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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

It's a US cultural thing to either avoid blaming the police for anything, or make excuses for them. Brutal police behavior is seen as either acceptable, or what even desirable. I've seen reddit posts where a protester slightly taunts the police and gets pepper sprayed in the face, and all the commenters were gleefully saying things like "fuck around and find out", without even thinking that maybe there wasn't enough fucking around to warrant any finding out.

When you try and point this out, you're called various names, because apparently you either support the police 100%, or you're a criminal.

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Exactly this.

There's no fixing the system when there is no onus on the police to act like they care. They enter a home that was a victim of swatting and kill everyone? Tough luck, "it's part of the job", "we told them to stand down and they didn't", "we couldn't risk the life of the first responders".

There's always a reason as to why police violence is fine. Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.

> Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.

Well, it's not. Even here, the function of the police is to enforce the will of the state, not to protect people. The protection is a side-effect of the enforcement, but enforcement can also be things like terrorizing minorities.

I'm pretty sure there are a number of people in the US who don't support the police in any way at all. There was a whole song a few years ago called Fuck the police, I'm pretty sure.

It's like sweeping categorizations of an entire country are usually not accurate or something.

That song was released in 1988 by NWA, a hip hop group from Compton, California.

I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think that song was colored by their experiences with the notoriously corrupt LAPD of the 1980s.

I live in America and while I have compassion for some individual cops, I hate them as a whole with a burning passion. I know lots of people that feel this way. It’s almost like social media comments sections are not an accurate representation of a population or something.

> I'm pretty sure there are a number of people in the US who don't support the police in any way at all.

Yes, this is so trivially true of any place that it's not worth mentioning, as generalizations are meant as just that: Something that a majority (or at least a large minority) are like. For example, people do say "people in the US speak English", even though there's a number of people that don't. This doesn't make the generalization any less useful than "Americans like baseball" or "Americans wear shoes around the house".

I grew up in a small town and was on the wrong side of law enforcement (sometimes rightfully -- underage drinking, etc., nothing that serious -- but oftentimes not) around 2 dozen times between 16/17 and 21 when I got the fuck out of that town. I haven't so much as spoken to an on-duty cop in over 20 years. To this day I still get nervous when I see a police car. They earned their image problems and they haven't even begun to try to correct it. Even if they started tomorrow, it would still take them decades to fix it. I'm not hopeful that any meaningful change in policing in the US will take place in my lifetime.

And, for anyone who isn't reading between the lines here, without a doubt I'm only so lucky as to avoid their attention today because I made it and have spent the last 2 decades living in nice neighborhoods and driving nice cars.

I've also seen reddit posts where the cop did everything right and people still criticized.

Cop didn't do everything right. A cop who does everything right leaves the force.

The only time I’ve seen police use pepper spray or aggression are when the protesters become violent. Do a YouTube search for Antifa protesters and tell me who the violent people are again?

I see news stories like this all the time: https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/caron-nazario-army-lieutenant-...

The first thing that came to mind:

https://www.kxan.com/investigations/everything-we-know-about...

I saw countless similar videos of cops violently attacking -- often with permanent, life-altering results -- people who were exercising their constitutional rights or simply minding their own business.

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