At a minimum, watch 100 videos. I did last night, only took about an hour, it's easy to find some to nitpick, some which are ambiguous ... and plenty that are totally horrifying.

If you can watch 100 videos in a row from Greg Doucette's list and say, "the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.

Otherwise you're not speaking from an honest grappling with what these videos contain.

There are way too many cases where a cop provokes a confrontation, often by stopping to allow someone else nearby to run into them, and every other cop in the group responds by beating anyone nearby and shoving back anyone with a camera.

You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice.

This is absolutely true, but the problem goes much deeper than just the police force itself. We seem to want to solve every imaginable social problem with police/courts/prisons. Drug abuse needs to be viewed as a public health problem, not a criminal problem. Homelessness as a housing and mental health problem, not a criminal one. Many other issues as economic problems not criminal ones. Address the root cause, rather than sending people with badges and guns. I realize this is easier said than done, but it's clear the old approach is no longer acceptable to society.

"Address the root cause", exactly, and the root cause is the unjust laws. Though cops pretty much never being found guilty for unjust use of violence is a big one too, and I wonder what law changes can solve that issue.

There are crimes that put people at risk but don't always create a victim. Do we allow for crimes that have a risk of a victim even if there isn't a direct victim?

There are crimes where we say that someone is a victim despite their own feelings of being victimized or having suffered a crime. Do those stay as well?

We have crimes where there isn't someone physically hurt and not a direct theft, but there is a reduction in value of items. Do those crimes stay?

Take zoning laws. Is violating a zoning law victimless? If I open a foul smelling poultry factory in the middle of a downtown commercial zone, it could greatly negatively impact that commercial zone to the point where businesses would not be able to afford to stay open. But if that makes it a victim crime, then what about when homeless people living in that same area also drive away customers to the point it no longer functions as a commercial zone?

As for drugs, what happens when companies start selling direct to users? Antibiotics and opioids without needing a doctor's prescription. We already have seen the problems even when doctor prescriptions are required, imagine what happens if drugs are declared a victimless crime and no longer prosecuted.

I think the notion that some crimes are victimless is based on looking at specific incidents that don't have victims and not considering it at scale. Which is to say that the example by the other poster of drunk driving might be a much more fairer comparison than what people originally took it as, because while the relation between the risk and possible victim is easier to understand, the question is if such a relationship is consistently used to justify a victim, not if the relationship is easy to understand.

I do think there's potential for more mandated community service as a response to antisocial behavior. Structure it so people don't have to miss work.

A very large amount of the crimes we prosecute people for are either drug crimes or crimes because of poverty/economic inequality, and these are best addressed with public health and investment.

Even some of the remaining economic crimes - like selling untaxed cigarettes (what Eric Garner was killed for) if they still happen probably don't need public enforcement. Give those that pay the taxes standing to sue those who don't pay the taxes. If those who are paying it aren't bothered enough to pay for enforcement, I don't see why others should be.

Most of what we do in the name of policing is deal with problems that we'd be better off preventing or dealing with by someone other than a man with a gun. This is the low hanging fruit we should pursue immediately, and when we see what's left the opportunities and alternatives for further improvement should become clearer.

Good point.

The most obvious answer seems to be to fine the offenders, but really, how do you fine a homeless person?

Fining the homeless seems silly, and unlikely to serve as either a deterrent or as workable compensation for society at large.

Throwing them in a jail is even worse; it is unlikely to deter (part of the problem is that there are mental issues at work which are likely going to make _any_ deterrence ineffective, you need complete solutions for individual cases, or systems in place that reduce the incidence of homelessness and the mental issues strongly correlated to it) - and it is a giant cost to society, not a gain.

There are _NO_ easy answers, that's part of the problem. We can point at the elephant all day, but the current plan of 'lets squawk like a bird loudly' has proven ineffective at chasing the elephant out of the room and also makes no logical sense as to why that should lead to the desired result either. It makes sense to stop the squawking like a bird immediately, even if there isn't yet a plausible plan in place to chase the elephant out.

Additionally, giving them homes has strongly correlated with a reduction in drug trafficking. These programs did not require the participants to stay drug free or to join any programs, but often they were buying/selling for reasons that were addressed by the basic provisions of the programs.

These programs aren't meant for everyone that's homeless. Many people are only homeless temporarily and the existing shelter programs handle those cases somewhat acceptably, but the major contrasting factor with the issues we're currently discussing is that these programs had zero involvement of the police. The police were told explicitly to leave its participants alone and not only did the homelessness issues go away, but their state budgets decreased overall.

You make good points about not being able to fully decriminalize certain things, but there are nuances specific to circumstances that make treating many societal problems as crimes to be less effective and more expensive than properly implemented social programs.

As Americans, perhaps we should be calling for:

1/ Limits on the power of police to protect bad officers and change prosecutorial discretion.

2/ Limits on the number of interactions between the police and citizenry, which means passing fewer laws.

Look at what led to Eric Garner's death. A politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, driving smokes underground. When the police enforce this overcrimininalization, it exposes poor people to unnecessary interactions with cops and potentially violent confrontations.

But I can easily imagine that out of 8 million people living in New York City, a certain number does not want to live at home and actually prefer staying outside.

http://graceofgodmovie.com/

And you're right, there are some people who are homeless by choice, but they are a tiny, tiny minority, probably less than 1% of the homeless population.

I sincerely wonder why.

My "off-the-top" theory would be that these people are either indeed homeless by choice or they are such assholes that not a single shelter would tolerate them.

How wrong am I?

[1] https://www.hudexchange.info/resource/5948/2019-ahar-part-1-...

Very. Did you actually read the report? The answer is right there:

"On a single night in 2019, roughly 568,000 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. Nearly two-thirds (63%) were staying in sheltered locations—emergency shelters or transitional housing programs—and more than one-third (37%) were in unsheltered locations such as on the street, in abandoned buildings, or in other places not suitable for human habitation."

So being unsheltered has nothing at all to do with being voluntarily homeless. These are completely orthogonal matters. In fact, the HUD report does not deal with voluntary homelessness at all, almost certainly because the number of such people is so small that they can be safely discounted for public policy purposes.

