Hacker News Reader

Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

Some of those who work forces, are the same that burn crosses

Every American should understand that the police are not your friends. They exist to "protect and serve" those in power, and you're not that person. That's what being a police state is all about. A seven and nine year-old walking together to Dunkin' Donuts resulting the in the arrest of their father is a symptom of our police state. The fact that neighbors can "sic the law" on one another and the fact that "swatting" has become a verb is a symptom of our police state.

Getting back to this story and adding my own "get off my lawn" anecdote, when I was a kid every kid in the neighborhood walked to school. Even the five year-old kindergartners, like I was at one time. Oh sure my mom walked me the first couple of times to ensure I knew the route and that was it. Some kids had to walk two miles! We didn't even get a break for inclement weather! We had to walk in rain, snow and ice. We also had to cross a four-lane arterial thoroughfare! The horrors! And all this was in a big city! In all those years not a single kid was grabbed.

View on HN

The trouble with "The police aren't your friends" crowd is they always seem to think the the police's boss is their friend when in reality, the government isn't your friend in general and the police are merely the enforcement arm of said government. Elect the same people for 50 years and let them get away with blaming their underlings if you want, but you are just being a useful idiot. The much lauded "social services" also played a role in making this happen, so "defunding the police" probably results in exactly the same outcome.

"The government" isn't a monolith, and I'd argue it largely isn't "the police's boss."

For instance, the NYPD leaked Mayor Bill de Blasio's daughter's arrest information, in a move that was widely criticized as an attempt at intimidation.

There's a great documentary about war from the 80s or 90s, and I remember a quote from it about how in an all volunteer military, soldiers are afforded special privileges in society. I think police in the US basically function in the same way.

If you reference my comment in this same GP thread I completely agree with you. If you want to take control of a local society, you need a cast of hitmen willing to do what you want. Conversely, if you try to take control of a local society and you don't have a cast of hitmen willing to do what you want, you will not gain control.

The government isn't a monolith but the tens of thousands of police departments, containing what, tens of millions of officers are?

Here are the facts, a large proportion, if not the vast majority of violent police interaction in the United States is a direct result of the war on drugs. The people who voted those laws in are currently still in power, one is the president, and generally they blame the police for this state of affairs while making no effort to correct their lethal mistake. How many young men would run or resist arrest if that bag in their backpack resulted in a small fine vs a few decades in prison like today?

>The government isn't a monolith but the tens of thousands of police departments, containing what, tens of millions of officers are?

I think the metaphor "the government is the boss of the police" is not very accurate. The police are a political force that receives a huge % of most municipal budgets, with their own PR team/media relations, etc.

I oppose the war on drugs. However, I don't think decriminalization of all drugs solves this issue.

We could say the same thing about the armed forces or teachers. I would agree if we were to call them factions within a larger entity, they certainly are distinct enough from one another, there is some degree of infighting, but I feel that in general a member of the governmental caste feels greater affinity for other caste members than they do the public at large, and that is why it makes sense to look at them as a single unit. At the end of the day, individual police officers aren't elected, the only form of redress we really have in our system is the remove the leadership that allows these things to happen, we haven't done that and nothing has changed, that shouldn't be surprising.

> Every American should understand that the police are not your friends.

But they should also understand that policy are rarely the enemy, either, and treating them as such will result in a worse outcome on average. Don't let the evening news distort reality so much.

Also, in the interest of sharing anecdotal get off my lawn moments, all the kids in my neighborhood walk to school too, in 2023. All weather, all the time, safely, nobody calls the cops, nobody gets grabbed, it's fine. The world is in fact objectively safer than it was when I was growing up in the 80s. There's a good reason I don't routinely watch the news or read partisan political media.

The point of "police are not your friends", is you can't know which cop has a chip on their shoulder until its too late and you're three teeth short of a smile. The nature of policing and the logic behind "ACAB" is that because police don't keep their peers in line, you cannot trust any cop.

"One bad apple" has been corrupted just like "Pick yourself up by your bootstraps". The former cuts off "spoils the bunch", the latter being a satire for something obviously impossible.

