Hacker News Reader

Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

Why such needless arrogance from cops in a developed country like US? They for sure couldn't be following some written law, right?

I mean that's not even pretending to 'protect and serve', unless we change subject from 'citizens' to 'ourselves'. I would expect such stories from say Russia or some parts of Africa, not champion of free world.

View on HN

There’s a lot of sordid history around the police being used to keep certain ethnic groups in line (heavily but not just black people - one of the more interesting shifts was how Irish immigrants went from being over-policed to comprising large fractions of many forces), but then the war on drugs really hardened things into a relationship more like an occupying military force. That coincided with many cops joining white flight to the suburbs, meaning that they didn’t feel part of the cities where they served as had been the case a generation earlier, and the lurid tales of how violent & well-armed drug gangs were along with how dangerous “super predators” were lead to a lot of quasi-military weaponry and tactics becoming routine with quaint things like warrants being severely undermined. I say quasi-military because I’ve known multiple combat vets to express disbelief at the poor discipline shown by cops compared to the rules they had in places like Fallujah.

The other big driver was the concept of qualified immunity and civil forfeiture. The modern form of the latter was invented during the drug war and formally embraced by the Reagan administration as a way to make elevated police presence self-funding, and that opened up a lot of room for abuse since it created huge conflicts of interest and the growth of qualified immunity removed the potential counterbalance of personal accountability.

>people - one of the more interesting shifts was how Irish immigrants went from being over-policed to comprising large fractions of many forces

Can you tell how this came to be?

There are a couple of different things coming together but the big one is that while they were first considered degenerates, criminal, drunks, etc. they weren’t denied all of the legal status whiteness offered. As states removed the property requirements, allowing all white men to vote, the large groups of Irish immigrants voted cohesively enough to become very influential in a lot of cities – helpfully around the same time that booming cities needed professional police & fire departments, creating a ton of civil servant jobs which did not require formal certifications or uncommon skills. Once a few people from a tightly-knit community get in more will follow, and the Irish tended to be more insular as Catholics in a Protestant country.

The persecution of the Irish was a leftover of the British's attempted cultural eradication of celtic and Catholic identities. British media often portrayed the Irish as violent and backwards, and the living conditions the British enforced often made the stereotypes seem true. After the Eiri Amach of 1798 and Irish Potato Famine of 1845 there were two waves of large immigration of Irish farmers, fisherman, and sailors to Boston and New York. These former farmers, fisherman, and sailors were extremely unfamiliar with many of the job types available in the heavily industrialized cities and struggled to find employment they couldn't form for themselves. As a result high levels of unemployment and street crime were part of American Irish life in cities in the 1850s and 1860s, leading to them being seen as troublemakers and being heavily targeted by city patrolmen.

By the 1870s a large portion had left through Pennsylvania to settle in the Appalachian Mountains, and many more were pushing further west to work on the rail lines. As they were often paired up with the Chinese and German migrant workers they were distrusted and weren't easily integrated into heavily English, French, and Italian descended communities that settled along the developing railroads, continuing the reputation of the Irish being supposed troublemakers.

However back in the major east coast cities the Irish who stayed were successfully carving out their own districts thanks to the enforced isolation from other ethnic groups, allowing them to form almost vertical control of the political process from individual home to district level. To ensure this control wasn't ceded as the cities grew and to prevent the return of the abuse of the 1850s, rising political institutions like Tammany Hall heavily encouraged first and second generation Irish immigrants to perform enforcement instead, leading to Irish descendants taking positions as everything from police officers to prosecutors. By the 1910s this push meant that as many as one in five police officers in New York and Boston was either an Irishman, the child of an Irishman, or the grandchild of an Irishman.

It's always Reagan. The poison seed of a human being that rotted America.

Protect and serve hasn’t been a thing for a long time. Police have been trained that no one or anything is worth dying for.

That’s why cops go and hide during mass shootings at schools.

Its never been the thing they want you to think it is. It was coined by an extremely racist LAPD officer

Do you have a source showing that Joseph Dorobek was extremely racist? I can't seem to find anything about him being racist. I saw one article which said that according to Dorobek's granddaughter it was coined by her mother who was 17 at the time, and he submitted her idea as part of a contest to find a motto

They mostly are not, but with 300 million people and free press you hear about the exceptions. If you think your country doesn't have simialar problems you are not paying attention.

  > you are not paying attention.

Or it just isn't being discussed. I'd expect to hear fewer of these stories in Russia because they don't have a free press and you can be punished for what you say online.

I'm sure this is what you mean, but not everyone is going to understand what that phrase means.

It happens enough (20 years ago, at least) that a short-term visitor like myself actually saw (but happily didn't experience) multiple examples of cops abusing people (beatings, mostly). The completely oblivious reaction of the crowds around these incidents spoke volumes more; it was clear that nobody wanted to attract any attention.

Cops in the USA are social tech support. They exist to protect the social and economic status quo, and to close out trouble tickets that come in over the phone. Protecting and serving aren’t in the job description, practically or even legally.

Ive had a bunch of run ins with cops and, to me, they just seem like guys who have a job thats annoying. I didn't get a big "classist conspiracy" vibe.

Your head not being on a pike/your continued breathing is also part of that 'economic and social status quo'. I think we can agree then that 'economic and political status quo' is thus a uselessly vague term.

I recommend not believing everything you read on the Internet. In a country with 330 million people, a one-in-a-million event happens often enough to be a regular fixture in the news. And it gets clicks every time, reliably.

It should be up to the legislators and justice to limit cops power, and punish them when appropriate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com