It is also really hard to assess whether someone is voluntarily homeless. My film was shot in Santa Monica, CA. One of the subjects I interviewed had reliable income, enough to pay the rent somewhere, but not in Santa Monica. Given the choice between being on the street in Santa Monica and being in a low-rent apartment in some random place far from home, he chose to stay in Santa Monica. But all else being equal he would have preferred to be inside. Is that person "voluntarily homeless"?

So we have a continual cycle of crime-punishment that doesn't mitigate enough, simply because the underlying problems remain, until our country stops with the "you're on your own" mentality and starts supporting social programs better.

So what? (Two) adults choose to have some interaction that all parties are happy with? Who are us outsiders to claim that their freedoms should be reduced?

The best reason is "splash and fallout" damage? I dont know if you've seen how weed has been used to put people in cages. People in cages! And you come with "splash and fallout" damage as a justification... You lost me.

So if I'm driving drunk, then I'm not prosecuted until there's a victim?

Hm...

I think this might be a good example of a larger structural problem. culturally, we accept that going to a bar with friends or having a few glasses of wine at a restaurant is a reasonable thing for an adult to do. but a large portion of the US is set up in a way that bars and restaurants are not within walking distance of homes, and the public transit is poor or nonexistent. if I, a 145 lb male, have a cocktail and a glass of wine at dinner, I'm pretty likely to be above the legal limit by the time I leave. I don't do this; I either drink less or arrange a different way to get home, but I do think the combination of law, culture, and (lack of) infrastructure pushes people towards committing a crime here.

Many illegal drugs have a potential of causing harm.

Should the harm be purely physical?

Homelessness is a public nuisance, which we can choose to ignore, but so is walking naked in a school yard, which will be seen as a much more controversial subject.

To the user, which is a risk they chose to take.

Now you could argue that the illicit trade is causing harm, but that's the direct result of criminalization and not of people choosing to consume substances.

But: - for it to work people should estimate the risks correctly - most people caught DUIing apparently are quite bad in understanding the risks involved

Drugs, prostitution and being homeless (a.k.a. being poor/ in need of support). Should never've been even considered for crimes. Hence I proposed to have those laws made unconstitutional by some amendment.

I mean, if you've had a few drinks and get in your car, you're not going to be automatically stopped and ticketed. Instead you're weighing the risk that a cop is going to just happen to catch you.

If the laws are changed so that driving drunk isn't presumptively a crime, but rather that if you're in a crash and found to have high levels of alcohol in your blood, then the crash is assumed to be your fault and will have extremely high penalties, then the difference is just in the details. You'd be balancing a lower risk, but of a much higher cost.

That might not work as well because of some people having poor skills at discounting future risks, but it's not obvious that's the case. It deserves further investigation.

I disagree. That's what makes this so much more difficult. If it required planning and practice, we could find the meeting place and itinerary and correct it.

This is much more subtle. This is the kind of thing you can get when you group like minded individuals together and give them power. Without directly orchestrating, they pick up cues and work together.

It's like when a company hires a new person and there's no rule explicitly saying they have to work overtime, but they see everyone else doing it and soon they are too.

Almost all of them had outright wrong, or heavily misleading titles and/or descriptions with contradictory claims in the comments - and almost none of them provided context to the police actions.

This list is really more about stoking emotions than providing evidence of anything.

I mean look at this one...

https://twitter.com/jayjanner/status/1267111893753307137

A large volume of misleading hyperbolic claims by a biased collector/poster don't get more meaningful through volume of posts.

Are there instances where police abuse their power? Yes. Absolutely. But it doesn't help anyone when people are cherry picking instances where escalation of force was warranted, but they do not show the full context leading up to that escalation.

I would like to see meaningful police reform as much as anyone else. But we need to be pragmatic about any examples we cite as "abuse of force". Let's create a list of absolutely cut-and-dry instances of police brutality, then move from there.

Second, why shoot to kill and not to incapacitate? Shoot to kill is a policy. Why is that a policy?

The police rule by fear. I’ve never broken the law and yet Im really affraid of cops in the US. I know I should not have a reason to but can’t help but be intimidated by their tactics, their orders, their demeanour. And I act like a scared ghost anytime I get stopped by them: I am afraid that if any answer I’d give them might make them punish me with one more more tickets.

Where do you aim if you want to "shoot to incapacitate"?

No such place exists on the body. Even using small, low-powered rounds like a .22 rimfire short carry extreme risk of death no matter where you aim.

The answer is more simple. Don't pull out that gun unless what the person is doing warrants death. I don't know that attempting to apprehend a DUI is worth killing someone over. If you're responding to a domestic violence situation where someone's running around with a knife though, it's likely that a gun isn't a terrible consideration.

I think the real issue is getting in the competitive zone. "I'm not going to let this pero beat me" instead of considering if the cure is worse than the disease.

There's a larger issue, though. All laws ultimately are enforced by people with guns who will do violence up to and including death if people don't comply. Some laws are less likely than others to result in death (e.g. drug laws vs. securities fraud), but "is this law worth killing for?" is a question we all should ask when considering what the law should be.

If the threat of a taser is a threat that warrants lethal force in self defense, the police are reaching for them far too quickly when they deal with people who are non-compliant. It takes very little provocation for most police officers to deploy their taser. I believe they are almost always used against unarmed people (armed people get shot, not tased).

I've never heard of this practice, and the opposite is regularly taught to various armed forces around the world. I'm curious to read about it, do you have any info or sources to share?

Most armed folks are taught that when you draw a gun it's to neutralize a threat. To neutralize is to completely eliminate the threat.

Has anyone here heard similar sentiments while getting a concealed carry license?

Something like 'Don't pull your gun out and point it at someone unless you intend to shoot and kill them. Anything less than that needlessly escalates the severity of a situation by introducing a weapon.'

The idea being that if you pull out a gun and don't use it, all of the sudden you have increased the potential for violence, exposed yourself as armed and willing, lost the element of surprise, and given potential assailants the idea/opportunity to match your use of force. Thus, "shoot to kill."

