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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

The so-called "North Hollywood Shootout" in 1997 was a big instigator of this. Two heavily armed bank robbers were able to hold off the LAPD by virtue of superior weapons and body armor.

There was a big public outcry and support for giving police the "tools they needed" to be able to take on the better-armed criminals, gangs, and drug dealers.

So now that the police have become essentially local armies in many jurisdictions, people think they have gone too far.

What troubles me most is that neither Obama nor most legislators in congress have the first clue or any experience in law enforcement. So anything that happens is going to be driven by political concerns, not what makes the most sense for effective and appropriate law enforcement.

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Obama nor most legislators in congress have the first clue or any experience in law enforcement

He was a practicing civil rights attorney, taught constitutional law and was president of Harvard Law Review.

You may not like him, but to say that someone who has that level of professional legal experience doesn't have any experience in law enforcement, would seem ridiculous.

> He was a practicing civil rights attorney, taught constitutional law and was president of Harvard Law Review.

That's a bit like saying that an Electronics Engineer who can build a CPU is a good person to hire to write Javascript.

Not exactly the same. But knowing civil rights and constitutional law is very different from having a wholistic understanding of law enforcement.

The claim was that he didn't have any experience, not that his understanding was merely less than holistic.

You'd need Dirk Gently for that.

Yes I was referring to on-the-street law enforcement, i.e. police work, which is the subject under discussion. Not lawering.

Lawyers are very much part of police work and on-the-street law enforcement.

You aren't in Mega City One, not yet at any rate.

Though taking a look through recent press, it is getting fairly hard to tell the difference, admittedly.

You know attorney and police officer are really different jobs, right?

They both have experience in law enforcement. Law enforcement thankfully still includes the court process, not just arresting people.

>They both have experience in law enforcement

You realize that police don't think that, right? And other than those attorneys working for Dept of Justice and other agencies with a law enforcement mandate, I don't think many attorneys consider themselves "law enforcement" either.

The local ambulance chaser or deed auditor hardly goes around calling himself "law enforcement".

You seem to have confused experience with title.

It doesn't matter what someone calls themselves when asking what they have experience in.

A deed auditor would tend to think that they have had some experience in the enforcing of the area of law pertaining to deed auditing without ever needing to title themselves as law enforcement.

Police are the problem, what they think is besides the point, they've invalidated their voice and are now the subject of the conversation about what to do about them.

So is the argument that only a police officer can judge this situation?

Because allowing them to do that got us into this paramilitary mess in the first place.

Politicians often don't have a clue about many subjects, but that's not necessarily too bad a thing.

Politicians should be generalists not specialists. What they should do is surround themselves with experts is specific fields, and consider the advice they give.

Unfortunately, in many nations the politicians more frequently listen to the distorted scare and panic the media has created that week and base their policies on that instead.

> What they should do is surround themselves with experts is specific fields, and consider the advice they give.

The problem here is that it's all too easy to pay off experts to give advice that isn't necessarily "correct" but is what a special interest wants for some reason.

Further many of these experts are also allowed to remain anonymous (or effectively so) which means that they aren't even selling their reputation on a one-time transactions where afterwards they will be publicly humiliated or shamed. They are allowed to do this over and over.

I agree with your statement in principle 100% but in practice I'm not sure it's terribly effective.

I don't see a problem with a lack of experience.

The natural incentives for police aren't necessarily what's good for society. A policeman will naturally want to keep himself alive and catch the bad guy at almost any cost. False convictions, injuries to innocent bystanders, dead suspects, and other such things aren't inherently something police care too much about. We make them care by imposing a framework where they have a reason to avoid these things, but left to their own devices they naturally worry about their own lives and their goal of catching criminals.

The police are certainly the ones to ask about how best to effectively combat criminals and similar things, but they're not the ones to ask about the correct tradeoff between police and civilian lives, the rate at which criminals should be allowed to get away (not zero!), and overall public safety from police, not just public safety by police.

In terms of how you phrased it, I think police are good ones to ask about effective law enforcement, but not necessarily about appropriate law enforcement.

>So anything that happens is going to be driven by political concerns, not what makes the most sense for effective and appropriate law enforcement.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I care more about not having a militarized police force than I care about the police being able to shoot the 1 in 1,000,000 well-equipped robber with a 50 cal/machine gun/40mm launcher/whatever they are getting these days.

Sorry for putting the rights of the civilian population (political concerns) over being able to kill any conceivable criminal ("effective" law enforcement).

It's interesting to me that this notorious shootout that prompted better police armament seems to have turned out fairly well despite the initial disadvantage of the police. Although badly outgunned, the police managed to keep the robbers relatively confined until the SWAT team arrived and disabled the robbers. A lot of people were injured but the only deaths were the criminals. Not exactly the best day ever for the LAPD, but it seems like a reasonable outcome for an unusual situation.

Isn't drawing the "effective" and "appropriate" lines anyway a political exercise?

The local sheriff's experience in law enforcement doesn't lend him any great advantage over me in deciding whether jay walkers should spend time in jail (or whatever other stupid example you want to use).

He probably has developed a better intuition about what sorts of people will escalate their lawbreaking, but that still doesn't give him an advantage in deciding what steps are appropriate in dealing with such a problem.

Agreed. Furthermore, a heavily armed and militarized police doesn't seem either effective or appropriate in most situations, which aren't like the North Hollywood Shoot-out, so what's the problem with a review?

Let's not review an alarming situation because not everyone involved will have the deepest understanding of it?

I would argue that the problem stems from a failure to train police in conflict resolution (without the use of military hardware). Police are supposed to be civilians, equal to and part of their communities.

Somewhere along the line, that got lost.

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