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Comment by ollysb | Hacker News Reader

The HN lens has certainly been showing the US police force in a bad light over the last year or so. What are the origins of this strange behaviour? Why is force regularly used against people that verbally query the police? Even the army is trained to use dialogue where possible. It does sound like cameras will help but surely good and regular training programs should encourage good engagement with citizens.

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"What are the origins of this strange behaviour?"

It's not strange behavior. It's just that wealthy, white people are discovering what poor people and minorities have known for a long time: the police are not their friend, are not accountable to them, and are prone to violent overreaction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

>> are prone to violent overreaction.

That's not true of every country though, it's certainly not the case in the UK. Here the police do act as your friends, they make a lot of effort to talk to the general public, both on the beat and at events. Certainly every encounter I've had with the police has been positive, even when I've been in the wrong (speeding or whatever). Police can be your friend, they can be accountable and they certainly don't need to be prone to violent outbursts.

Stephen Lawrence would probably disagree with you.

The basic upshot of this story is to keep your contact with the Police brief, friendly and say no more than you need to.

The Police have been doing this to black people, gay people and other minorities for years, it's actually quite ironic that the Stonewall riots happened in San Fran too.

All that's happened this time is a well off, straight, white chap has realised just how hard life gets when you're treated as a minority.

I hope he gets his day in court and if the story is true they will sort the copper out and pay some compensation to him.

It would seem that training programs may help. After all, people respond better to meaningful requests than to arbitrary orders.

Something like "Sir, I'm going to need you to move to the other side of the street while we ascertain the situation." may work better than "Move to the other side of the street.".

But some of it is unavoidable. Americans seem to live with a siege mentality that I found uncommon in other developed nations (except the UK to a lesser degree). The police reflect this mentality with a constant fear that the people they're talking to will resort to violence. Of course, it is somewhat justified in their case because of the relative lack of safety in American cities in comparison to other developed nations (a homicide rate comparable to India, for instance).

Possibly something to do with arrest quotas?

There's police corruption, etc. But there's also the fact that American cities are war zones. The homicide rate in San Francisco, a relatively safe city, is 8 times higher than the homicide rate in London. It's 31 times higher in Oakland. Police in the U.S. are surrounded by violence.

Police in the U.S. are in no sense surrounded by violence. The United States in 2014 is one of the safest, least dangerous societies the universe has ever known.

American cities are the most dangerous in the developed world, by a large margin.

Only certain parts of certain cities[0]. It's almost entirely a result of the War On Drugs. In areas where drugs and gangs are a problem, the homicide rate is very high. In wealthy/safe parts of town, violent crime is not dramatically higher than the rest of the developed world.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chicago_violent_crime_map_...

Does San Francisco have a particularly large amount of "war on drugs" related gang violence? It's still 8x the homicide rate of London. And whether it's caused by the war on drugs or not, the fact remains police still have to deal with it.

Gang violence preceded the "war on drugs".

> American cities are the most dangerous in the developed world, by a large margin.

Um, can you give a source on that? I rather doubt it's true, but probably depends on what you mean by "most dangerous". (And also perhaps "developed").

Here's an article titled "Violent crime worse in Britain than in US": http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-25671/Violent-crime-...

Or here's PolitiFact:

> For England and Wales, we added together three crime categories: "violence against the person, with injury," "most serious sexual crime," and "robbery." This produced a rate of 775 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

> For the United States, we used the FBI’s four standard categories for violent crime that Bier cited. We came up with a rate of 383 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

[Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/... ]

The Daily Mail is not a good source for, well anything.

Already you can see that adding up those categories doesn't make sense as some will overlap (in particular violence and the other two).

Sure, there's some overlap between assault, rape, and robbery. But the underlying point is sound. What makes a city dangerous includes one's overall chance of being victimized, not just the chance of being murdered. And if you look at those other categories you'll find the US is not leading the pack.

From the point of view of the police, murders are a much bigger deal than robberies, because they are generally the result of organized violence.

Replying to facts with your own opinion isn't real useful.

>> But there's also the fact that American cities are war zones.

That's an opinion claiming to be a fact.

Absolutely true. But there are other supporting facts in there even though the conclusion might be bananas. :)

Cameras seem like a good idea, but training won't change anything.

Good engagement with citizens? The power is the draw to the position, not the responsibility that comes with it. Take away the power from the job, and see how many superheroes exist in the world.

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