One problem is that guns are tools for a task, and when you pull out a tool, you want to leverage it as efficiently as possible. Maybe the answer isn't to use the tool differently, but use a different tool entirely.

Absolutely, I was taught this in my self-defense shooting class. The question of kill or not kill doesn't enter into it at all. We were trained to neutralize the threat, full stop. The effect on the future health of that threat doesn't enter into it.

And this makes sense when you understand that gunfights don't happen the way you see on TV. There, when someone is hit with a bullet they fall down and stop being a threat. This is not how the world works. In the real world, unless their circulatory system or nervous system is taken offline, they will continue to be a threat. Even if they've been hit through the aorta or femoral artery or something that is likely to be fatal, it'll take a minute or two at least for the effect to occur, and in the meantime, they're going to keep trying to kill you.

No, you can't just shoot someone in the leg to disable them. You have very high chances of hitting main arteries anywhere (arms and legs).

Shooting a human being is not like it is in Hollywood movies. Once an officer pulls out his/her firearm and use it they know it means killing the person. That's why they go through other means of less lethal force before drawing.

Edit: Spelling

I just want to answer your question about shooting to kill vs incapacitate.

The first part of the answer is that nobody should shoot anyone who they don’t reasonably believe is trying to kill them. This applies to citizens or police. Generally it is the standard applied in citizen self-defense scenarios.

The second part is that shooting isn’t that easy or effective. Certainly not how it appears in the movies. It is hard to hit a 6” moving target in a stressful situation, even at relatively close range, and would require training and practice that simply isn’t available to cops. Added to this, there is no reliable place to shoot someone that will incapacitate them without also being likely to kill them. Surprisingly many people will continue to fight after being shot, so even if the cop had the ability to ‘shoot them in the leg’, for example, they would still be at risk of being killed by an aggressive adversary.

In addition, any responsible use of firearms has to take into account the environment. Handgun bullets are still lethal hundreds of meters from where they are fired. When cops miss their targets, bullets can and do kill bystanders, or ricochet or fragment and cause injury to people not even in the line of fire.

So the guidance to anyone using a gun in self defense is generally to shoot for the ‘center of mass’. This is primary because hitting the central nervous system or vital organs is the only reliable way to stop someone, but also because it’s impractical and unsafe to aim anywhere else.

None of this is meant to justify police shootings. Quite the opposite. I am just explaining why every gun use is necessarily a lethal encounter.

If a politician suggests “shooting them in the leg”, the one thing you can be certain of is that they are completely incompetent on this topic, and can not be trusted to improve matters.

Generally agree apart from this - if cops don't have training to be expert (or at least above-average good) shooters, then that's a failure. We've read tons of articles about militarization of US police. If they have budget for armored vehicles, for sure they have budget for (very cheap but quality basic) 9mm ammunition for practice.

In Long Island a higher ranked cop would retire after 20 years with a pension of 500k, and in Long Island they really don’t do anything. While that, a new recruit in the Bronx would start at salary of 40k with poor training and lots of headaches. Seems like we need to reform the police!

Discussions about these things just started popping up on NPR and other sources. They brought it up on themselves.

Even the best handgun shooters in the world are unlikely either to be reliably be able to shoot to incapacitate.

It just isn’t a capacity that handguns have in realistic use cases.

The primary reason police need more training with firearms is so that they become less afraid of them and more generally competent and confident.

That will give them more capacity to exercise better judgement in when they actually need to shoot.

Of course it depends a lot on the training and whether it is aimed at increasing or reducing their fear levels.

2) Because there is no such thing as shoot to wound. If you've gotten to the point where you're shooting at someone they need to be dead. Any bullet holes in your body are potentially fatal. Especially the famous leg shot; damage to your femoral artery will kill you extremely quickly.

Some people have mental issues and normally they twitch a lot. And cops claim they were afraid for their lives, it’s the easy license to kill. I find that barbaric and no wonder we see so much backlash against the police force!!!

When considering whether or not the use of deadly force was justified in a given situation, the lack of a weapon isn't the trump card indicating the force was not justified that many people think it is.

Because there is no place to shoot that will simply incapacitate everyone. The policy is generally shoot to stop the threat not to kill per se. There are many instances where a person will take many rounds in potentially fatal spots and continue like nothing has happened.

> In this free-for-all, the assailant had, in fact, been struck 14 times. Any one of six of these wounds – in the heart, right lung, left lung, liver, diaphragm, and right kidney – could have produced fatal consequences, “in time,” Gramins emphasizes.[1]

[1] https://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/why-one...

2. Have you ever shot a gun? Have you ever shot a pistol? Now to simulate the Andrenaline dump run few sprints then try again. You CAN NOT shoot to disable this is not a Hollywood movie, it does not work. Most people can’t hit anything past few meters away with a pistol.

Gun is not a taser or a nightstick. It is a lethal weapon and should only be employed when you have a reason to kill.

Sure, if there's someone hanging out by themselves then de-escalate and do whatever. The moment there are innocent people in harms way though, that calculus changes.

De-escalation is a great catch phrase, but it's not a universal solution. It's one tool of many, and it has a time and place.

Sure you can, it's what the vast majority of police forces in developed countries are doing all the time [0].

That way they also don't end up shooting innocent bystanders, which is apparently quite a common thing in the US [1] [2]

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/ge...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/12/06/785561122/4-dead-after-armed-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/nyregion/firing-at-man-in...

No, it's not that simple. Police escalation itself can put innocent people in harms way. The police can shoot, miss, and kill innocent bystanders. Escalation can provoke a criminal to start shooting and kill innocent bystanders or police. That's not to mention the now better-documented situations where the police escalate against someone who's not a threat and murder them in the process.

> You should be much more concerned about a criminal harming you than a police officer.

There's a lot wrong with your comment, and one issue is your conclusion obviously does not follow from your (unsourced) statistics. If you want to reason from statistics, they have to be measuring comparable situations, which yours are not. Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].

Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply. For instance, Philando Castile was armed, but clearly should not have been shot by police.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

> Being killed by police is more like being murdered by a stranger, which is much less common than being murdered by anyone including people known to you [1].

The question at play as I understood it is whether, being in a dangerous situation as a bystander, you should call the police knowing that they may respond with lethal force. If someone, even someone you know, is posing a threat to you, then the police pose much less of a threat by several orders of magnitude. Yes, police are imperfect and occasionally kill bystanders, but they kill less bystanders by far than people killed through criminal acts.

This then comes back to our question of de-escalation. If someone is unarmed and behaving violently.. the police will probably successfully de-escalate them and indeed, de-escalation is the correct approach. However, if someone is threatening lethal force, then de-escalation is no longer the correct approach.

Which brings us to the Philando Castile case, in which he was not threatening anyone. He was stopped for a traffic incident.. not waving a firearm around, not because someone was panicking. The police officer who shot him was wrong, and that's why he was charged and faced trial.

> Another issue being armed does not justify a police shooting, which you kind of imply

It's hard to justify shooting an unarmed person. If we are interested in those cases where the police acted wrongfully instead of just those cases in which they acted at all, then that number is important. Yes, there are cases where someone armed is unjustly shot, those cases are obviously more rare.

[^2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Look, obviously there are some rare situations where de-escalation is not possible, like the North Hollywood Shootout, but it sounds like you're saying that the police should come in guns blazing whenever they think a suspect is threatening lethal force. That's obviously wrong. Police should try, to the greatest extent possible, to avoid shooting anyone. Whenever possible, they should de-escalate the situation, which refers to stuff like this:

> De-escalation more broadly refers to the strategic slowing down of an incident in a manner that allows officers more time, distance, space and tactical flexibility during dynamic situations on the street. Applying these specific skills increases the potential for resolving the situation with minimized force or no force at all, which reduces the likelihood of injury to the public, increases officer safety and mitigates the immediacy of potential or ongoing threats. A reduction in use of force incidents also reduces community complaints, promotes the perception of procedural justice and, most importantly, promotes resolution of events with the public’s compliance. [1]

Here's one case of what not de-escalating looks like, and the kinds of police attitude problems that are at play here:

> “Last week, there was a guy in a car who wouldn’t show me his hands,” the officer said. “I pulled my gun out and stuck it right in his nose, and I go, ‘Show me your hands now!’ That’s de-escalation.” [2]

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-applauds-a...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/us/long-taught-to-use-for...

That's nonsense. Evidence is never excluded because it doesn't tell the whole story. If that were the case, admitting any evidence at all would be a rare occurrence. Rather, each side in a case tries to piece together their version of the story with the evidence that is available to them. Generally speaking, evidence is only excluded if it's unreliable (e.g. hearsay) or irrelevant.

That's really all we need to know to demand radical changes to police culture, if not the entire concept of ubiquitous armed police forces.

But, also, rubber bullets are less lethal, not non lethal, and so they should be reserved for situations where life is at risk. If she wasn't throwing molotov cocktails or bricks they shouldn't have used rubber bullets on her.

The other claim is that she was pregnant and thus shouldn't have gone. This is incoherent: we want protests to be non-violent, so we want pregnant women and children to be able to attend.

The worst thing they ever used, as far as I remember, was water cannons and riot shields.

Notably, the German police is also trained for much longer, three to four years at minimum. They're trained with guns to aim for parts of the body that make it less likely to kill a target instantly or quickly and instead incapacitates them (of course, with a gun you can never know but you can alter the odds) and to only use guns as the very last resort of stopping someone. Every bullet a german police officer fires in the line of duty is accounted for (54 in 2018) and every person killed is investigated by police officers from a different precinct (11 killed in 2018). From what I've experienced and seen, guns seem to be treated as the first weapon of choice for the police officer in the US, which is the wrong mentality.

This is the third time I've read this in the comments but I can't seem to find any info on "shoot to incapacitate" online. I'm not doubting it, I'm just looking to collect information regarding the topic to share with others. Do you have anything to corroborate this training method?

<https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finaler_Rettungsschuss> Details this a bit better; most shots fired by the german police aim to incapacitate an opponent or are fired in a perceived or real emergency situation, the prevention of crimes and prevention of getaway.

The difference between the mentioned cases and the "final and fatal shot" is that the later is used by the police officer with the express and only intent to kill. There are various requirements, mainly that it must be the only viable way to prevent lethal or extensive harm to others.

Please note that the english pages are not as extensive or talk about the US situation so they're less useful.

It is still shooting at people, so potentially deadly. But less so than putting 6 bullets into someone's chest.

What does the number of followers have to with whether a statement is true or not? That's absurd. Donald Trump and Elon Musk have tens of millions of followers on Twitter; I have very few. Does that make me a liar?

But let's assume it's true: unless she was throwing bricks or petrol-bombs police should have used some other method to stop her.

Yet lists like that is all we have to actually quantify the problem because there are literally zero attempts of doing it on a federal level [0].

In that context, I always consider it quite fascinating how the federal US government is allegedly very informed how many protesters are killed by security forces in countries like Iran, yet the same federal US government couldn't tell you how many of its citizens are killed each year by their own police.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-year-after-ferguson...

same here. I saw a couple out of 20 that looked like gratuitous police brutality. many were labeled as such and didn't seem likely. The deluge of irrelevant examples and confusing commentary confuses the point.

Just to play devils advocate, can't I conclude there is a problem without that problem being the "militarization" of the police force. In other words aren't I allowed to conclude there was a problem prior to the militarization of the police force, and really what we are seeing proliferation of video recordings that are now making us think these acts are new, when the reality is they happened in mass occurred prior to militarization of police...and as scary as it sounds accountability is increasing because of the video?

Then on the extreme end of devils advocate, lets say we all watched 100 videos that made us sick to our stomach...how many millions of police interactions have we not seen that might suggest the bad acts is a drop in the bucket compared to the overall data. Not unlike maybe a few bad actors that have looted or committed arson, or committed murder during the BLM protests, do those acts suggest the entire culture of BLM movement is tainted?