My general approach is to be as polite as can be while saying virtually nothing. If the first words out of your mouth after getting pulled over are "AM I BEING DETAINED?!?" then the police are going to make you have a very bad day. My brother had to learn this the hard way, he learned that 'tactic' from reddit I think, and it got him face down on the pavement for what should have been a speeding ticket. Just stay calm and never say anything more than the most vague pleasantries. If they ask where I'm going then it's either "to home", "to work" or "to the store"; they aren't owed answers to these questions and reddit will tell you to sperg out and start ranting about your rights, but if you stay calm and pleasant albeit distant, then the police will be more inclined to treat you the same. But if you antagonize them within the bounds of the law, they'll step outside the law to get you back. You're just setting yourself up for failure in the common case when you follow popular internet advice about cops.

Good advice. Also helps to be white.

This reminds me of this skit by Chris Rock: https://youtu.be/uj0mtxXEGE8

Better yet, Eddie Murphy nails it with this "documentary": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_LeJfn_qW0

That may be true, but it's not actionable advice on an individual level.

I think there's a tendency, particularly on reddit, to let perfect be the enemy of good in situations like this. Reddit will tell people that if you're not white then there's nothing you can do to get better behavior from cops and that advice such as mine above is therefore invalid. Being black in America changes the baseline interaction you can expect on average, but I think my advice will still do most people more good than harm most of the time.

If you want to have a boring incident free traffic stop, the best you can do is play your role in such an exchange and hope the cop reciprocates. Conform to the pattern of a mundane traffic stop so that the cop falls into the same pattern. If instead you play the role of some sort of agitated sovereign citizen, the cops will almost certainly reciprocate. In the first case, nothing is ever guaranteed but in the second case a negative outcome of some sort is virtually certain.

BTW I think this advice applies generally to almost all encounters with strangers, not just cops. Superficial politeness is a superpower. It works on anyone from troublesome new neighbors, crazy threatening people you encounter on the street at night, even stiff indifferent bureaucrats. Superficial politeness gets better outcomes from almost everybody, most of the time.

> if you antagonize them within the bounds of the law, they'll step outside the law to get you back.

This is exactly the problem. Police shouldn't be allowed to mete out extrajudicial punishment for being offended.

Exactly the problem, yes. On a societal level it's a problem that we should strive to correct. But on an individual level on a case by case basis, it's the reality you have to protect yourself from.

Very good points. I've used this same strategy for decades and my interactions with the police have been nothing short of overwhelmingly positive. Of course, I remain wary at all times, maintain situational awareness, and always try to remember the police officer's name and badge in case I need to have redress later with their department or the court.

These are all symptoms of living in a police state. We've normalized this behavior so much while living in a police state that we no longer see it, much in the same way proverbial fish are unaware of water.

I completely agree. In this case, it's about the fish being aware that he's in the water and which direction the currents flow. If you don't know how the water flows, you'll get smashed against the reef.

> But they should also understand that policy are rarely the enemy, either, and treating them as such will result in a worse outcome on average.

If you are afraid of what will happen to you if you don't comply with everything someone says, they are your enemy.

All these terrible experiences people vent about the American police force largely have to do with the fact that it's completely underfunded and poorly trained. In the US the average time to become a police officer is around 600 hours, in Germany 3500 and Finland 5500 hours [0]. If you pay police officers a shitty wage and let them do long, strenuous shifts - the only people who sign up for that kind of job are those with some external motivator other than money. In the best case they wanna help their community out but in many cases it's power hungry people who feel empowered carrying a gun and stopping traffic at will. The solution to fight that is simple: Pay higher salaries, have more competition among the applicants and only select those that pass a thorough barrage of physical and psychological tests.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56834733

It's a bit strange to point to 4 officers spending hours "investigating" a nothingburger as being evidence they're underfunded and overworked.

I guarantee that if that family had their house broken into and a bunch of stuff stolen...one cop would have shown up hours later, told them it wasn't worth filing a report as "nothing ever comes of it anyway", and then ignored phone calls from them when they discovered they did, in fact, need a report for insurance.

40% of the town general fund in Uvalde went to the police department. A tiny town with nearly zero crime had a large police department geared up to the gills and a separate school police department...and it got them...a police department that stood around (with county police and a federal border patrol tactical team) while their children and teachers were slaughtered.

Police aren't underfunded. They're lazy, entitled bullies.

They're also not undertrained - most police get huge training budgets for all sorts of stuff. It's just stuff that is fucking useless. There's lots of time and money for SWAT, anti-terror, and drug operations training, and it's way sexier than training on how to handle a domestic violence case or sexual assault or home invasion.

