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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

Reading your law enforcement stories, combined with mostly broken checks and balances due to an arcane election system, judging it from the outside and comparing it with what we have in my home country, I'd say you're not close but you're about half way there.

If there was a more sane way to introduce new law into your system, I'd suggest something like 'make it illegal to make their performance reviews depend on the number of arrests'. But how would you even start a movement like this? It is still possible to shoot down laws pending in congress (as demonstrated with SOPA), but actively steering into a new direction? I guess if you have a few hundred millions to get get yourself elected it would be possible - the problem is, having this sort of money is not a good filter criteria to get a balanced congress. So how to even start?

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Reading your law enforcement stories

This is exactly the problem. You read the stories, that is, the exceptional cases. Don't extrapolate from exceptions.

I expected this comment and I phrased it specifically to get this reaction. Let me ask you this: Are you sure these cases are exceptional, not systemic? Naming something exceptional usually means that the system can be left alone. This might be the case, but I'm worried that you people are in a frog-in-boiling-pot situation.

So, let me rephrase: do you have trustable statistics showing that police brutality is not systemic? How about all those 'exceptional' cases where the system very much seems to work against correcting itself by protecting the offending police officers?

See, I'm not surprised that in a ~300M nation there are lots of cases of authority acting violently and that we only hear about those cases where people are treated badly - but what's worrying to me is how bad the 'exception handling' usually appears to work. If your program throws an exception every 10'000 users, but the exception leads to the user being electro-shocked, jailed and possibly loosing his job, wouldn't you throw in some additional exception handling?

So, let me rephrase: do you have trustable statistics showing that police brutality is not systemic?

I agree with the implicit assumption in your question. When trying to evaluate whether there is a serious problem, in any area, we should rely on data. These stories, heartbreaking as they are, are just anecdotes. Thus, lacking proper data, I can't tell whether there is a systemic problem with police brutality in the US: I can't answer your question. I'm sure such statistics do exist, but since I'm not from the US, it's not exactly something I tend to pick up on.

However, I am somewhat familiar with the dynamics involved with issues like this. There are usually some few exceptions that stand out enough to be picked up in the media, but most don't. I'd guess that there are an order of magnitude more cases that are either not severe enough to be reported on, or too common to be interesting, but are still beyond what a society would consider ideal, were they to come to light.

Perhaps the folks who report this stuff are the exceptions. If you find yourself in these scenarios and you're not white, or aware of your rights... who's going to believe the ramblings of some gaolbird?

These stories, even if they are exceptions tell me:

1) The rate at which these things happen is sufficiently high that I see 20 or 30 of these stories a year without looking for them. My reaction is now "one more of these".

2) The system is very bad at dealing with these things even if they are exceptions. I'm ok with that when the system is "Google's tech support for free products" and not ok when it's civil rights.

3) Even if the arrest itself is an exception the story that comes after (filthy cell full of people, verbal and racial abuse, etc) is incredibly consistent.

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