

>It is that simple - what exactly makes you imply that it is not?

Have you thought about that statement for literally more than a minute?

If you abolish the police, and fire every officer, what do you replace them with?

Here are some options:

Literally nothing - Okay, and the next time a man murders his partner, does that man just carry on? Who arrests him, who investigates? This option is clearly worse than the existing system. The rich pay for private security and the poor are terrorised by organised criminal gangs.

Something about "community policing" - Who appoints them? Who pays them? Are you, at best, just recreating the police with zero institutional knowledge and experience? At worst, this is just a power vacuum that will be filled by the only other organised violent group - criminal gangs.

Something about despatching social workers before interpersonal crime happens, and maybe abolish capitalism so theft and sexual assault will (magically) no longer be an issue - wishful thinking.

Do you have any better options?

> Something about despatching social workers before interpersonal crime happens, and maybe abolish capitalism so theft and sexual assault will (magically) no longer be an issue - wishful thinking.

Nice job conflating a real solution in with a bunch of straw men.

But if they didn't use strawman arguments it wouldn't have been so easy for GP to throw up their hands and say "I guess we shouldn't do anything at all then" in essence.

it's the institutional knowledge that's the problem. Policing has an entrenched culture that reinforces bad behavior - I would take a fresh set of cops with no connection to the one we currently have any day.

Of course, this is anyhow a symptom and not a primary diagnosis. The police, and many institutions like them, exist the way they do because of a body politik fundamentally disconnected from the populous.

That is to say, shitty cops aren't a problem for the powerful elite, so they're not a problem.

The problem is actually even worse than that. Abolishing the police effectively means ending the state. Who pays taxes without the police? The courts have no means of enforcing judgements against tax-evaders without the police, and without taxes, the rest of the state ceases to function.

Now you're getting it. The goal is reclaiming the right to violence as expression from the state.

> It is that simple - what exactly makes you imply that it is not?

If for no other reason, residents in most locales want to continue to have police services.

Humans in institutions act the way institution shapes them - they react to what is punished, what is rewarded, on peer pressure, on what they are taught in training.

When you add a good person into corrupt institution, they become enablers at best, punished and sidelined if they insist on not adjusting and at most likely very their worldview and behavior shifts to match the institution.

Cops are not independent individuals exercising individual judgement calls. They are powerful armed organization with special privileges over civilians. They have strong hierarchy and act the way that is rewarded.

This is the answer. Someone may go in with the best of intentions but are quickly and easily molded by the president

The entire saying is "a few bad apples spoils the bunch"

The hard part is fixing an organization that has some good people and some bad people

This is just the "not all cops" with more words. Where are the good cops?

They aren't turning people in. They aren't speaking out. If they do such things, they get fired. They aren't getting promoted: Speaking out makes you untrustworthy.

They aren't doing this so much that we know there are police gangs. With tattoos and everything. Surely, folks knew, but nothing happened. Simply not acting like the bad cops isn't enough to be a good cop.

The only real reason we have evidence of police misconduct is because of modern technology: The only reason Rodney King's abuse got nationwide coverage is because it happened to be on video, and now everyone has a camera in their pockets.

And little has changed.

Where, exactly, are these good cops and what are they doing?

This is just “yes it is all cops” with more words.

So you're saying every single cop is bad. I have a hard time believing that, but on the other hand I live in a country that does not have a problem with police brutality.

> I live in a country that does not have a problem with police brutality.

Yea I really doubt that. You're likely just not the target.

A lot of western peers have Very Few deaths per year involving police interaction.

Death isn't the only form of police brutality.

If police in every single country is intrinsically corrupted, what are you suggesting instead? If we have no role model anywhere I presume a simple reform is not enough, since it would be futile.

Surprisingly, whenever there's a civil war or government collapse, we don't see any mass migration of these ACAB-types to these cop-free utopias.

I think with this American police stuff, a lot of people are missing a simple truth.

>This is just the "not all cops" with more words. Where are the good cops?

They're not in the same police departments as the bad cops. This is what people miss.

The good cops you don't hear about, because they don't have a lot of problems. Instead, you hear about the bad cops in departments like the LAPD and NYPD (and many other much smaller departments). The good ones don't make the news, but the bad ones usually make the news multiple times.

>They aren't speaking out. If they do such things, they get fired.

Exactly. So the bad cops tend to congregate together into bad departments. It's exactly like the rotting apple trope people keep misusing and not understanding. The bad apple makes the whole barrel rot quickly. So if you see a department with a few bad cops, most likely they're ALL bad. The good departments get rid of the bad cops before they ruin the place.