One of the things that really makes me sick about the George Floyd death which doesn't get a lot of attention is that the prosecutors/state attorneys originally swept it under the rug and refused to bring charges. Thank god for the video, even though it didn't stop the act, we all see the tragedy we see the victim we see the cop and attach names and faces...but who knows the names of the prosecutors who watched this video and said "no, nothing wrong here, no charges?" Nameless, faceless people protecting the officers behind the scene enabling offices to act any way they want knowing they will be protected...and maybe if we corrected that problem and officer didn't feel they could act in any fashion they wanted and receive protection perhaps we would see officers act a little differently in the streets.

Oftentimes, I think people say things like "I don't think a few bad police officers ruin policing just like I don't think BLM is evil because of a few violent actors" because they have empathy for police officers who don't do horrible things, and it's sort of a knee jerk reaction against broadly characterizing people.

The problem, however, is that the two groups aren't equivalent. If we granted every person who identified with the BLM movement the same authority as we do police officers, the presence of violent actors inside BLM protests would be an issue. But we don't.

Police officers are given the utmost authority and deterrence in America. They have particular legal protections, they are authorized by the government to give legally enforceable orders to other citizens, etc. Even if the bad acts are a "drop in the bucket," would that be acceptable? And isn't the fact that these bad acts are persistent—regardless of frequency relative to good acts—at the very least suggestive of systemic issues?

In other words, consistent bad acts—even if infrequent—are a bigger deal when the actor is in such a position of authority. Protest groups are clearly not in such a position—hence their protests.

No, I believe injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Also, I agree with you the injustice is worse when committed by people in positions of authority acting in that official capacity.

That said I don't condemn everyone based on the acts of one or some, that goes for police and BLM.

>And isn't the fact that these bad acts are persistent—regardless of frequency relative to good acts—at the very least suggestive of systemic issues?

Yes, part of why I am happy about the proliferation of video and want to shine a light on the nameless, faceless prosecutors making decisions behind the scenes to sweep these tragedies under the rug to protect the officers. Again no one talks about it, no one knows the name of the prosecutor who initially watched the video and refused to bring the charges against George Floyd's murder(s), that helps fuel the systemic issues. Video will help with accountability, but that is only helpful for what happens on the streets, we need to also focus on behind the scenes on the nameless, faceless people protecting bad actors.

On the other hand, all of the instances of so-called police brutality with context which I've seen elsewhere occur after the police calmly order the protestors to leave a particular area, or to go home because of a curphew order or something else and the protests refuse in a less-than-calm manner.

My question is this: is the police using force to manage a crowd always unjustified in your view?

They are friendly and don’t over exert their force in a frequent manner like the US.

In US the police just take out their gun for absolutely petty reasons. It’s like they just want to escalate the situation rather than calm it down.

So yes, the problem is American police don’t know how to calm a crowd down. They stand like robots rather than be humans and listen and work with the crowd.

In many instances the first shots are fired by the police.

The crowd has been otherwise quite peaceful exercising their first amendment right.

Not going to lie, this actually made me laugh[1].

Other than that, you missed my point entirely. When a policeman calmly explains to you that you are not allowed to be in a particular area for 10 mintues and the whole crowd screams in disapproval and refuses to leave, so the police use force to remove the crowd, and someone tapes a 30 second clip of this, you can see how you can get the wrong impression.

Maybe the portestors are in the right and their presence is protected by the first amendment, but that's a whole different story. It'd also be a different story if they weren't allowed to protest at all, but they are. Just not absolutely whenever and wherever they want.

Is that the story behind every single one of these instances? Of course not. But I'd wager it's the story behind a vast majority of them. Unfortunately, there is no way to know if I'm right or not, as these clips do not provide any insight into that. Just senzationalism.

[1]: https://youtu.be/QjnMuujUGq8

It's not at all obvious to me that the majority of policemen don't support the abuses, even if they aren't all getting their hands dirty.

I can't see how you can classify this as an abuse. Yeah, the cops should have apprehended him instead of pushing him after he started scanning their equipment, or whatever he was doing, but it's very clear from the clip the officers had no intention of harming the man. You even have some guys in green checking on him at the tail end of the video. The officer which pushes him also appears to try to help immediately after the incident - even if it's not exactly clear what he was trying to do -, before he is pushed back in formation.

Did any officer resign in solidarity with George Floyd's murderer? Or in some other incident which we can all agree is an abuse?

Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?

On top of that they're a fairly politically active group, so they have an outsized influence on policies, including those that affect them.

But the biggest issue, as you note, is the sheer disparity in who interacts with the police at all.

From a 2015 Bureau of Justic Statistics report

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf

Only about 10% of Americans had police-initiated, non-traffic stop contacts.

So 9 out of 10 Americans never see the police, much less have insight as to whether they're too violent.

Blacks 50% more likely than Whites to be subjected to a street stop by police.

Blacks 120% (!) more likely than Whites to be subjected to police force.

And, every single respondent who indicated they were Tasered by police felt it was "excessive" force.

So, yes, fundamentally this is a "rights of the minority" problem - and the minority in this case are younger, poorer, less politically connected, and therefore are underrepresented in discussions about police brutality, effective law enforcement, police training, and other policies which impact them.

The efforts to "defund police" would solve some of the same problems that police currently address through other means. This would weaken the influence of police unions. For example, spending more to treat drug addiction as a disease rather than paying police to address possession as a crime.

I am just curious at this choice of word that seems to be the clarion call, which means entirely different in the dictionary than what is being implied! :-/

I am now genuinely curious to know how this is to be achieved, and what safeguards/guarantees are to be encoded so the new org does not devolve into the existing police.

(BTW some people actually do want to eliminate the police)

"Defund the police" in the 'mainstream' such as there is one, means to reduce funding for law enforcement and shift that funding to public health, social workers, and community programs, in a way that reduces the scope of calls police will get, and reduce the number of calls police are required to respond to.

Police Unions are not publicly funded, so defunding them doesn't make sense. Renegotiating collective bargaining agreements with unions does. "Smash Police Unions" has a nice ring to it.

https://time.com/5848705/disband-and-replace-minneapolis-pol...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/poll-pr...

