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Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

msisto, you appear to be hellbanned.

> I remember being at a basement show in Allston when I was 18 that was broken up by the cops and thinking "This is so fucking cool". I mean, it's a pain in the ass and sucks for the bands. It can totally ruin your night, but for me it totally fanned the flames and made me love it even more.

> What this article doesn't mention is that the cop who was using the Lemmingtrail board to find out about house shows kept posting even after being outed, eventually being somewhat-ironically accepted into the community. I regularly saw him at shows after he'd been exposed and he was always friendly.

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It's hard being a cop who is into punk and going to one of these shows. For some reason, everyone hates you even though you're just there for the music. (Source: my cop hardcore punk friends in south florida)

Being a police officer isn't a job that you can just take off.... if you are willing to be an agent of state violence, don't be surprised when people who have problems with that situation have issues with you personally.

So all cops are 'agents of state violence'?

Just like all developers are 'evil hackers'.

If people realistically want the situation to get better, they need to embrace the 'good' police officers, rather than automatically ostracizing all police officers equally. Many still really do want to improve their communities.

Probably OP was using "state violence" in its sense as part of a socio/political theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

There's always been a strong connection between punk subculture and anarchist thinking (which is specifically opposed to this type of "legitimate violence"), so its actually a somewhat reasonable thing to bring up.

>So all cops are 'agents of state violence'?

Yes. That's what law enforcement is by definition. Non compliance results in (eventual) violence, regardless of the severity of the crime.

P.S. Nice edit. Both "hacker" and "cop" carry some negative connotations without the qualifying "evil" in front of it.

I added 'evil' because particularly in this community, the connotation of 'hacker' is not necessarily negative. Many here esteem hackers as people who get things done by taking cleverly manipulating the system, or, alternatively, value results over process (I'd actually really appreciate a proper neutral definition of the term).

You're somehow conflating developer and lawbreaker in an effort to explain how cops are something other than agents of state violence. It's a strange argument.

Non-compliance is a provocation of violence, so naturally it results in violence. It's the price we pay to have a society.

That depends entirely on the law being infringed. Society could do with a lot fewer of them as a whole.

There is nothing "natural" about it.

It comes naturally to a lot of people.

Nowadays police will apply force regardless, and retroactively claim that you didn't comply. Just look at all these videos of people being brutalized and beaten unconscious by police men shouting at them "stop resisting!"

So what you're basically saying is the price for having any policing is that we have to accept a morally and legally corrupt police force.

So all cops are 'agents of state violence'?

Yes.

Though isn't the idea of state violence a workable one because there are situations in which violence and compliance are in people's best interest - such as shooting a home invader, and secondly because (ideally, and this is where it has broken down) the state is an accountable facilitator of the people's will.

Possibly, yes. I'm not passing any judgement here, just pointing out that police, as agents of the State, are ultimately agents of violence, since the State is ultimately just "that entity which reserves for itself a monopoly on the lawful use of violence".

Personally, I agree with Bastiat that the State should be more more than the collective extension to our own individual, inate right to self-defense, so any violence which goes beyond that, I consider improper.

But I've said too much already, HN really isn't the best place for these discussions...

If the "good" police officers wish to be respected, they should start doing things like outing and arresting the corrupt cops, speaking out against victimless laws that only make everyone a criminal, routinely compensating innocents for damages caused by false arrests/raids/seizures/imprisonment, etc. Until these things are commonplace, it's only proper to consider all of them representatives of their misbehaving organizations.

The idiom "A few bad apples..." is commonly brought up in discussions such as theses.

There is something funny about that phrase though... it is not complete. The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel". This is to say that if you do not take an aggressive stance towards weeding out all of the bad apples, the rot will spread like an infection (rotting apples will release ethylene gas which acts as a ripening agent, accelerating the rot of nearby apples) and corrupt all of the apples.

So if we trust our apples:cops metaphor then what we are really saying is that if we overlook the a few bad cops for any significant amount of time, before we know it, all cops will be bad. Obviously crooked cops don't release ethylene gas in significant quantities... instead the Blue Wall is the most commonly cited mechanism of transmission.

I like this idiom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Code_of_Silence

For anyone else who might not have heard of it (by name).

> The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel".

They don't even have to actually spoil the barrel. Since dramatic events stand out in the human mind, it's possible for a few bad actors to completely change people's perception of groups or their place in society.

This is part of the reason why it's so hard for privileged groups to understand how minorities see things and vice-versa. What's a dramatic, salient event for one group is not so much for the other.

Flass: [taking a bribe] Don't suppose you want a taste? I just keep offering, thinking maybe some day you'll get wise.

Gordon: There's nothing wise in what you do, Flass.

Flass: Well, Jimbo, you don't take the taste... makes us guys nervous.

Gordon: I'm no rat! In a town this bent, who's there to rat to anyway?

>So all cops are 'agents of state violence'?

That's the very definition of law enforcement.

>Just like all developers are 'evil hackers'.

No, because that's not the very definition of developer.

A cop is an agent of the state that (and is) ordered to arrest, take down, put in jail, etc people and is authorized to use force for that -- including his gun.

If they're not, I want them fired. They are here to find the non-compliant and hit them with sticks until they submit to the judicial system, and to kill them if that's not possible (if we as a society can stomach a death over whatever we're accusing them of.)

Appropriate username.

A cop that doesn't hit people with sticks is a just social worker.

Or 'just a social worker,' rather.

So if I try to break into your house, you won't be calling the cops? Wouldn't you be supporting 'agents of state violence' by relying on them to come to your aid?

Huh? Well, yah, duh. It's better than me going out and acting as my own agent of violence to beat you myself... I personally think that a legitimate state has a legitimate monopoly on violence.

You can live in your own pretend society or you can deal with the one you're actually in right now - which includes things like laws and law enforcement. And you have options.

But taking a negative attitude so general as "all police officers are agents of state violence" has no positive outcome. You just decided every interaction you have with cops will turn out bad (or violent), so of course you're going to have issues! The rest of us try to treat each other fairly and as a result 99% of the time don't have problems with cops (unless we're breaking the law, wherein naturally problems do arise).

Also, your job isn't the only thing that may make one have personal problems with someone else. I tend to get pissed off at immature anarchopunks who think the world revolves around them. I guess it kind of goes both ways.

Well, I'm not a much of a fan of angry teens, either... I'm just describing the situation.

But in keeping with "act pragmatically" officers can live in their "own pretend society or [...] can deal with the one [they're] actually in right now", which includes folks who don't particularly like them solely based on the authority they represent.

This seems reasonable to me. Police are under an obligation to uphold the law, their presence at a less than legal event is at best a significant liability to all those involved. What kind of punk becomes a cop anyway? What's next, punks voting republican? Punks wearing designer clothes? Oh wait...

does anyone know if you can just ask them if they are a cop; with them having to respond truthfully? or is this just idiotic folklore that i've somehow heard.

Just a little bit of thought should answer this for you.

Hint: How would a sting or other undercover operation work? Do the police lie during interrogations?

> does anyone know if you can just ask them if they are a cop; with them having to respond truthfully?

Of course police can lie about being police officers. Another person kind-of answered already, but this apparently needs to be stated unambiguously: A police officer can lie to you about being a police officer and get away with it.

http://www.erowid.org/freedom/police/police_info6.shtml

asking if someones a cop, or stating, 'cops can't come' shows intent.

It's folklore, based on a misunderstanding of the concept of entrapment. Learning exactly what entrapment means may be worthwhile, but cops lying about being cops does not constitute entrapment.

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