This isn't to say that most departments are good, or bad; I really don't know. But I do believe there's good cops out there, but they're not in the same departments as those shitty cops that are in police gangs like you mention.

By that theory you'd still expect some bad cop to occasionally end up at a good department. So if the other cops at the department are really good cops, they would charge the bad cop very quickly for doing something. I would imagine that to make at least local news (I mean we just read that cops saving ducks is making lots of news). Why do we not see any of those reports. One way to identify good departments should be police union membership. Considering the crucial role police unions play in protecting bad cops, good departments should have near zero membership, are there such departments?

I'm guessing that in well-run departments, bad cops tend to get pushed out quickly, before they do something really bad that's worthy of news coverage (plus, they probably have better hiring practices to try to identify who's a good "cultural fit"). Plus, departments probably try to avoid media coverage of anything that makes them look bad, just like any organization.

Police unions nationwide are probably a net negative I'd agree, but claiming that good departments wouldn't have any union at all seems a big extreme. Public service employee unions are pretty normal in the US.

https://thecrimereport.org/2020/06/18/the-plight-of-the-poli...

We do, sometimes. Instead of getting the presidential medal of freedom like they deserve they are forced to suffer.

The system is broken from the top, can only be fixed from the top and those on top are pretty content with the status quo.

Setting up the DHS after 9/11 was dumb but setting up a new department answerable only to the president to police the police would fix the problem.

>Setting up the DHS after 9/11 was dumb but setting up a new department answerable only to the president to police the police would fix the problem.

No, it wouldn't: what happens when someone like Trump gets elected? Now the police nationwide are basically just like the SA.

If the department was tasked solely with policing the police then Trump would likely just have tried to water it down and render it toothless exactly like he did with the EPA.

I dont see an intrinsic problem with its existence.

> Why do we not see any of those reports.

Because the bad cop goes to jail and now he's no longer in the department, so the department falls out of the news cycle. I'm not sure what else you'd expect...

Here's a possible example of a couple bad cops in what could be a good department: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/offi...

The "bad department" is the US when you compare it against the rest of the planet

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/

So the US doesn't only have bad cops, it has bad police departments. The rot starts from the top, then?

While there's definitely cultural problems in the US that could lead to more bad departments, the US is a highly decentralized country with a lot of control at the local levels. I think this tends to lead to a lot more corruption at local levels (in some places much more than others), and accordingly more bad departments.

The US lacks a national police inspectorate, or similar body that could reliably investigate crimes committed by police from the outside. Police are left to police themselves.

> you hear about the bad cops in departments like the LAPD and NYPD

New York (state) police kill about 1/3 of the median, California just a little under the median[0]. I imagine those numbers are higher for the two cities you've mentioned than state-wide.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-kill...

Again, see my parallel comment about how decentralized America is and how much power is retained at local levels. The NYPD may be in New York, but it doesn't represent New York state.

Also, killings aren't a great way of comparing departments necessarily. There's a lot of corruption in the NYPD, but that doesn't necessarily translate to killings. Just look at their former "stop and frisk" policy; it was a violation of rights and racist, but didn't result in many killings that I remember.

There may be some good cops, but I think they get crowded out by all the scum around them or by their strange loyalty behavior where no cop would say anything bad against another cop - at worst they die because of it, or they need another job, or they get transferred to another police station in the middle of nowhere.

> Where, exactly, are these good cops and what are they doing?

I can't believe this comment is not only not flagged dead, but actually is the top reply here. Sometimes HN really is a caricature of liberalism.

I mean, seriously. Where are any good cops? ANY? And what are they doing?? This is so profoundly ignorant I'm not sure where to start.

- youve never seen someone tearing down the interstate going 40mph faster than surrounding traffic? Or swerved all over road? Or ran red lights? Who do you think is taking care of those problems?

- you know literally 0 people who are or were criminals and know 0 people who've been victims? I've known murderers and drug dealers. People get robbed, fights break out, domestic disputes happen.

Im not a fan of the current state of policing in America, but policing is hard and extremely dangerous; there are more guns than people here. Someone has to enforce the rule of law at their own peril. You don't have have to ignore the bad to take the good, but don't act like it's not a useful, necessary, and dangerous profession. Don't be a child.

The commenter is not saying “where, physically are the good cops.” They are not saying “good people don’t exist in the police department.” What they are saying: “when these terrible episodes of brutality happen, often over a number of years within the view of fellow officers, where are the good cops stepping forward and policing this, or at least preventing departments from institutionally providing cover for the wrongdoers.”

