Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I'm not making a normative claim about what your best strategy is to protect yourself from a police investigation, but rather a positive claim about ordinary people's attitudes towards the police, which are not (gesturing towards this thread) this.

View on HN

Meanwhile I’ve spent way too much time around people in real life on both sides of the isle that absolutely loathed the police.

The general attitude seems extremely positively correlated with income, and the average American isn’t particularly well off.

The biggest complaint working class families on the west side of Chicago have about the police is that they're never around when they're needed.

Which is significantly less of a concern in wealthy areas. When fines are meaningless and police plentiful people’s attitude changes.

I'm not talking about wealthy areas. I'm talking about working class areas, where residents complain (loudly and often) that there aren't enough police. There's a common online meme --- you didn't say it but you can feel it in the air on this thread --- that working class people see themselves in solidarity with people who commit property crime. That idea is really quite offensive, in addition to being dead wrong: in fact, the logic you're using here is much more potent with respect to crime, because working class people can't absorb e.g. the loss of their car with the ease that you and I can.

Complaining about not enough police is still people being unhappy with the police force. I’ve heard people complaining about them eating donuts in such environments, you don’t hear that as much in rich areas because they have plenty of police and you see them everywhere. I remember talking with a friend about how many cops there where and then at the next 4 way intersection and seeing a cop car going in every direction.

Thus the line from poor < working < middle < upper classes with satisfaction generally increasing with wealth.

I don’t know, as someone firmly in the top 0.1% of taxpayers, most cops seem gleefully unaware of their place in life.

But perhaps that just reflects the public/private split when it comes to quality of services

Okay, but "never talk to the police" is a normative statement, not a descriptive statement, so your contrast of it with a people's attitudes towards police is kind of apples and oranges.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com