To clarify, you're stating that "Don't talk to the police" is an "extremely online belief"? Or were you referencing the dating portion of the comment?
I don't even know what to do with the "never date police officers" thing. Most police officers are married. It's a shift-work job, so they have high divorce rates, but they just remarry.
They have also unusually high domestic violence rates. That is where the bit comes from.
The factors police have and firemen dont are a.) victim not being able to go to police, cause those are his buddies b.) training teaches cops to take and keep charge (escalating aggression until compliance is acquired).
The question in my mind is what people are expecting? What do they think this proves? Policing is a conflict focused job that involves violence so I wouldnt expect it to be the same as baseline to begin with.
I would caution against "just so" explainations. There are obviously lots of complex reasons and one can speculate a lot of stories one way or another.
Because of this, police officers should have plenty of experience (and training, but let's limit this to the US) with de-escalation and proportional response. The domestic violence rates should be lower among police wrt the general populace for that reason alone.
do you mean they should be lower as a normative claim or postive claim? It is clearly flase as a positive claim, if the police domestic violence studies done in the 90's are still accurate.
Police are not soldiers nor executioners. Where does this fantasy come from that they are somehow "trained to kill"? Copaganda shows, I guess?
Try growing up poor and see how your perspective changes on the police.
There are multiple examples of prominent law professors bringing in ex-police professionals who all say the exact same thing: never talk to the police. If you spend five minutes around a lawyer they will say the same thing. If you ever end up finding yourself in legal turmoil it is the very first thing a lawyer will directly advise you to do.
People being stupid I don't think suddenly makes this advice terminally online. I was hearing it, in person, when I was in college over a decade ago.
I've read threads here where people have made impassioned arguments that you yourself should never volunteer information to the police investigating a crime such as a hit and run. The police will turn it against you and somehow make you the target of their investigation! Ordinary people out in the world do not think that way, and you will not succeed in making them think that way by showing them videos of lawyers explaining why the only thing you should ever say is "I do not consent to any searches and will not answer any of your questions".
If you said that to a police officer doing a canvass in my neighborhood, people would look at you like a space alien.
I think it's helpful to understand all this stuff when reading things about Flock. People on HN and in activist communities seem gobsmacked that all the Flock cameras haven't been taken down yet (in fact: ALPR deployments are growing, not shrinking). But they have wildly different priors about policing than the median resident of a muni with ALPR cameras.
Yes, that is why they don't do it. It does not mean the advice is "terminally online". It is the advice coming from layers that deal with the system.
Layers saying those things, online and offline, are not terminally online.
And I will also claim that layers have way less distorted view of the system then us, people whose view of the system is based on movies and rare cases that hit the news.
Though: the validity of "nobody should ever talk to the police" is highly disputable. It assumes the only objective anybody would have in a police encounter is not being prosecuted. Prosecution is unlikely, and there are other important objectives.
Not that its always benign to do in cases like this, you can easily talk yourself into becoming a person of interest. Especially true if the officer happens to have a 'bad day' or is a bad apple, you can't really tell because the police keeps employing these people. An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
Not true, the context I have seen it very much included being a witness who is not a person of interest to the police. It especially explicitly included that situation.
> An example I saw a woman went into the station to provide a video from their phone as evidence of some event and ending up getting taken to the ground in the lobby and arrested for resisting arrest or some bullshit. All because the officer tried to snatch the phone out of her hand without saying anything and then used her keeping hold of the phone as a reason for assaulting her.
That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.
Even without context, its good advice. By talking to them you might even be confessing to some crime that you didn't even know exist.
>That is egregious abuse of power. The layers I have in mind were not explicitly mentioning that high level of lawlessness from the police.
That's the entire point. This idealized version of the police you seem to have, maybe some European countries come close it due to their requirements on officers and training, is not reality. Departments allow officers that act like this to resign so they can move to a different department.
The general attitude seems extremely positively correlated with income, and the average American isn’t particularly well off.
Thus the line from poor < working < middle < upper classes with satisfaction generally increasing with wealth.
But perhaps that just reflects the public/private split when it comes to quality of services
This is a deeply masculine take, Zuck would be proud.
This is such a widely known problem, I’m really surprised you’re not familiar with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officer-involved_domestic_viol...
“Never date a cop” is very common advice women will give to each other, has nothing to do with politics or being excessively online.