We’ve seen a common pattern many times where abusive officers do terrible things over a period of years and get away with it until they are caught due to their own mistakes, while the occasional objection gets squashed. I don’t entirely blame the “good cops” for valuing their survival and careers over fighting these battles: I blame a culture that makes it much too costly and difficult for good cops to push criminals out. But this is a broken and unprofessional culture that needs to be uprooted and changed, because a country needs law enforcement professionals that it can trust.

You are illustrating why "The hard part is fixing an organization that has some good people and some bad people."

People within an organization don't all have the same amount of power to affect change. Most have little power. And at the same time, they have bills to pay at home.

Meaningful change has to be systematic.

I mean, when your organization is killing the good people to protect the bad (See: the death of Houston Tipping) then your argument no longer works.

> And I think some people do need a reminder that it’s not helpful to generalize large groups of people.

Being a cop is not an identity.

Being a teacher is an identity. Being a programmer is an identity. Descriptively speaking, without even thinking about why things happen some way, people identify themselves and others with their work. Being homeless is an identity too.

There is a big difference though, being police is also an institution. One could maybe argue the same for teaching (although ironically teachers face much more scrutiny about their behavior than cops, despite not having the power over life or death), but not for programming or homelessness.

Sure it is.

So many cops live in cop neighborhoods, surrounded by their cop friends, with blue lives matter stickers & flags, going to their FOP meetings & get-togethers regularly, & all the other signifiers. Their self-identification as a cop is stronger than 90% of how anyone self-identifies about even the most intrinsic elements of themselves like ethnicity and upbringing.

>And I think some people do need a reminder that it’s not helpful to generalize large groups of people.

It certainly can be if they are all part of the same institution, because the institution shapes how they act.

I think some people need a reminder that "cops" are a distinctly different type of group to say, "Jews" or "black people".

There are over 15,000 different police departments in the US.

If one good cop won't snitch on one bad cop then there are no good cops.

So basically a slightly less malicious version of how photographers started faking drama by placing children's dolls/toys into the rubble for photos of ruined buildings? Which became a meme in the terrorism era and some TV shows/movies satirized it.

It all started after a real story won the Pulizter (or photo equivalent) of an Elmo-style doll in some building rubble and photographers decided to create their own versions.

> So basically a slightly less malicious version of how photographers started faking drama by placing children's dolls/toys into the rubble for photos of ruined buildings? Which became a meme in the terrorism era and some TV shows/movies satirized it.

No, they're just typical human interest stories being misleadingly portrayed as some kind of conspiracy.

There are all kinds of stories about firefighters saving ducks, regular people saving ducks, kids saving ducks, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34623180. I guess "people saving ducks" is a common, easy, heartwarming story to write.

Wow, it's nice to know that police protect and serve ducks.

Would be cool if they also protected and served people, but I guess ducks are a little easier to work with.

They often do. What do you think the world would be like without police, roses and fairie dust?

"Often" is an understatement. I wish software had as few bugs per line of code as there are incidents of police brutality per number of police interactions in the country.

the stakes are way lower. My buggy code doesn't kill people.

I think that's the point they're making...

Nvm, I misread it. Yeah, you're right.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/

The US also has more crime per capita than the other listed countries. More criminals -> more work for police officers

Police work = killing people?

Sometimes, yes. In any interaction with police, there is a certain probability of the police killing someone. The killing may be justified (defense of self or community), or occasionally it might not be. But more criminals -> more interactions with police -> more opportunities for an interaction to become deadly.

Well I guess first do you have any sources for the more crime per capita claim?

Secondly, other countries seem to manage to do police work without killing a ridiculous number of citizens, so that's definitely kinda weird

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate

(Homicide is generally the most accurately tallied crime, so best for such comparisons)

In general, countries with fewer killers and thugs per capita can afford a softer police touch. Maybe one day we in the US will figure out how to reduce or reform our population of unsavory individuals, but until then law enforcement have to deal with them as best they can.

I don't agree that homicide is the best for comparison, the original claim was about crime in general

I should have been more specific, said "violent crime".

For example Germany has no speed limits on highways, so I suppose they must have very few speeding tickets—but that's not very informative

If anyone ever says "hackernews brain" isn't a thing I'll be pointing them to this comment

Yeah, I can't help but feel anytime a police officer stops me on the highway for 8 mph over the speed limit that they're really keeping all the crime away.

That's why people stop speeding, cause they get a ticket once and after that they never do it again.

