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Comment by HideousKojima | Hacker News Reader

>You and I (as innocent people) are more likely to be affected by bad police behavior than the few bad people themselves and so we support the bad people going free.

I know anecdotes aren't data, but my only negative interactions with cops have basically been for traffic tickets. Meanwhile my negative interactions with criminals have been far more numerous, along with several second-order effects caused by their mere existence (like not going to certain neighborhoods at night because of high crime rates). I don't think there's ever been a neighborhood law abiding citizens had to avoid because of fear of cops.

Maybe I'm some kind of crazy outlier, but I'm pretty sure that most innocent people are the same.

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> I don't think there's ever been a neighborhood law abiding citizens had to avoid because of fear of cops.

I think there's a fair number of stories of POC be accosted by police officers because they were in a neighborhood they didn't "belong" in, so your statement is likely inaccurate.

The threat to innocent people posed by incompetent or tyrannical police is arguably much greater than by ordinary criminality.

In small towns across America, corrupt police departments hassle outsiders and issue minor citations as a way to generate revenue. If someone is found to have large amounts of cash for some reason, they often will confiscate it in a process called civil forefeiture. Many US police officers act with impunity because their misconduct will be protected by local prosecutors and judges. There absolutely are towns and neighborhoods good people should avoid because of the police.

Dan White shot the mayor and a supervisor in cold blood and confessed everything to the cops. They managed to stop him from spilling out his premeditation on tape by interrupting him as his confession was getting rolling and the DA failed to win the easiest conviction of his career. The cops then went on a spree of beating people gratuitously in the Castro.

Cops aren't there to enforce the law without fear or favor. They routinely engage in petty corruption and complain when they have to be professional when on duty.

There is a reality distortion field in existence now because almost every police interaction is recorded (body cams are everywhere nowadays) and the ones that go bad are put on full blast across social media and the news, despite them being somewhere on the order of 1 in 1,000,000 encounters.

Seriously, if car accidents were reported like police accidents, we probably would have been forced by confused ideologues to ban automobiles 2 years ago.

Given that they're over 100 deaths a day in the US (as of 2022), we probably should consider car accidents more than we do.

(But they pretty much do report on them consistently on local news... People won't stop driving because the social benefit is so large).

That’s called luck.

Personally I’m a cis white male, who’s been a mostly law abiding citizen, and I’ve had dozens of poor interactions with police throughout my life. Additionally I have a probably unusual number of family and friends who work in law enforcement. The stories I’ve heard about co-workers from them are absolutely terrifying. My father’s (retired police officer) advice when I became a teenager was “only call the police when what is about to happen is worse than going to jail.”

I deeply respect the difficulty of the profession and don’t believe that all or even most police are bad people, but there are way too many who have no business being in that profession.

Honest question: are you white?

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