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Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

Interacting with any person raises your risk. The more people the risker.

This doesn't meaningfully diminish the problem here: the police in the US are heavily armed, and are trained to manufacture pretext for violence (cf. any number of videos where police shout "stop resisting" or "hands up" repeatedly to people who are already complying).

Ordinary people, even ones who might hurt you, are aware that doing so comes with the threat of the law. The police are the law, and as such are emboldened towards violence when antagonized in ways that the ordinary public is not.

Well ordinary people have an option of just walking away that police officers generally have a duty not to, meaning they put themselves into tense situations in the course of doing their jobs.

This is a common misconception: under the Public Duty doctrine, the police have no obligation to intervene in any particular public instance of crime[1]. Their duty to the public is a “general” one, which makes it an extremely weak duty.

[1]: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/police-c...

As well as being consistently reaffirmed by various courts that the police have no constitutional duty to protect the public. Only the people in their immediate custody.

That duty to protect in custody is also frequently not respected[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abner_Louima

Wasn’t it also in New York where an on-duty cop watched a guy get stabbed on the subway from a few feet away and actively chose to do nothing without punishment?

This might sound like common sense but the opposite is more true.

Police may walk away from just about any interaction with the public, even if they know that death or serious injury will happen unless they intervene (though there may be states that have legislated exceptions to this).

Most working people may be fired for not engaging a potential customer, client, vendor or someone else they’d normally interact with as part of their job. They can even be fired for simply not being friendly enough in one of these interactions.

Hot take: Community policing should be separate from warrant enforcement. A huge part of police's 'fear' is from not knowing who in any interaction is at risk of being incarcerated for 20 years and has an outstanding warrant and might therefor do whatever it takes to avoid that.

Community policing should be about community policing and needs to be de-escalated. Warrant enforcement should be warrant enforcement. This would make police less fearful and less justified in their hostility.

Also ordinary people can't get away with having used deadly violence after their pretext is thrown out of court. For police it's a regular Tuesday, and then back to work on Wednesday.

And I'm someone who respects the police and believes in the rule of law. But reality is reality.

They also take part in community pickup games and are trained to interact with the community. 99% have never fired a weapon in the line of duty.

There are many more people who would kill you because they don't care or think they will be caught or forgot it all in the moment. You would be surprised how little your life means when someone needs a fix or a lot of money is available.

What we have here is the tv effect. Every cop show features a bad cop. Cop murdering black guy results in huge protests where 10 times more people get murdered by other protestors.

Your chances of getting killed at the protest is much greater than being murdered by the cops who everyone is protesting against

> 99% have never fired a weapon in the line of duty.

This is a misleading fixation: the police can beat, brutalize, and kill people without ever firing a gun. In fact, mistreatment at the hands of the police is probably overwhelmingly physical in nature. The fact that your community has sporty cops does not meaningfully change this truth.

By and large, the police in the US are subject to extremely positive media portrayals. I, like millions of other Americans, grew up watching Law and Order (the good one, not SVU); the police in these shows are shown, with sparingly few exceptions, to be virtuous public servants. Such positive fictionalized portrayals have been instrumental in the public's overall opinion of policing[1], even through real-world evidence to the contrary.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230609092852/https://www.ojp.g...

Gosh yeah, I guess there's no room for consideration of magnitude.

You're probably at a lower risk of being murdered with a bad cop than with your own family members.

Yes, but people in general don't weight their families as much of a danger as strangers. Interacting with cops has become scary for people.

In a fascinating irony, more than 40% of cops admit to instigating domestic violence at home (which begs the question of how many more have, but don't admit it?).

> You're probably at a lower risk of being murdered with a bad cop than with your own family members.

Sure, and I’m much more statistically likely to be hurt by a dog than mauled by a lion. But I’m not going to give up my dogs and start wandering into lion cages at the zoo.

With travel, we often talk about deaths per x miles traveled. I think in this case a reasonable metric would be deaths or injuries per x minutes of interaction.

> You're probably at a lower risk of being murdered with a bad cop than with your own family members.

If you have a cop as a family member, you are at an elevated risk of each of those, and much of that is the special risk of getting both simultaneously.

Most automotive collisions happen within 50 miles of your home.