Seems fair to identify this as PR folks doing PR. You do PR where you need it, and they need it.

There is another term for when the state does it — propaganda.

It's annoying that the word “propaganda” has ended up meaning “PR efforts I don't like”. There was once an era when propaganda was a normal word.

Okay, but this is propaganda in the original sense of the word.

AFAIK propaganda is used with a positive connotation as well. It's just debatable if you interpret a specific act of propaganda as positive or negative, depending on the objective of the message.

Despite this particular story which is probably a "matryoshka" of propaganda inside a propaganda inside... you are one step away from discovering the reason for the frequent appearance of Chekhov and Dostoevsky in HN :)

Please forgive my ignorance, but I don't understand (probably because of my lack of knowledge wrt Chekhov and Dostoevsky), yet I want to. At the risk of giving away the joke, could you explain your point to me?

When did propaganda not mean "PR efforts I don't like", especially government PR efforts?

Wikipedia says:

The term began taking a pejorative or negative connotation in the mid-19th century, when it was used in the political sphere

Do you long for the days of the 1850's?

I heard a great definition of propaganda recently.

It’s a British person having a good look.

I don't get it.

It sounds like "proper gander", where gander means "a look".

In case people are wondering, the analogy is to the appearance of a goose (the male goose is a gander) when it cranes its neck to look at something, and you can't use it in many places "look" fits, it's specifically an action so you can "take a gander" or "have a gander" but you don't just "gander" and the appearance of something is not its "gander".

(Ganda means to look)

If the police departments are actually fortuitously finding baby ducks, sure...that's smart PR. But if the entire event is staged, that's propaganda instead of PR.

If it's staged, then it would border into animal mistreatment since the ducklings would have been removed from their environment to be used as prop.

It's propaganda either way because it's funded by public money (PR is funded by private money).

Propaganda and PR are the same thing. The term "public relations" was invented in the wake of public sentiment turning negative regarding "propaganda" in the wake of the second world war. Prior to that PR was just called propaganda, and did not have a generally negative connotation.

> You do PR where you need it, and they need it.

But sometimes you need to step back and ask why you need that PR in the first place, and if perhaps there are better avenues to recover your standing rather than staging PR-worthy displays. At some point the PR becomes completely disingenuous and starts actively harming you.

If it's staged, it's the police lying about the work they're doing in the community, which is an ethical problem.

Doesn't even crack the top 10 of ethical problems resulting from the police.

Whether or not it's staged it's the creation of a PR person who's likely never even so much as been on the inside of a squad car, trying to spread an insipid, demonstrably false narrative about a bunch of wife-beating knuckleheads hiding in their SUV's between bouts of extreme violence.

The hatred or dislike of police in a country seems to be strictly correlated to the levels of criminality, progressivism and ethnic heterogeneity.

Looking at law, Singapore, Japan and South Korea would be brutal police states, but there is none of that dislike for police that we find in countries like France, US or Britain where people sing about how much they hate the police. Instead, in those countries people respect and appreciate police officers.

Singapore has no freedom of expression and the police are actually held accountable for doing their job.

Thankfully correlation doesn't equal causation, imagine how stupid you would look like online.

Almost as stupid as someone who thinks the existence of a police force is the source of the problem every time this _context_ occurs.

For some reason, countries without progressives and their shitty policies don't have these problems. There's no horrible police force from Switzerland to Singapore

I feel bad for the stupid youth who choose to become a police officer in a progressive country, imagine getting shit on endlessly for trying to uphold the law.

I can help you find the address of your local police department if you need some more boots to lick.

>Instead, in those countries people respect and appreciate police officers.

Because they aren't murdering disabled people in the streets like rabid animals. It's pretty simple.

For Japan at least this isn't particularly true especially among the younger generation. There are some very well known issues with the policing system in Japan, from forced confessions and brutality behind closed doors to racial profiling and targeted harassment. It's just easier to ignore if you're not a target by the system.

> Japan

I recall seeing a statistic that something like 98% of the people charged with an offence are ultimately convicted in Japan, which means that their criminal justice system is extremely different from ours.

Either their police are legitimately only arresting people who definitely did a crime, and documenting it thoroughly, or once you've been charged you're expected to be convicted for cultural reasons.

If by ours, you mean the US, I was under the impression that the rate would also be in the high 90%'s.

> correlated to progressivism

how?

also, there are better correlations to crime, than cop hatred, like darn communism is the first i can think of

>correlations to crime,

Sure is, but the biggest of them would be illegal to even mention.

