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Comment by sabarn01 | Hacker News Reader

People get killed in the process of enforcing laws. All laws are eventually enforce by violence and that violence kills people. The state house rep who wanted to tax cigarettes didn't mean to have Eric Gardner killed but given a large number of police encounters it was bound to happen.

The way police responded to 2020 was to pull back because in general its a numbers game. Given enough encounters bad outcomes will happen. Pulling back plus the insanity of 2020 caused a rise in crime. Police are starting to reengage and crime is starting to go down.

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Very weird retelling of the events surrounding Eric Gardner's death. The riots weren't because cops were arresting him, they weren't even surrounding the fact he died. The riots were about the fact that you had 3 cops choking him to death even after they already had him subdued while he repeatedly tried to say he couldn't breathe and given the history of cop killings, all 3 were going to walk away with no repercussions.

If I write enough code, bugs are going to happen but when bugs happen we have a review and triage the issue, yet when cops kill people suggesting that they need better training or more oversight is suddenly an insane proposal.

They need tons more training but no one wants to pay for that. We underfund police compared to other OECD nations. We also have a much more dangerous environment for them to operate in.

The individual actions are terrible and every effort should be leveraged to reduce thoes outliers but they will still occur. In 2020 we as a society to put a lot less emphasis on enforcing social order and that causes crime.

> They need tons more training but no one wants to pay for that.

No one agrees on what type of training they need.

> We underfund police compared to other OECD nations.

This is just not true. The US spends 32 billion dollars on policing[0] while the UK spends 433 million euros[1]. Even if adjusted for PPP that still massively puts the US ahead.

[0] https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/2023-doj-budget-highl...

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-funding-for-...

They increased funding by 433 million

£15,877 million in police funding for England and Wales has been agreed for the financial year ending March 2022 overall funding has increased nominally by £433m (2.8%) compared with the previous financial year

My mistake I read that number wrong. The most recent number I can find is that during the 2022-2023 budget year, the UK spent around 25 billion pounds which puts them closer to the US when compared in USD but still under. Which begs the question, what do you consider well-funded?

So per capita the UK spends more than 4x as much?

No. The number I quoted is how much the US spends federally on funding the DOJ. It does not include state and local budgets.

Its about 190B which is about on par so I was wrong. From my experience with friends who are LEO they get about 1 week of training a year which isn't enough.

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