> Does this mean that people just do not care, or there is only some minority who thinks that the police is too violent and the rest is ok with that?

Yeah, basically. Especially that last part.

Just as a synopsis, systemic racism became a more subtle segregation. POC (People or Person of Color) were systematically made to appear more violent and criminal-like over time. Combine that notion with an idealized notion of the police as hero figures and you have a recipe for rationalizing violence against POC.

Mobile phone videos allowed us to see from the victim's perspective just how brutal police have become.

"How it happens that all those mayors and sheriffs are still in the office if police brutality is such a big issue?"

To this point, you need to understand about voting districts and how POC voting power has been diluted and prevented over decades.

Eventually I saw a pattern, surprising since it was common in major cities all across the US and as if there were some single, central training materials. Apparently:

(1) Police are taught to be in control of any contact with a citizen. Recently the police have been taught to act nice initially, but, once it is clear some actual law enforcement is to be involved, be in control.

Being in control can mean that the citizen has been intimidated and made submissive so that they won't resist. Part of this is to demand that a citizen DO some little things, e.g., stand with feet apart, move back 10 feet, or tolerate being falsely accused of something, e.g., "weaving" in the road, being too close to the officer, etc. The officers are looking for things, even trivial, fake things, to object to so that they can object. It's like Captain Sobel in the 101st Airborne training in the series Band of Brothers -- "find some" infractions so that can complain about them and force the soldiers to accept being falsely accused so that they will be more compliant -- the police seem to have borrowed this tactic.

If the citizen does not look submissive, then the officer provokes a defensive reaction from the citizen so that they can arrest the citizen or threaten to arrest them.

Then, finally, maybe arrested, the citizen has been subdued and is submissive, which is what the police wanted to begin with.

(2) The police like to teach citizens, to change their attitude, and do this by hurting them, e.g., hitting them with a club, bending their arms, throwing them to the ground and putting a knee on their neck, spraying them with pepper spray, etc. They regard good police work as meting out "cruel and unusual punishment", with pain and maybe serious injury, without "due process". So, the police want to be absolute dictators on the streets.

(3) In a confrontation with a citizen, the police want some result where they successfully took some law enforcement action, a ticket or an arrest. E.g., in Atlanta, at first they didn't want merely to leave the citizen alone or, if the citizen was drunk, let him call a cab and (ii) later wanted to make sure the citizen was not able just to run away. The reaction to a citizen running away?

"Shoot them and kill them. Gee, they might 'get away'; can't permit that; that would violate due respect for the police; so, shoot the citizen." -- or some such.

(4) The expected, usual approach to an arrest is to throw the citizen to the ground, hold them down with a knee to their neck, their arms behind their back, and put on handcuffs.

From the 100 or so videos I watched, it appeared that (1)-(4) are so standard that they have been taught from some standard source. E.g., in all of that, some semi-bright guy had the idea that it was good to put a knee on a neck, and it appears that that is now standard.

Apparently part of (1)-(4) is the associated support for it from the Blue Line, e.g., police unions, Police Benevolent Associations, liability insurance cities buy for their police, the norm of police sticking together, local prosecutors, DAs, and judges who work daily with police and want to cooperate, politicians who want safe streets, etc. And at times maybe there has been more to police power, e.g., confiscating cash, shakedowns, payoffs, etc.

I'm sure that changing (1)-(4) can be done but won't be easy.

Police are expected to acquire control of any situation they are called to through seizing initiative. This means that they don't wait for anyone to take any action, but immediately take verbally or physically dominating actions.

It is nearly impossible to acquire control of US civilians without violating the Constitution or Bill of Rights. Once someone has violated the law, the police are protected in terms of this violation, but because they are trained to acquire immediate control, they most often are violating the rights of people who've broken no laws.

If you watched 100 videos of kitchen malpractice within restaurants in which:

- The acts of malpractice had broadly consistent characteristics

- The restaurants in question were all owned under the same organizational umbrella

- That organizational umbrella had the authority and exclusive control of the US government

And then drew the conclusion that maybe there were systemic problems that lead to these remarkably consistent issues, you'd be completely rational.

As for your other comparison between this and "the media" curating street interviews, I don't see the parallels at all.

A news outlet using a random interview with a person on the street as evidence that people are "divided over climate change" is clearly manipulative. In this case, a person is saying "Police are routinely using military equipment and force tactics against US citizens in disturbing ways. Here are 700 videos of it as evidence."

Compare that to the opaqueness of police misconduct/brutality internal investigations, or how frequently even the bad actors that are known to have done wrong, are still granted their pensions. Where is the equivalent payout for a restaurant owner who doesn't follow health rules? Where do you see other restaurant owners banding together to defend a restaurateur who's had their misconduct exposed? Where do you see something equivalent to "qualified immunity" for the food industry?

In other words, this is a great example of a reasonably well-functioning market. If regulating the police behaved much more like regulating the food industry, that would actually be fantastic. In many ways, that is exactly the goal of the protests, to bring a similar level of transparency and accountability and high standards to policing, as most people already expect and has long been standard for the food industry (in developed countries).

Police don't have a centralized authority. And it really depends on how big the chain restaurant is if 100 videos would have it shut down.

The better argument is that each one of those restaurants would be exposed and either they would put in enough effort to show they have improved or people would stop eating there. You can't boycott your local police.

What's the analogous conclusion from this to police brutality videos? You watch 100 and begin to think you should never talk to a cop again?

Sure you can post up a bad conclusion to draw and then attack it. I'm pretty sure there's a name for this sort of thing.

You can do better than this rhetoric question. The analogous conclusion would be that there is a systemic issue with the police and you'd prefer not to deal with them again, by defunding or dissolving the police force (seems to be a current wish by many).

> Sure you can post up a bad conclusion to draw and then attack it. I'm pretty sure there's a name for this sort of thing.

Sure you can pretend it's a bad conclusion when it's about the effect of watching selected videos and how drawing any conclusions from that is naive.

