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Comment by ElevenLathe | Hacker News Reader

Unless we change the law, selective enforcement is the default. Courts have found again and again that cops have effectively no responsibility to even try to do their job. They can enforce what they want, and ignore what they don't.

So the question isn't: "Should we take away the tools these cops use to serve the public?" but "Should we give even more powerful surveillance tools to a group of unaccountable thugs who routinely abuse what they already have?"

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When I was younger, in the summer, when I had a (very dark) tan and worked a night job which involved my driving around at odd hours I would get pulled over once or twice each summer for pretty flimsy reasons which equated to me matching the profile of the sort of person the police officer in question felt should be stopped/questioned.

It should be a quick bit of data work for records to be made of such stops based on duty logs (sans personally identifying information) and compare it to actual arrest/conviction rates to verify that at a minimum the perception of the police match reality. If they don't, then the local community should exert a suitable oversight to adjust police procedure.

The arrest/conviction generally follow the pulled over stopped rates. It's pretty hard to arrest/convict people you aren't stopping. These types of biases and stereo types are often pervasive within certain groups of people, including law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, and often the subset of the local community in power. If you've ever been to court (even traffic court) you'll find the word of the officer is given tremendous weight, while the word of the defendant is almost totally marginalized (no matter what your race). Even though you are "presumed innocent", the defendant has a natural incentive to lie and the officer presumably doesn't.

To top that off there is almost no "suitable oversight" of any police departments in the US of any kind, let alone by the community.

There really are no simple solutions to this, even places not plagued by bigotry and racism have major structural power problems for the average citizen.

I didn't say this was a solution or that the problem has a simple solution, but pretty much any solution needs to start with community involvement and community oversight seems a useful component to consider.

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