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Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

A question I intuit but probably has a fallacy of some kind: if you want to enforce the law for dangerous and violent people, doesn’t it seem reasonable you’ll need at least equally if not more dangerous and violent people to do so? And wouldn’t a natural result of that be that those dangerous and violent “enforcers” emulate the same kind of organizational underpinnings as those they are enforcing against?

Imagine there wasn’t a rule of law at all and no police officers. A gang of “baddies” forms. What would be a natural response to the formation of that gang? Wouldn’t it be a gang of “also baddies but baddies whose interests align more closely with ours?”

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> if you want to enforce the law for dangerous and violent people, doesn’t it seem reasonable you’ll need at least equally if not more dangerous and violent people to do so?

No. There are other ways.

For example, mobbing with massively superior numbers, resulting in no harm to anyone, and a suspect getting the hospital care they needed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mzPj_IaMzY

Ah, but ok now you’ve lead me into my next point. You see how many officers it takes to subdue a single person wielding a close range weapon. Guns are multiplier of violence in and of themselves and so many people in the US have them, especially criminals. So we’re asking for a critical mass of people crazy enough to go toe to toe with people with guns who have nothing to lose. How could they not be similar if not the same as the criminals they’re up against and stand some kind of hope of making it out of the other side?

I’d never be a cop personally because, well, many reasons, frankly, but the biggest one is I have better options. And I’m sure you do too. Almost everyone does.

I’m not saying there doesn’t exist a way to nonviolently deal with the US criminal populace but I’ve yet to see any good examples of it outside of sound socioeconomic policies and a penal system that focuses on rehabilitation. And those are indirect.

I would hope that with the whole might of the state behind them the cops don't need to rely on being as violent and stupid as their street gang opponents. They can rely on superior armaments, better funding and numeric advantage.

I suspect your conceptualization of 'dangerous and violent' as a single axis may be the main weakness here. We've struggled with 'dangerous and violent' for a long time (e.g., incorporating 'friendly' Gallic tribes in the late Roman era as a defensive buffer) - but over the long term there's been a clear transition away from the 'friendly barbarian' model towards the modern professional military?

I don't have a clear conclusion here to wrap it up, but the multiple dimensions at play here intuitively reject the assumption that you have to embrace the same characteristics that you are trying to protect against.

In what case has that ever been true though? In military conflict, there are possibly varying levels of morality at play, sure, but at the end of the day, people with guns and tanks end up killing people with guns and tanks, right?

Not at all. Modern war isn't some sort of battle royal with guns and tanks, it's more of a strategy and logistics problem. If you're interested in a window into modern military thinking that's accessible to laymen like you and me, I'd recommend checking out this article: https://warontherocks.com/2023/02/the-war-will-grind-on-refl...

It's a strategy and logistics problem for the generals sitting in their safe air conditioned offices.

But it absolutely is about men maiming and killing one another with terrible weapons. The logistics are required to fuel the battle royale and the strategy is required to kill and maim more of the enemy more cheaply than they are maiming and killing your people.

“What would be a natural response to the formation of that gang? Wouldn’t it be a gang of “also baddies but baddies whose interests align more closely with ours?”

Yes, and this is so obvious I can’t believe you are being downvoted. If authorities do nothing, vigilantism will become the increasingly common response. This is exactly what happened in the Seattle CHOP zone- no police = adhoc armed groups claiming that authority for themselves.

It's a fair question, but in other contexts this hasn't worked out. At judges' discretion, America funneled some number of criminals into the military pipeline up until the end of Vietnam. The recruits would often have antisocial tendencies and did not follow orders well (surprise...criminals don't obey social constructs like chain of command).

Russia is doing the same through the Wagner group, but they've learned to just use the convicts as first-wave cannon fodder so they're minced before they can get rebellious.

This "band of rogues" stuff makes for fun television but falls short in practice. Hence this article.

Good question. The US is full of guns but people stand down when police open carry in their communities, why? police have to earn/maintain that legitimacy or they’re just more bad guys.

I think this closely tracks Hobbes' social contract theory: governments/nations/etc. are themselves gangs to compete for resources with other gangs.

I've thought about this here and there too, with the framing of "how do we break the cycle of violence", or "if we always require a bigger bad to defeat a bad, aren't we doomed to depend on the bad?" My latest thought experiment was the dynamic where electorates sometimes make Faustian bargains with strongman dictators to solve an urgent problem (economic destruction, raids, social change) but then they get stuck with an even worse problem: a brutal dictatorship. A couple of things I think:

- Violence is downstream of trauma. Stop the trauma, stop the violence. Frustratingly this can be relative because status factors in (in 800 AD maybe you got called out for your jank farming tools, now you get called out for your year-old shoes), so there's a cultural component to solve as well. But yeah, generally avoid catastrophes (invest in mitigations like levees, heterogeneous crops, insurance, and a free press) and lean on your culture when you can't (community disaster relief for hurricanes, draft every capable person to kick Putin the fuck out of your country, etc.)

- If you can't nip trauma in the bud, you can mob a big bad with lots of small violent actions. Like it doesn't matter how good Putin is at judo; if 1000 clumsy townspeople show up he's going down.

But like, we know how these things happen, all the way down from dictatorships to street gangs. They're ancient human stories. But they're deeply entwined in our group psychology, so knowing how the dynamic works isn't sufficient to free us from the cycle. We have to collectively rise above. But, that's pretty hard so we haven't been able to do it yet.

Excusing violence as a flower of trauma does disservice to all of us who have survived trauma without becoming violent assholes.

There is no excuse for violence. There is always choice.

(n.b. I'm sorry for anything you may have gone through).

I think there are so, so many excuses for violence. If someone burst through my door looking to rob and victimize my family I would work pretty hard to do violence to them, and I think that's excusable. One doesn't have to think too hard to come up with other examples.

My theory here is that the people who would try and commit that crime against me are doing it for systemic reasons. Sure there are psychopaths or whatever, but broadly people are products of systems. We know this because people behave differently in different systems--if they didn't matter, we'd see similar aggregate behavior in all societies: crime rates, poverty rates, drug use, education rates, etc. Or to be more concrete: the US has more mass shootings than the EU because of its gun policies and culture, not because more people are randomly choosing to perpetrate mass shootings.

> What would be a natural response to the formation of that gang? Wouldn’t it be a gang of “also baddies but baddies whose interests align more closely with ours?”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohortes_urbanae

I’m surprised and frankly disappointed no one has brought up de-escalation.

De-escalation is an important tool in anyone's belt when it comes to handling erratic behavior. However, my question is more looking at how we actually expect these positions to be filled with actual people. Who's going to jump at being a cop? Someone who favors de-escalation, or someone who favors violence?

As always, politics is downstream of culture. If every movie cop for the past 100 years had been a Jimmy Stewart aww shucks goody good, maybe we would be in a different place. Instead we tell ourselves (and therefore the next generation of cops) that policing is a macho violent profession, then recruit ex-soldiers to do it, and finally give them Pentagon-surplus equipment to do it with.

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