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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

The police exists to protect capital, not regular folks like us.

I think sweeping statements like this might seem fair in the context of this article, but are actually harmful to democracy.

A fundamental right in liberal societies, for better or worse, is that of property rights. Yes, some people have a large amount of property so police will try to protect that large amount of property, but the police will also protect your property. More generally, police will protect you if you someone tries to physically attack you. We shouldn’t take this for granted since autocratic regimes care much less about these principles and will take away your property or physically harm you if they feel like it.

To say that the police will protect you is not accurate. The police are a preventative institution. They try to maintain order and reduce the incidence of crimes and act as a deterrent for those who would otherwise commit a crime. But they aren't a condom around violence. If somebody wants to hurt you, they can, and you're mostly on your own. They will only be brought in to investigate the case later, and maybe catch the perpetrator. It is kind of funny how we Europeans are brought up with this illusion of safety, believing that the police are some kind of superhero characters that will spring to action the second before we get knifed or shot.

In the US there are tens of thousands of violent criminals in prison. The police were integral to many of those investigations or arrests.

Please look at the proportion of Americans in prison compared to the rest of the world, then realize that the rest of the world manages to maintain law and order without holding 25% of the entire world's prison population

Stupid comparison. To dramatically reduce our prison population would mean releasing tens of thousands of very violent black men into poor black communities. Europe has tons of low level violence and intimidation that they punish with EXTREMELY short sentences. They would be much better off with a lot larger number of people in prison.

> how we Europeans are brought up with this illusion of safety

That's not exclusive to Europeans. But also - many Europeans aren't particularly fond of this delusion.

The illusion of safety prevents people getting armed to their teeth and as such participate to their safety.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=07o-TASvIxY

Yep, most people forget this fact. Police is explicitly there to protect property.

Sometimes they do protect people, but that is typically an exception

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