In my experience the view of the police is pretty positive here in the UK.

It used to be - but even now the problem is a different one. Less about police brutality (Menezes and Tomlinson notwithstanding) and more about police apathy and not-my-job-ism when facing any crime harder to solve than a traffic collision.

The UK is currently going through a series of scandals about rape by officers: https://news.sky.com/story/metropolitan-police-officer-david...

If the police don't want to be hated, they should simply address crime among their own ranks.

Singapore is a brutal police state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...

This is only a couple of years after Sarah Everards murder by an officer - how officers acted in towards women in the vigil after her death wasn't exactly great either.

>Singapore is a brutal police state

Yes? That's exactly what I said. But because Singapore is not a progressive state, filled with progressives, their police force is appreciated and work in harmony with the community. Because you know what?

People there follow the law, and appreciate that the law is enforced, and don't blame the police for the bad situations that arises from mass criminality.

> Watch for "cops save baby ducks" stories in the next few months. Media collaborates with police to produce these puff pieces after every police brutality incident.

> Literally every dept does these after police killings, it's amazing.

Maybe, maybe not. There's no evidence of causation or conspiracy shown here.

Even the prediction seems a little bogus. "The next few months" seems like it might just be when ducks start having ducklings.

I predict in about six months, you'll start to see dozens of stories about cops saving kids who were drowning in lakes and rivers. I assure you, it's totally a conspiracy to distract you from police brutality and has nothing to do with summer and beat reporting.

Edit: And a lot of these supposed propaganda stories are actually about animal control officers. This blog post itself and the tweet it's based on are starting to look like shoddy pieces of propaganda:

https://wokq.com/manchester-nh-police-rescue-seven-ducklings...:

> Enter Manchester's Animal Control Officers, including Kayla Tremblay. Tremblay knew exactly what to do after the officers located the storm drain and the missing ducklings.

https://www.republicworld.com/entertainment-news/whats-viral...:

> A California animal control officer with her presence of mind saved a group of baby ducklings from a storm drain.

https://fox4kc.com/news/officers-rescue-flock-of-ducklings-f...

> OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Animal control officers responded to a different kind of emergency at one of the Overland Park’s parks.

https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/story/news/2022/05/18/res...:

> Alyssa Giaquinto, of The Giaquinto Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, along with the Marlborough Animal Control Officer and members of the Marlborough Police and Public Works departments all worked together to rescue the ducklings from the drain.

> I assure you, it's totally a conspiracy to distract you from police brutality

Not sure if this is intended to be sarcasm, but it's like the adage goes -- just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. I don't know if it's a conspiracy or just an emergent status quo, but the media do constantly provide puff pieces for the police.

Old ladies crossing the icy street in the winter, ducklings in the spring, kids and swimming pools in the summer and Halloween/Thanksgiving in the fall. Regardless the season they'll find some way to spin the cops in a positive light.

> Not sure if this is intended to be sarcasm, but it's like the adage goes -- just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.

But it doesn't mean they're after you, either.

> ...but the media do constantly provide puff pieces for the police.

And teachers, too. Is that a media conspiracy to distract from poor school performance and low test scores? Must be, as proof, watch for the big jump in those from September to June, right during the school year, when schools are actively performing poorly.

What's really happening is there exists a genre of news called "human interest stories" that highlight all kinds of feel-good positive stuff.

In this case, one type is about ducks getting saved. Here's a bunch of stories where firefighters are doing it:

https://www.wusa9.com/article/life/animals/baby-ducks-rescue...

https://www.wral.com/apex-fire-department-rescues-13-baby-du...

https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/jc-firefighters-rescue-ducks...

https://www.whas11.com/article/news/local/ducklings-rescued-...

https://www.whec.com/archive/ducklings-rescued-from-sewer-dr...

https://local12.com/news/local/nky-fire-department-comes-to-...

https://www.12news.com/article/life/animals/lucky-duckies-ph...

https://www.fox29.com/news/firefighters-get-creative-to-save...

https://www.winknews.com/2022/07/26/ducklings-saved-from-har...

https://www.fdlreporter.com/story/news/2021/05/05/spring-bri...

https://www.ocregister.com/2021/04/01/huntington-beach-firef...

https://www.wdrb.com/community/prp-firefighters-save-family-...

https://www.forestparkreview.com/2020/06/11/duckling-saved-f...

https://www.naplesnews.com/story/news/local/communities/the-...

https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/story/2021-04...

And here are common citizens and other kinds of workers doing it:

https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/duck-defender-neurodive...