Hollywood is the culprit for all this militarized police in the USA and the arms industry.

Police officers in cities like Boston and New York can make well into 6 figures after overtime pay. They also can retire relatively young, with generous pensions. Their departments are also well-stocked with capable vehicles and equipment. Funding is not the issue in those cases.

I have a couple cop friends and they make about as much as me. And that's ignoring benefits. How much do we need to pay them? $300k? $500k?

Underfunded lmao. This is some grade-school level of bullying. “We will stop the beatings and murders if you give us more money.”

LAPD got 1.9 billion in 2022 by the way: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/police-commission-votes-to-...

Various cities can spend over 30% of their budget on police btw.

Maybe it should be even closer to 100% huh. Why live with iPhones, flat screen TVs, computers, when all of our spare cash can just go to the police.

Police budget for Berlin (similar in size to LA, at 3.5M inhabitants) is about [0] $2 billion per year - that's for a region with much lower salaries than the US. They employ more than twice the number of police officers (26k vs 12k in LA).

And that's comparing a well funded and prestigious police force in the US - the comparison would look much worse in some poorer cities.

[0]: https://haushaltsdaten.odis-berlin.de/share?modus=Funktionen

Kids in cities tend to be safer in general than suburbs. Not only from strangers, but especially from cars.

Need Data to back this

Found this with a little Googling:

Probst, J., Zahnd, W., & Breneman, C. (2019). Declines In Pediatric Mortality Fall Short For Rural US Children. In Health Affairs (Vol. 38, Issue 12, pp. 2069–2076). Health Affairs (Project Hope). https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2019.00892

Interesting. I do wonder though if the environment is actually safer, or if kids in urban areas just stay inside more. (Aware of threats, the homeless, etc) I never lived in an urban area as a child, but can tell you that I was allowed to (and did) roam freely in the rural areas, the woods, etc.

I grew up in a rural area, small town in western PA. Woods existed, but you couldn't use them. Firstly, how could I get there? There were no sidewalks, and riding a bike anywhere on the road with all the hills and blind corners would be suicide. Any fields nearby were fenced off. Any woods nearby were forbidden by great big NO TRESPASSING notices every 50 feet, and I didn't put it past them to shoot a child for trespassing. Every other property had an unleashed dog waiting to pounce on you for getting within sniffing distance of the property line. Thus I spent all of my time indoors playing Civ 4. In my experience, rural areas are designed for cars and are populated by people who wish they didn't have neighbors.

Good response. Definitely had a different experience down in rural Tennessee. Lived in several different towns but always had access to the woods through some mechanism (friends house, neighbors land, etc) never had more than a half acre ourselves but sure spent most of my free time outside. I appreciate your point, but obviously, we are both just spewing anecdotes, which still makes me wonder which environment outside of the home is actually safer.

I don't know if it is because you were in a different area than I, or if it was because you grew up 20 years after I did (based on your Civ 4 comment. I was playing a lot of Ultima 3 in my day.) But my growing up in a rural area, small town in central MA, I spend almost all of my time outside, often in the woods. Nobody was going to shoot me for trespassing, as all us kids knew all the local farmers and land owners. We went to church with them, and we all pitched in at harvest times to help on the farms and make a few bucks to spend at the local general store, which we got to by riding our bikes through trails we'd made in the woods. And traffic on the roads was always pretty light, so we never much worried about getting hit.

Not sure it's the time difference. Born in '93 and my experience is much closer to yours.

Link to the source of your data?

Found this with a little Googling:

The safety models of cities is just different from that of suburbs. If you live in a walkable urban area, there's safety in numbers. It's not uncommon to see children walking down the block to their corner store or going to school or whatever. If a random adult approaches a child, there are plenty of people around to see it, and if they call out for help it's very likely that someone will intervene. In the suburbs, it's a bit different. The safety model depends more on things being "normal" - people are suspicious of anything out of the ordinary. In a community where everyone drives their kids to wherever they need to go, seeing children walking down the street might be unusual enough to get someone to call the police. because they'd want other parents to do the same if their own children somehow escaped and started wandering the neighborhood. It all depends on the norms of the particular community.

>They exist to "protect and serve" those in power, and you're not that person. That's what being a police state is all about

So who are the police serving in this case? It's not like Big Karen(TM) has a trade group that hires lobbyists. It's not like The System(TM) really cares if your kids walk to wherever.

