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Comment by getstowly | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why more police agencies aren't being super careful with this stuff, especially if they're being sent to a house / location where no other crimes have been reported. It would be one thing if you have a call to a house that's had domestic violence calls, other shootings, etc. Instead, they're just getting a call and thinking, "Oh no! Danger!" and running in, guns blazing. I love the protection from the police but sometimes I'm afraid they don't think intelligently and instead just react.

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A lot of police departments in the US pay to send their officers to seminars where speakers tell them that they’re Literally Warriors. Cops with Punisher tattoos aren’t being ironic, they think about finishing a shift of playing Temple Run on their phones like catching the last helicopter out of Saigon.

This is currently down-voted to gray for me, but it's a pretty well-documented phenomenon.

To anyone unfamiliar with the concept of warrior cops, it may behoove you to start with the following Harvard Law Review article: https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-128/law-enforcements-...

A lot of them _want_ to be able to go in guns blazing and not having to be careful. They're living out a Warrior fantasy.

Many people have fantasies like that, where a thief (hopefully without a gun) invades their home, and they use their gun collection to heroically "neutralize" the invader and defend their kingdom without legal consequences.

These are the kind of people who shoud be strongly filtered out from jobs that require carrying firearms. They could enlist as infantry in whatever invasion USA is doing that year, but they're actually scared of guns if they can fire back.

> They could enlist as infantry in whatever invasion USA is doing that year, but they're actually scared of guns if they can fire back.

The irony is that soldiers in the US military are usually better trained than the cops, and aren't going to magdump when an acorn hits their patrol car.

If you just hire cowards or regular people you end up with uvalde. You need crazy people who run into gunfire sometimes.

The best police force is a mixed bag of talents and skills.

>I don't understand why more police agencies aren't being super careful with this stuff

Honestly, having been on a jury, police seem super intellectually uncurious and I suspect that is true at all levels. Since they mostly end up with not being responsible legally, they really don't care.

Why would they? What downside do they face? Cops get paid bonuses for raiding houses, they get bonuses for seizing money and valuable goods, they get bonuses for charging people with crimes. While they face almost zero consequences for abusing and extorting people, can lie with impunity, and often even get away with straight up cold blooded murder. Corruption within their organization is almost completely ignored and they hire people based on how sociopathic and unempathetic they are and enforce those traits in "training" even more because harsh draconian enforcement brings in the largest amount of money for cops and courts.

Unless you live in a community where the median income is $200K+, the primary funding for cops is through charging people with the easy crimes that they can't afford lawyers to fight, often drugs because they have massively inflated fines and fees. And the next best source of funding they have is special grants and programs which are often doles out based on how "dangerous" an area is, and killing "criminals" makes an area seem more dangerous and deserving of special funds and recognition and fancy armaments and killing toys.

They aren't being super careful because there's no cost to being careless.

you had me until "I love the protection from the police"

my whole life police done nothing else than harassed me by their various actions instead of improving my life and making it safer

so I would love some protection from the police, but all I am getting is harassment

Some protection!

In San Francisco the cop cars don't say "To serve and protect" they say "Safety with respect" lmfao

cuts to 6 cops beating a guy with clubs

IIRC "To serve and protect" was originally from a movie. Cops don't have a duty to protect you, and there in fact many cases of a cop not intervening during a violent crime due to concerns for their own safety, even when the asailant only had a knife.

> "To Serve and Protect," is a phrase made famous by the Los Angeles Police Department and adopted, in various forms, by law enforcement agencies across the United States.

https://www.policemag.com/articles/to-serve-and-protect-v2

> In February 1955, the Los Angeles Police Department, through the pages of the internally produced BEAT magazine, conducted a contest for a motto for the police academy. The conditions of the contest stated that: “The motto should be one that in a few words would express some or all the ideals to which the Los Angeles police service is dedicated. It is possible that the winning motto might someday be adopted as the official motto of the Department.”

> The winning entry was the motto, “To Protect and to Serve” submitted by Officer Joseph S. Dorobek.

> On November 4, 1963, the Los Angeles City Council passed the necessary ordinance and the credo has now been placed alongside the City Seal on the Department’s patrol cars.

https://www.lapdonline.org/lapd-motto/

I don't know what film you're referring to, but it's been a motto since the 50's, and made official since the 60's.

Huh, yeah you're right. I swear I remember hearing about this on an NPR radio piece about how police really don't need to do anything to protect you.

Police are under no legal obligation to protect you.

That's because the Supreme Court has ruled that police have no constitutional duty to protect citizens.

Special note: that includes cases where protective orders like restraining orders are concerned. The Castle Rock v. Gonzales ruling specifically states that police have no obligation to enforce them.

We could easily create a duty at the state or local level if we wanted to. The US Constitution is pretty silent on a lot of issues that are remanded to the states.

They got rid of the clubs since Rodney thing in the 90s. They were much safer IMHO. Bruised but alive!

A mere concuss is never sus!

Maybe a little blood and puss.

Don’t be a wuss![1]

[1] This rhyme only works in certain dialects of British English. For most English speakers, it won’t. It’s a bit like that Nickelback song Never Made It As A Wise Man when he rhymes “story” with “sorry”. Nickelback didn’t realize he developed a moat, an uncompetitive advantage, and nobody would be able to sing his wonderful songs. Nobody, except him.

There is something like 50 million police-public encounters annually. Stuff like this is exceedingly rare.

So while Pima PD should be held responsible, and those cops should face criminal charges, it's logically non-nonsensical for this to make you terrified of police (or the other 5-10 similar stories annually). I mean cars are genocidal military dictators by comparison.

The downstream effect of this is people doing incredibly rash and stupid things because they think the cops are just going to start blasting them during a traffic stop ("I need to shot them/run away because I am dead anyway").

There are hundreds of billions of person-to-person encounters annually and almost all of them end just fine, yet people feel the need to:

1. Come up with a beautiful story about how they need to have guns to defend themselves.

2. Come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who improperly uses violence in such encounters.

Encountering a cop is one of the most dangerous 'mundane' things that can happen to you. ~One in 50,000 encounters ends with someone dead.

Going on 50,000 drives is unlikely to send you to the morgue.

You need to control for situations where the person on the other side is trying to kill the police.

It's something like 1000 people killed by police annually, but it's childishly dishonest (or ignorant) to ignore that ~995 of those are people actively trying to kill the police.

I wouldn't call shooting out your back window because you're getting pulled over "mundane".

Also, if each drive is ~20 miles, you have around a 1% chance of dying. That's 500x greater than even the dishonest 1 in 50k stat. Just further driving my point home for me, thanks.

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