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/3502545-ca...

https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/zevely-zone/duckling...

https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/story/news/2022/04/29/duc...

https://www.odt.co.nz/star-news/star-christchurch/team-effor...

https://www.richmond-news.com/local-news/video-richmond-resi...

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2022/07/07/off-duty-...

https://www.blogpreston.co.uk/2022/07/preston-rspca-describe...

https://www.wmar2news.com/goodtoknow/good-samaritans-rescue-...

https://dailygazette.com/2020/04/23/rotterdam-water-departme...

https://onwardstate.com/2021/05/04/wholesome-penn-state-stud...

https://myedmondsnews.com/2020/04/scene-in-edmonds-duckling-...

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/17/us/boys-rescue-ducks-savannah...

https://www.news4jax.com/features/2021/05/05/familys-ducklin...

And here's a man who needed to rescued by firefighters, because he got himself stuck in a drain while rescuing ducks:

https://www.wxyz.com/news/firefighters-rescue-man-who-was-tr...

Those are some of the top results of a Google News search of "saving ducks from drain".

> And teachers, too. Is that a media conspiracy to distract from poor school performance and low test scores?

Many of the stories about teachers are of the 'Look how this teacher overcame a lack of resources to still try to provide kids with a passable education' format, so they are also puff pieces for teachers, but in a different way, meant to distract from the fact that the teachers are so under-resourced.

That's ultimately what these feel-good stories are intended to do, to distract from _something_, even if that something is just the status quo of daily life. And that is also why when it's feel-good stories about the police, it feels particularly insidious; As though the stories are trying to distract from all the horrible things police do. As the meme goes, no one ever wrote a song called 'Fuck the Firefighters'

> ...even if that something is just the status quo of daily life.

That is it, and maybe an attempt to keep the news from being a selective display of only bad things, creating the misleading impression that the world is a grimdark shitshow where nothing good ever happens.

> And that is also why when it's feel-good stories about the police, it feels particularly insidious; As though the stories are trying to distract from all the horrible things police do. As the meme goes, no one ever wrote a song called 'Fuck the Firefighters'

And that's distorted thinking. Dislike of the police is causing people to believe and peddle false conspiracy theories to express that dislike.

It's pretty clear that what's really is when ducklings get saved by anyone, some fraction of the time a local journalist with column inches to fill writes a fun story according to an established template.

> It's pretty clear that what's really is when ducklings get saved by anyone, some fraction of the time a local journalist with column inches to fill writes a fun story according to an established template.

Which is not mutually exclusive with these things being puff pieces. For example, the same journalist could probably find something consequential to report happening down at city hall, or the last council meeting. They could dig a little into the local homelessness or drug problem or something else. If all you need is a few column inches to fill, you don't need to do in-depth investigative reporting of those things either.

But they don't do these things because as you pointed out earlier:

> maybe an attempt to keep the news from being a selective display of only bad things, creating the misleading impression that the world is a grimdark shitshow where nothing good ever happens.

That's what it is. Modulating the dopamine drip. Get you worked up, bring you back down, rinse, lather and repeat. If your local newspaper was all depressing or boring stories all the time, no matter how truthful, you'd eventually get tired of it and move on. So you sprinkle a little bit of feel-good writing throughout to keep the ride going.

This is why I never specifically referred to this as a conspiracy, because I don't think it is on the scale that the linked article is trying to imply. That would imply coordinated collusion between thousands of actors, which I find a bit hard to believe. I think it's more that the system is set up this way and we're seeing the natural results of actors behaving within the rules of the system. Take my example above of the newspaper that only prints bad news. Eventually people stop reading it, and the newspaper goes out of business. Newspapers that didn't only print bad news survive and take over the readership of the now-defunct one.

(Incidentally this also offers a pretty simple explanation for why there might be more puff pieces about the police published after the police do something horrible. If you think of a media outlet as trying to maintain a homeostasis between outrage and feel-good, then you need more feel-good stories to offset the newly generated outrage until things are back in balance.)

Just looking at the headline, I thought the article was going to be about a different kind of quack: "expert" witnesses that champion theories such as "killology", which are pretty convenient for police.

An attempt to Google 'killology' returned to Wikipedia article on Dave Grossman:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Grossman_(author)

The article claims he is the source of research into 'killology', but makes it pretty clear that he is against the costs that the more violent approaches to policing involve. He was on the prosecution team for Timothy McVeigh, FWIW.

Has there been a subsequent move in the usage of 'killology'?

For a split second I thought that this article was AI generated... :)

The freemasons are responsible for this

Not the Space Guild?

