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Comment by wyldberry | Hacker News Reader

The ability for hacker news commenters to grossly over-simplify and misrepresent things like this is unparalleled. Just like it takes all folks to make a village, it also takes those folks to do some missions that police forces have. The problem is when the culture of a police force is all of one type. There, however, is value in having people appear strong to those who would take advantage if weakness is detected. Today's punisher skull is yesteryear's ceremonial armor and masks.

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Nothing we need done requires a punisher skull bully with an inferiority complex intimidating citizens.

Nothing we need done requires .... intimidating citizens.

Until you need SWAT to kick in a door with actual murderers on the other end. Really until you need violence to contain violence.

Then you get into the real questions: in their day-to-day interactions such as issuing citations are they intimidating citizens with behavior or their appearance? I've known several Military folks who later became police (and had significantly better escalation of force training from the military) who looked fierce but were big softies most days. No better friend, but no worse enemy and all.

Yeah man I literally know two dozen cops and almost every single one is a racist coward who gets off on bullying people they have power over. That's what the punisher skulls are for.

The murderers behind a door thing sound scary tho, how often do you think that happens? Vs like every other encounter the 700k american cops do each day? Also uh, uvalde? maine? Seems like we might be optimizing for the wrong thing here and also it doesn't even work.

Ah, giraffe_lady again. No, that's objectively not what the Punisher skulls are for. People don't slap a Punisher skull on their truck and say "alright, how many minorities can I oppress today." At least not the overwhelming majority.

The Punisher skull is a statement that they believe in vigilantism, not the rule of law, to the point where the guy who created the character condemned police officers who do it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190116204016/https://www.syfy....

What does objectively mean to you?

Ultimately the government always needs to have the biggest guns to maintain a monopoly on violence. Otherwise the government ceases to exist as competing organizations eventually start taking over.

Instead of arming the police force to the teeth, how about reducing access to weapons? It just seems completely insane that civilians have access to powerful weaponry, making it necessary for the police force to engage in an arms race with the public.

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