(You interact with your own family members many orders of magnitude more often than with the police; as such, raw numbers here would be wildly misleading.)

You could apply that same criticism to your original post.

What do you think the chance magnitude is of being killed for filming a police lobby? 1 in 10? 1 in 10 billion?

The chance is non-zero, and that is unacceptable.

Is this your actual argument? You will accept nothing less than literally zero? Surely you realize that this is impossible among any group of people (including police) in literally any place on Earth.

What would your proposed policing system look like?

in my case, it would not only enforce the law, it would obey the law, be culpable for breaking the law, and would actively route out criminals, and gangs that manage to enlist.

I think approximately everybody agrees with these ideals, but approximately nobody agrees on how to achieve them in the real world. Or agrees about comparative importance - ex. weighing being culpable for breaking the law against ability to enforce the law, if you see the discussion below about qualified immunity.

>I think approximately everybody agrees with these ideals

Maybe in vague theory but in the past several years, every time a cop shoots someone without just cause there are a lot of people defending them. Hell, they get donated millions to defend themselves in court! Strangers send money to a random cop so he can afford expensive legal council to keep him from being guilty of a crime. Surely that can't be read as everyone wants accountability right?

I'm wary of kicking the hornet's nest here, but just as a note, a lot of the highest-profile "just cause" cases have a lot of disagreement around the actual details. Thanks to the PETA principle[0] (section III is about exactly this), the events that make it into mainstream media almost always have intensely divisive details that do make an impartial ruling a lot harder. People that disagree with you would probably also disagree with how innocent/guilty you find the people involved.

I think pretty much everyone wants police accountability, but the cases where the police are most unambiguously & egregiously wrong on every level aren't divisive enough to stay in the news as long as divisive ones. (Not necessarily always true! Please do not take any of this as a strong personal opinion any any particular case(s)!)

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...

I would expect that if someone were killed by the police under suspicious circumstances there would be a meaningful and earnest investigation as to whether the police acted appropriately. If not, that their special authority be revoked and criminal charges be brought.

Ah, this I agree with. Qualified immunity has protected police in a few way-too-shady circumstances.

However, as a side effect, I think a lot of police would leave their jobs (or less people would join the police force in the future) without qualified immunity. In some cases this is good as it removes or prevents bad apples in the force, but in other cases I imagine perfectly good potential-cops are not going to put up with a dangerous, low-paid job that they can also be sued for doing at any time.

Sort of like aggressive medical malpractice lawsuits discouraging actually good/useful medical treatment as bycatch. Maybe there's some free-market equivalent of malpractice insurance for police (where the shadier they've acted, the more they'd have to pay for insurance)? Not sure the market is the right approach here, but I'm not familiar with any specific alternatives.

Or, to make everything a lot easier, just give every cop a bodycam and ~80% of the ambiguity disappears.

> * I think a lot of police would leave their jobs (or less people would join the police force in the future) without qualified immunity*

I'd rather have fewer police, even if that makes them dangerously understaffed, than the current situation where cops have very little accountability, and are unlikely to be punished when they break the law when interacting with non-cops.

Qualified immunity needs to go. Not just because it's a bad doctrine, but also because there's no basis for it in law; courts have just made it up with little legal justification.

> Or, to make everything a lot easier, just give every cop a bodycam and ~80% of the ambiguity disappears.

Body cameras are much less useful than we'd all like to believe. I think 80% is too optimistic. Cops can turn off the camera (or, "weird, it wasn't working"), and regular physical motion can easily blur the scene and make it impossible to know what's truly going on. I think cops should be required to wear them (and be auto-punished for turning them off), but I don't think they're the panacea many people think they are.

We might have a genuine disagreement then, because I have a very strong preference against police being "dangerously understaffed".

Given other societal forces (i.e. decreasing mental health care for those with the greatest need, since about the Reagan era), in my understanding we rely on cops to hold together denser areas. If policing were to substantially decrease, I'd want to be as suburban/rural as possible (whereas currently I'd like to be more urban). I might be in favor of less policing if it came after we had better services for the homeless & mentally ill.

Not claiming my viewpoint is morally or practically correct, only trying to give a better view of my perspective. I'm sure views on the police differ greatly by group membership (I am likely biased by police having low suspicion of me by default; I am also ~never going to "win" a physical interaction without backup.)