Sounds like the citizens have a problem with their government.

Sooo, so for extreme clarity and simplicity, let's break this issue down to about the 2nd grade:

Here in the US we have a democracy, a Constitution, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. We are supposed to have free elections and a free enterprise system. Soooo,

Step 1:

When government is doing bad things -- illegal, unethical, violent, nasty -- with freedom of speech, some people should complain and with freedom of the press journalism should present the information, say, meeting common high school term paper standards, to the voters. If the journalism is not doing that, then it looks like there is a business opportunity in the US free enterprise system.

Step 2:

Seeing the information, the voters are supposed to complain to their elected representatives in government. If the voters do not complain, then the representatives might wonder if many voters care and, thus, be reluctant to take action.

Step 3:

The elected representatives are supposed to correct the problem. If the representatives don't do this work, then it looks like in our democracy there is an opportunity for some new representatives.

Sooo, why don't these three steps work, i.e., why don't the problems get reported by the journalists and corrected by the representatives?

For an answer, my guess is that journalists believe that, for their ad revenue per hour of work as journalists, they have more profitable places to allocate their time than reporting on problems with government.

For a change, we might guess that the journalists will change and report about (A) representatives lying, police beating up citizens for no good reason, graft, kickbacks, wasteful spending, dangerous infrastructure, payoffs, no-show jobs, unfairly serving powerful special interests, cushy contracts, ignoring crime, etc., i.e., problems with government, instead of (B) police saving baby ducks as soon as voters and readers insist they want such change.

So, in my opinion, given our democracy and Constitution, the real, basic fault lies with the voters who don't give strong feedback to the journalists and representatives.

the three steps you mention do not operate like that, in reality.

1 - most news is published by one of a few conglomerates. It is impossible to be competitive in this space without a staggeringly large bankroll, and most 'competition' is just the illusion of, not the genuine article. An example of this is the chairman of the Associated Press (nominally a non profit news organization) also being the CEO of Hearst Communications (named for William Randolph Hearst - one of those conglomerates I'm referring to)

2 - Things getting in between your opinion (that is, anyone's opinion) and enacted policy: first-past-the-post elections, the two party system, gerrymandering, the Senate (unless you live in Vermont, Wyoming, or one of the Dakotas), the DNC, the RNC, primaries, voting happening on a single day, voting not being a national holiday, the supreme court, relying on representatives rather than voting directly, corporations are people, and money buys elections.This list is incomplete but touches on most of the key players. You get the picture.

3 - Not quite sure where to start with this. see (1) and (2) above.

The thing is, it's a really complicated mess and like any sufficiently complex system, it's nearly impossible to reason about without making some deep assumptions. For a light introduction to the scope of the situation, I recommend reading Republic Lost, by Lawrence Lessig. He's a constitutional scholar who started talking about all this before the system started to show late-stage symptoms of what's probably terminal cancer, from a societal perspective.

> the three steps you mention do not operate like that, in reality.

Uh, my post had

> Sooo, so for extreme clarity and simplicity, let's break this issue down to about the 2nd grade:

and you went to at least the high school level!!!

> 3 - Not quite sure where to start with this. see (1) and (2) above.

Moving up to, say, the high school level where the students can drive a car and might have an after school job to pay for the gas, if everyone who, say, wanted $2 a gallon gas again would just write their Representative and two Senators, then ... something would happen!! Congress, i.e., a MAJORITY in Congress, has a LOT of power. Wanting $2 a gallon of gas again sounds to me like a MAJORITY!! If 90+% of the voters would write about gas prices, or grocery prices, or whatever, then, yup, things would happen. That's my explanation of Step 3 -- not complicated or weak, both simple and strong, voters just WRITE.

I wrote: Each Rep/Sen has a Web site with features that make sending an email really easy. I got back messages, canned from my Senators and a personal one from my Rep. Didn't notice much change in grocery prices yet!! For Step 3, my guess is that simple can be strong and actually work.

But, I don't know why Step 3 seems not to work. I would have thought, guessed, bet, going back to some of the wars, economic situations, inflation, interest rates, etc. people would be packed together on the Mall from Congress (the Capitol building) to the Washington Monument protesting. But, nope, doesn't/didn't happen, not very densely "packed".

For responding to the attack on Pearl Harbor, it seems that there was a strong majority right away, and it was a big change -- draft, blood, money, war production, ships, planes, supplies, The Bomb, having a LOT of women in factories, ..., and all from just that one attack.