If you did that, and then decided we needed either better laws concerning food safety, or better enforcement of existing laws... where is the logical issue? If someone was to make the argument that a certain tolerance of bad food handling is to be allowed, then we would need to know the rate to know if we needed to make changes, but if the view point is that no restaurant should be engaging in that behavior then I don't particularly see the issue.

What about just thinking that restaurants need serious reform and accountability?

No of course not, but there are measures you can take to reduce bad practices, which is why we do those measures for restaurants! Let's make police accountable for their crimes the same way we make restaurant owners and employees accountable for e.g. food safety issues.

The police are uniquely powerful against normal citizens. Not only are these videos clearly representative of a large number of abuses, but their colleagues rarely try to stop those abuses. Few of them will be held accountable. The police are almost always above the law, if not outright immune.

In "cop vs. citizen" when it's just words, cops will always win. Even when there is video, it is difficult to get justice. A cop unjustly hitting someone and a citizen unjustly hitting someone are two different crimes, in my opinion, and the cop committed the far worse of the two.

The fact that everyone watching George Floyd get murdered in slow motion was too scared to tackle that cop is proof enough of the power to kill with impunity that cops have.

You lost that bet.

Yeah there's no reason to make a fuzz about it. It becomes a bit different when the food and safety inspection routinely comes in and says yeah that's alright, keep going.

Perhaps not at a national level if there's no clear unison there but at least at a local level. Like, for example it doesn't get to me much that Philip Brailsford killed a guy. I've been desensitized much by the internet. The fact that he was rehired to get a lifelong 2500$ a month tho gives a different message about accountability in that area.

Living there would make me look differently at the taxes I pay and make me fearfull and distrustfull of police.

That's not my impression when people are openly calling for defunding or disbanding police departments. Those who are concerned with the tails are the sane voices drowning in a sea of insanity these days.

I agree that the outliers are the problem, but how uncommon they are cannot be determined in this way.

At least this one comes clearly labelled and backed by some evidence.

If you see a single restaurant chain use horrible ingredients for humans, trans fats, far too many preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, over and over, you should never eat there again. I've personally cut out mcdonalds, and the fast food garbage restaurants. It doesn't mean every restaurant is bad, it means some restaurant models are bad. I still eat shawarma, I still eat indian and thai, and my family still owns an italian restaurant where we also don't try to poison our customers with horrible ingredients.

If you're comparing police to restaurants, then let me ask you, then on a scale of Taco Bell to El Buli, where does the current american system police system lie on the scale? I'd argue it's more like at the dumpster outside of your local mcdonalds.

And also people like lists.

At least in that case you wouldn't have people arguing that the kids deserved it.

> Horror porn is not an intellectual argument.

This isn't porn, this is filming reality as it happens. I know we're all a bit numbed, but this reminds me of the decisions by the Allied forces to document Auschwitz as well as possible when it was overrun, or how the BBC footage of the Ethiopian famine sparked Live Aid. The act of filming has a habit of cutting through all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit from those arguing in favour of the brutality.

Damn. Well that's the best rebuttle I'm going to see this week.

> This isn't porn, this is filming reality as it happens. I know we're all a bit numbed, but this reminds me of the decisions by the Allied forces to document Auschwitz as well as possible when it was overrun, or how the BBC footage of the Ethiopian famine sparked Live Aid. The act of filming has a habit of cutting through all the pseudo-intellectual bullshit from those arguing in favour of the brutality.

To add to this sentiment; this is literally what's going on in the USA right now. Obviously it isn't every cop in every city, or protesters would be exercising their 2nd amendment rights en masse. But these actions documented here are inarguably immoral, and IF they are legal, the law needs to be changed immediately. It's absolutely disgusting, and if seeing these videos of police brutality doesn't invoke that feeling in you, take some time to imagine it's you or your loved one getting beaten, maced, tear gassed. These forms of crowd control are immensely painful, pain that a lot of us have never felt, and they leave lasting damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbf0x_K9i54

+ How do you know your partner is behind you?

+ How do you know he won't take your gun after he uses the taser on you?

+ How do you know it was a taser?

+ Are you confident enough in those answers to miss your daughter's next birthday?

So he knows his taser has the stopping power of a nerf gun at that point. The corollary is that he knows the taser in the hands of the victim is also out of range, also has the stopping power of a nerf gun. After this is known, because it is known, he drops his taser and draws his pistol, which does have the range.

This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.

In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.

US police forces seem to have a very short training which, as far as I understand is not centrally vetted by any federal organism? And considering the short training time it seems to be mostly focused on tactical and firearm training.

Compare that with European forces and you see a completely different reality. In Europe the police is generally seen as peace-keepers, force is absolutely a last resort (probably not so true for crowd control units but certainly true for daily policing).

Correct; some states have laws mandating training hours for barbers that are longer than that mandated for police [0].

> not centrally vetted by any federal organism

As with many things in the US, these rules are mostly state-based (read: 50 different, often overlapping but also often contradictory systems) but with a patchwork of federal oversight.

For example, in 2012, the federal government stepped in with a judicial document called a "consent decree" aimed at reforming the Seattle police department after "a pattern or practice of excessive force that violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law" [1].

That's an example of federal oversight, but it only happens after problems have already occurred; it only applies to the city of Seattle; and it's temporary. Only a month ago [2] the city was in court petitioning for "we're all better now, federal oversight can end".

After saying in court they were reformed and would no longer use excessive force, Seattle PD used so much tear gas in a residential neighborhood that it seeped into peoples' homes [3]. Then they announced a 30 day ban on use of tear gas [4]. Then about 48 hours later they used tear gas anyway (after using "blast balls" containing "pepper spray gas" the previous night and insisting it didn't count as tear gas). Finally a federal judge stepped in [5] and issued a 14 day ban on its use - another example of our federal oversight being reactive and not proactive.

Oh, and did I mention Seattle PD shot a "less-lethal" grenade round directly at a protester, causing enough blunt force trauma to stop her heart and require life-saving CPR? [6] That was on the same night they used tear gas after promising not to.

