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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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"

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.

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

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