The police in this case are enforcing the morals of some subset of the local population. Some nobody called them up and they dutifully got right on it.

HN is angry because the morals enforced in this case are excessive and the amount of enforcement is disproportionate but the fact of the matter is that the person/people who's morals the cops are backing up with state violence is probably not that different from them.

> The police in this case are enforcing the morals of some subset of the local population. Some nobody called them up and they dutifully got right on it.

I don't think the problem is so much about them checking on the kids' family after being called by some neighbour (which is prob. legitimate to avoid any risk of neglect etc.).

As you said t he problem is that they arrested a parent who, for all intents and purposes, was complying with their questioning. In front of their children. And threatened the second parent with arrest. And taking away the children.

I don't see how you can make the jump from "response was disproportionate" to "commentators are not that different from the person who reported the incident" though.

>I don't see how you can make the jump from "response was disproportionate" to "commentators are not that different from the person who reported the incident" though.

The point is that the call didn't come in from one of the "more equal animals". Any one of us could have made the same call and got the same response. It's not like the cops were doing someone a favor by responding.

Until now I thought the lyric was

> Some of those that law enforce us, are the same that burn crosses

> They exist to "protect and serve" those in power

While this is technically correct, this phrase sets up a simplistic model of society where there's the Powerful on top, the Police right under them serving them, and the Oppressed under that. I don't think this is the best way to understand what the Police are and what they do.

I've heard many left-leaning people claim something along the lines of "the Police do whatever the Powerful want by taking it out on the Oppressed". This doesn't accurately reflect the behavior or mindset of the individuals who collectively make up the Police. There are thousands of stories of rich and "powerful" individuals being harassed by police officers when their actions or beliefs clashed with the beliefs of the responding officers.

In fact, in America the definition of "power" is almost tautological when it comes to police. You are a "powerful" person when the police will either look the other way or help you when you break the law. I would go as far as to say that in America it is impossible to be "powerful" unless you have the police on your side. (A possible exception is for gang leaders with their own outlaw police forces.) Without the police you do not have meaningful power, and so saying "the police exist to serve the powerful" incorrectly separates the relationship between the "Powerful" and the "Police".

The Police are the power. I like to call them the "Martial Caste", in order to draw connections between them, medieval knights, samurai, cartel sicarios, the KGB, etc. It's all the same thing: they are the muscle behind the societal ownership claims of the local warlords. Without them the warlords are nothing, and without the warlords they are nothing.

A more accurate statement is "the Police exist to protect and serve whatever system perpetuates the Police". If you're a rich and you donate to police causes, suck up to their members, agree with their politics, and generally support police proliferation, they will bend their enforcement tactics to your favor. This makes you "powerful". If you rail against police behavior and try to reform them, they will bend their enforcement tactics against your favor. This makes you "powerless".

> A more accurate statement is "the Police exist to protect and serve whatever system perpetuates the Police". If you're a rich and you donate to police causes, suck up to their members, agree with their politics, and generally support police proliferation, they will bend their enforcement tactics to your favor. This makes you "powerful". If you rail against police behavior and try to reform them, they will bend their enforcement tactics against your favor. This makes you "powerless".

Reminds me of this joke from the other day about the "system":

A CEO, a Politician, a Supreme Court justice, a Cop, a Laborer and an Immigrant are at a table. The table has 20 cookies. The CEO takes 19 cookies, and passes one cookie to the Politician's PAC. The Politician says to the Laborer "look out, the Immigrant is trying to take your cookie!" and allocates a few crumbs from the table cookie to the Cop. The Cop beats the Laborer and shoots the Immigrant. The Supreme Court justice rules that the PAC is legal, the shooting is justified, and the Cop has qualified immunity for beating the Laborer.

Jokes are supposed to induce laughter. That paragraph does not.

Maybe "joke" should be in air-quotes too, just like "system" !

Yep, the police serve the themselves. The same can be said about basically every other group of humans. Police have significant power and leeway because the service has provides a lot of value to others.

I like your martial metaphor.

Poor and marginalized communities usually want more police, not less. Not because the police come at no cost, but because the alternative is worse.

It is like hiring one knight errant to keep other knights/bandits at bay.

This is basically the origin of all governments and power structure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com