Soooo, we have some data: Gas prices, inflation, interest rates, massive violation of immigration laws, ... don't quickly yield a majority but bombing Pearl Harbor did. Soooo, the necessary condition for a majority is somewhere between those two!!!

Soooo, for Step 3, can still keep it simple: When enough people are angry enough, they WILL complain enough, and then things WILL change.

God, I wish you were right. I felt the same way for a long time. At this stage, the only way I see it going is the system collapses on itself. There's no reason for them to listen and there's nothing we can do about it, though. We can get as mad as we like, they have militarized police with MRAPs and drones.

Heck, there were protests. Recently. All over the place - but the police have been defunded of nothing whatsoever and they still have qualified immunity.

Congress just kinda doesn't need to care, so they don't; with one or two exceptions.

Hidden at the bottom of the US policing problem is indeed a set of beliefs by the electorate that are in favor of police brutality. It's like gun deaths: the voters want it that way and will not countenance thinking that it might be different.

> Hidden at the bottom of the US policing problem

Actually, it turns out, I grew up in Memphis. Was thrilled leave. Went back for 18 months at FedEx, wrote software to schedule the fleet, etc. then went to grad school and again was thrilled to leave.

I wanted to leave out that recent Memphis police stuff and possible main reasons of just why.

But since YOU brought up the issue, as I recall there are some forms of rather strict segregation in Memphis. Sooo, housing neighborhoods are (were) segregated. How? Nearly all the houses are under a tricky contract in an organization, maybe an actual corporation. I don't have the details just right but do have the important point right: All house purchases have to be approved by the relevant organization. So, wonder of wonders, presto, bingo, housing is segregated. Next, the K-12 schools are neighborhood schools. Again, wonders of wonders, presto, bingo, ....

Then, let me guess: Policing is organized by neighborhoods and, again, presto, bingo. Now, with that background, two tiny baby steps in real political politics can explain much of the recent situation.

For a little more, when I was there, Dad, who knew a lot about education, looked for a house with good schools and, then, bought a house in a neighborhood with the best elementary through high school in the city. Yup, as a 1-12 it was relatively good! It was flatly, bluntly, intentionally, strongly a college prep school: The architecture had tall Greek style columns and was a big U with in the middle some walks in a geometric pattern borrowed from, maybe, some French chateaux. 97% of the students went on to college. MIT came recruiting. The year before me, three students went to Princeton and two of them ran against some third student from somewhere for President of the Freshman Class.

Some years later, after some, call them riots, the college prep school(s) moved 15 miles or so east, and the school I went to had courses not there when I was, e.g., "cosmetology".

Soooo, in simple, crude, blunt terms, it appears that the powers that be decided that there are two parts to Memphis, Black and White. The Whites have nearly all the money and power (but maybe not a majority!). The Blacks have their own areas and neighborhoods, and there the Blacks are free to have their own lives and problems and their own police run however they want.

The Whites? They don't have problems with the police.

After I left Memphis and FedEx, I haven't been back and don't want to go back. Maybe the best thing I got from Memphis was a taste for their chopped picnic pork shoulder BBQ and do a version of that myself.

Ducks and brutality aside, it's obviously best to comply as you're getting arrested. If wrongful arrest, sort out later as it's all recorded.

"Give me your hands," they shouted. He refused. "Lay down on your stomach!" Again he refuses, argues, struggles, breaks free and runs off. No punches had been thrown at this point. Education is needed on how to behave if you ever get detained.

All he had to do was comply with the initial instructions, and he'd be alive today. Same with Floyd who refused to get in the car when repeatedly ordered to. The police brutality comes after the sheer stupidity of these suspects who decide that getting arrested is not for them.

https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2023/01/30/report-reveals-pol...

Nice try. But even if we disregard the impossible commands, how good would you be at obeying commands when fearing for your life?

I wasn't 'trying' any more than you tried replying, or the author tried painting a duck-saving story as bad faith agenda.

Of the 4 videos released, the first shows the initial stop with guns drawn. Cops won't greet you with "evening sir" when approaching with guns out. Not sure what he did to attract attention, but was likely more than failure to indicate.

Your linked article claims punching and kicking happened at the car, but this isn't visible on the released video_1.

What I see on video 1, is a messy aggressive mob of cops barking orders, yelling over the top of each other, but also a subject unwilling to play along the whole way. He isn't about to go ragdoll for these cops. He's not fearing his life, he's fearing arrest. So he runs rather than be cuffed.

Cops relax when cuffs are on, everyone knows. So let them put cuffs on. Or risk injury.

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