Hacker News Reader

Comment by gulfie | Hacker News Reader

tldr; The mission is to avoid aggravating the local population any more than necessary, and they may be angry for good and valid reasons. Hurting/shooting people tends to anger people and turn the military presence there untenable(costly in material and lives).

okay, I mixed in a some background from other publications in the tldr, but whatever.

of course : " One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine, is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine... " - From a Soviet Junior Lt's Notebook

View on HN

one take away from the videos of the police in Ferguson recently, they point their guns in the protester's directions more often than not, as in they are dialing up the antagonism. Real soldiers would never do that, you only point at whom your going to shoot.

Wanna be soldiers become cops because its easier than making it through boot camp

Agreed. I'm also taken aback by the recordings of unprovoked hostility from the cops. To reporters, mind you. If this is how they are acting towards the media, how badly are they treating the minorities in their communities who have little to no power to fight back?

Keep in mind: the standard for justifying the use of lethal force for a cop is whether the officer had reasonable belief that he/she was protecting himself or others from serious injury at that moment. The scope is narrow - it does not take into account if the cop provoked the fight in the first place.

They're fearful, the cops. Not excusing it but this is not only the community lashing out at their lack of power, but the authority lashing out at the same. I don't want to psychoanalyze this but I think the whole thing is part of a bigger picture where authority in America is trying to maintain control of a public that is, according to almost any poll you find, is seriously disillusioned with their leadership. And they react with the deft touch of your typical large institution.

I think they are fearful and it must be stressful to have to do an admittedly dangerous job under immense public scrutiny, media attention, and the disillusionment of their communities they're supposed to serve.

But Ferguson's disillusionment is not an abstract dislike of authority, it can be concretely traced back to its history. When we talk of disillusionment we need to talk about years of police abuse and mistreatment of citizens: racial profiling, trivial arrests and police brutality. And they continue to justify the community's scepticism by withholding information (the officer's name), clumsy attempts to manipulate the narrative (the unrelated story of the robbery) and attempting to shut down the media.

Not all cops are bad, but it whatever institutional policies exist to hold cops accountable is non-existent; they haven't earned the community's trust.

This is another reason to standardize police forces. Allowing counties to determine whether their units have to be monitored by dash cams/personal cams is a mistake. We need a more unified police.

Wow, lots of absolute statements there.

"Real" soldiers do sometimes use weapon-mounted optics for observation and target ID. They don't always end up shooting the people they're looking at.

Your statement about cops simply reveals your ignorance about law enforcement.

>> "Real" soldiers do sometimes use weapon-mounted optics for observation and target ID. They don't always end up shooting the people they're looking at.

I've yet to hear a vet tell me that's an acceptable crowd control tactic. Not everything the military does is crowd control, and when they engage in crowd control they don't use all of the tactics that an infantryman at the front lines might use.

To put into less hyperbolic context : when a 'target' is standing seven feet from you, you shouldn't need to aim a sniper rifle at them to identify them through its' optics.

A police sniper with a magnified scope isn't there to provide "crowd control" in the sense that you're describing, i.e., getting up close and personal with a crowd. They'd be providing overwatch from a distance.

That said, using binoculars would convey a much less threatening impression than observing through a weapon-mounted scope. On the other hand, we don't know exactly what the tactical situation was when that sniper was aiming at the crowd. Unless you do, you're not in a position to say whether he should have been aiming at people or not.

This.

Armed forces use scopes to gather information; this is acceptable.

Police under the influence described by the Stanford Prison Experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment) Aim weapons at civilians to assert dominance that they feel they must exert.

The action is the same, the reasoning is different.

Being an MP is an easy way to get into law enforcement.

And they are too dumb to make it as PE teachers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com