Could you expand on where & why we differ?

Qualified immunity as a concept is necessary in some cases. You don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. All you need is comprehensive and codified rules to prohibit certain police behaviors.

Miranda rights are a good example. Police don't get qualified immunity for violating Miranda Rights because they are codified.

Separating it Internal Affairs and police investigations under a different organization seems like a no-brainer. This would remove conflicts of interest.

The kind of person who is unwilling to be a cop without qualified immunity is 100% not the person who should be allowed to be a cop.

No other job in the US, including ones that can cause negligent death and send you to prison, has qualified immunity. If a cop can't do their job without breaking the law, something is very wrong with the law or their job description.

>dangerous, low-paid job

It is not even remotely either of these. Cops die less on the job than sanitation workers. Most cop deaths (excluding when covid was the primary cause) are caused by car accidents. Is the police union attempting to stop car chases which have shown to be dangerous and ineffective?

I think "the kind of person unwilling to be a doctor without [some level of] protection from medical malpractice lawsuits shouldn't be qualified to be a doctor" would be false - there's a lot of reasons someone might want protection from constant litigation in a high-stakes job, even if they are trying to do it well. What do you see as the key difference between doctors & cops here? Other jobs don't have qualified immunity per se (except other governmental jobs), but there are plenty of jobs with specific licensing/insurance that seems to be trying to do something similar.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Police and sheriff's patrol officers and transit and railroad police have some of the highest rates of injuries and illnesses of all occupations."[0] It's certainly not the deadliest job, but I'm guessing it is vastly overrepresented in deaths & injuries compared to most jobs (and many potential officers' next best option).

In 2021 police & detectives in the U.S. had a median wage of ~$66k[1], lower than the national median of ~$71k[2]. Again, not the worst paid by far, but below median.

Obviously a lot of this depends on location; different areas have vastly different crime rates, and police in a wealthy suburb probably are very well-off compared to the night shift in inner cities.

Police work is far from the worst job you can get, but it still seems harder than a lot of (most?) other work. Though I don't feel qualified to make a subjective comparison to other jobs of similar pay & starting requirements.

I'm not sure what you mean by police unions trying to stop car chases. Presumably chasing criminals through sometimes-dangerous situations so they don't get away is a core part of the job description?

[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detect... [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/protective-service/police-and-detect... [2] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...

Probably pretty low!

Fear is often not a rational experience, though. Interacting with American cops has become scary, and thus we don't have a ton of people doing what this guy is doing.

I think in this case fear is a pretty rational response considering that police could rob, rape, or murder you and would likely face zero consequences for it even if it were all caught on camera.

Do you really believe that that's true? That a cop can rape someone on camera and the likely outcome is no consequences?

Honestly yes. Obviously there's a lot of disparity in how video evidence of crimes committed by police are handled. Some officers do get charged and convicted, some get fired with no charges brought, others voluntarily retire, and some only get paid vacations before they're cleared of all wrong doing, but considering how often police have gotten away with outright executing people on video, is it really so hard to imagine it isn't happening with rape?

What I can say is that I haven't seen the footage of police raping someone shown by the news (with the exception of Daniel Wilkey - https://youtu.be/90UuIJkeZYg), and I imagine that many victims would object to that footage going public. I think it's reasonable to conclude that rape is less likely to be filmed (by police, victims, or bystanders) in the first place and more likely to go unreported entirely than the beatings and murders we usually see footage of.

Still, we know that police do rape people.

Personally, even things like this are terrifyingly dystopian:

https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/06/justice/new-mexico-search-law...

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2020/09/2...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/19/syracuse-...

But there's at least some thin excuse for why that should be allowed. We've also seen cops caught who ended up with a long list of victims and/or a history of complaints.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/maryland-cop-arrested-custody-koh...

https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2019/may/13/desmond-loga...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/11/us/tennessee-deputy-danie...

https://www.wdrb.com/news/fourth-woman-files-lawsuit-accusin...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/09/23/roger-...

https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/hempstead-village...

I'd like to think that today things are slowly getting better and that if a video was released which clearly showed police raping someone at least something would be done about it, but I really don't have any reason to think that police would get away with rape any less often than they do murder.

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