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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

> It shouldn't be too much to ask to have the cops arrest the criminals and not the bystanders.

Have you ever met a cop before? The only disincentive to arresting more people is a bit of paperwork, and the whole court system is stacked against the arrested unless they can afford non-court-appointed lawyers to pave their way. Guilt-by-association doesn't magically disappear from the psyche when handing someone power and a gun, rather it gets easier to apply indiscriminately because it's very hard for people to oppose the one with authority over their freedom and state-sanctioned license to be violent.

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> The only disincentive to arresting more people is a bit of paperwork

This is indeed a problem in which the police are, essentially, breaking the law. The question is, how do we fix it?

The intuitive answer would be to impose penalties on cops who arrest people without cause. Which sounds great, until you consider the incentive it gives them to commit perjury and falsify evidence in order to avoid the penalty. So what else you got?

One possibility is to have better cops. Right now we need a lot of cops who are willing to get into shootouts with gangs and wrestle amped up meth cooks to the ground, which attracts a certain type of person to the profession, and not really the ones we might want. If we were to end the War on Drugs and thereby put all the drug dealers out of business because they can't compete with Walmart's pharmacy, the people you attract to a profession that is no longer so steeped in violence might be of a different kind.

I feel like you are the one who has never met a cop in a situation you were not a suspect , if you have and expouse publicly, that opinion.

What makes you feel that? The post you responded to makes complete sense and reflects countless instances of police brutality directed towards individual peaceful protestors.

Here's just one example out of literally countless examples of police brutality directed towards individual peaceful protestors: https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/08/29/nypd-cop-pepper-spray-blm...

Ironically (but unsurprisingly), this example of wanton and indiscriminate police brutality was the police response to protests against wanton and indiscriminate police brutality.

> this example of wanton and indiscriminate police brutality was the police response to protests against wanton and indiscriminate police brutality.

Actually probably not. Judging from them holding their hands up, their protest are probably motivated by the "hands up, don't shoot" hoax, based on a false claim that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot by the policeman. In reality, Michael Brown was not a victim of the indiscriminate police brutality, but rather repeatedly attacked a police officer and tried to relieve him of his weapon (no doubt out of mere peaceful curiosity). The whole "hands up" narrative has been invented later and distributed by the media, and had no basis in fact. One may notice here that while police brutality is indeed an existing and reprehensible thing, a lot of cases of "indiscriminate police brutality" touted by the press, after proper examination, turn out not to be so.

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