And they threw flashbang grenades at the medics who were trying to save her life. [7]

(in case it's not obvious, I'm a Seattle resident and I'm pissed)

Another example of how complicated our justice system can be that might surprise people from other countries is all the levels of police forces we have - city police / county sheriff / state police (plus federal law enforcement - FBI, TSA, border patrol, and so on). Especially in rural areas the county sheriff often wields a tremendous amount of power [8].

0: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/28/us/jobs-training-police-trnd/...

1: http://www.seattlemonitor.com/overview

2: https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/05/08/city-of-seattle-fi...

3: https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/06/04/43840246/seattle...

4: https://crosscut.com/2020/06/seattle-issues-30-day-ban-tear-...

5: https://www.kuow.org/stories/federal-judge-in-seattle-bans-u...

6: https://www.kuow.org/stories/this-26-year-old-died-three-tim...

7: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/gywxhz/folks_i_nee...

8: https://theappeal.org/the-power-of-sheriffs-an-explainer/

states run themselves, and the federal judiciary basically only steps in when state/local governments don't follow their own rules (the presumed expression of the will of the people) or violate the constitution. the constrained executive response follows from the judiciary (and sometimes the legislature).

and that's the way it should be. you want power local and limited, not consolidated and far away. that would only make things like use of force worse.

so the immediate appeal to authority should be to the local, and then state, judiciary and legislature stepping in with corrective actions. the feds aren't of much use here. they're intentionally a line of last (and slow) resort.

it's worse if we had the same sordid problems at a state or national level. it's rolling the dice once or 50 times vs. rolling them ~50,000 times.

Maybe in your country but in many, many places in the world this is demonstrably not the case.

as with markets, idiosyncratic conditions like sociopathy can lead to pockets of undue concentrations of power, no doubt.

but it would be even worse if those same conditions were concentrated on and elevated to wider populations. by distributing power, you can more effectively pit one against the other, and have some chance of bettering conditions over time. those chances decrease with power concentration.

Thanks for laying out some of that context on Seattle PD.

Normal summer weekend you have at least couple dozen people shot(not by cops, so you never hear about them)

Nevertheless, a large percentage of situations can be de-escalated by police forces. What is even less acceptable, is that in many cases the escalation is originating from police officers. Which is why, to me, de-escalation and conflict management training is lacking among these officers.

Going back to your point, it is a really complex issue and I am not going to claim a deep understanding of US society.

There is a huge percentage of GDP spent on welfare in most EU countries, the welfare and safety nets put in place are (mostly) accepted in the EU because of a sense of solidarity and dignity and a mutual understanding that _anyone_ can be caught in a situation where they are facing social/family/health/finacial issues. Being misfortunate should not be punished with falling through the cracks of society. I get the impression that in the US this type of belief would be an outlier.

However, putting aside the humanitarian values, there is a very practical and utilitarian aspect to EU welfare and social benefits programs, they actually detract people from marginal behaviour because it stops them from being pushed into a corner.

There is a lot of evidence that social welfare safety nets reduce crime. Equally, there is evidence that insufficient welfare correlates with crime rise. [0]

And this I think, is a huge cultural shift. The outrage in the US would be huge if we tried to rationalize that we have to take tax money from everyone, to give free-money to people on the fringes of society, in order to reduce gun violence. However, all the EU policies for the past 40 years confirm this reasoning.

[0] Social determinants of health in relation to firearm-related homicides in the United States: A nationwide multilevel cross-sectional study, D. Kim, 2019 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Hiring and firing by this metric is also lacking.

IMO, the issue is that the US Police are not one organization. There are over 10,000 police departments in America. In some towns, the Sheriff + Deputies are less than 10 people.

Some towns have a Sheriff who is democratically elected. This leads to massive lack of accountability, because there's no chance the Sheriff could be fired before the next election.

Under such a system, why would a Sheriff, or their deputies, ever get deescalation training?

-------------

Washington DC serves as a great example of how confusing this gets when you start actually tracing the power structures.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/14/politics/trump-church-protest...

The shear amount of "blame shifting" going on for the Lafayette Park clearing is staggering.

> More than a half-dozen officials from the National Guard, federal law enforcement and public safety agencies have challenged the Trump administration's narrative that the clearing of peaceful protesters outside the White House earlier this month was unrelated to President Donald Trump's subsequent walk to a nearby church for a photo-op, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

...

> But officials told The Post they weren't warned that US Park Police planned to push the perimeter or that force would be used.

...

> The US Secret Service issued a statement Saturday admitting that an agency employee used pepper spray on June 1 during efforts to secure Lafayette Square and clear protesters.

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/tear-gas-g...

> US Park Police, Arlington Police, DC Metro Police and the Secret Service have all denied using any kind of chemical irritants in Lafayette Square Monday evening. But WUSA9 crews were there, witnessed tear gas being deployed and collected the canisters afterward.

So at a minimum, there are ~5 Police Forces, each with different accountability structures, involved in the Lafyette Square clearing. It probably was only ONE Police Force that messed up (probably US Park Police??) that was the site of the brutal beatdown.

But all the different organizations get the blame, even if the officers are of completely different organizations.

------------

US Citizens typically have to deal with ~3 police organizations per location. The city (or county) police, the state police, and finally the federal police.

And the Feds are organized into multiple different police: DEA, ATF, FBI, and ICE.

There's a "weak" culture... the "thin blue line" where Police Officers do stand to protect each other, even if they are from different organizations. But when it comes to accepting the blame, they actually shift the blame between each other a lot. So you need to be very knowledgeable about your local police structure before you can even cast blame in a proper manner.

Even if some organizations are considered good (ie: FBI generally has a very good reputation), other organizations (ie: ICE) have a pretty negative reputation in unwanted use of force.

------

Finally, a little example for how confusing this can get.

-- If you have a Sheriff, your only means of accountability is the election next year. A Sheriff and their deputies can pretty much do whatever they want. Any issues must be taken up with the Sheriff themselves in the meantime. If the Sheriff is uncooperative, you're left with voting them out next election (which is surprisingly difficult, because no one pays attention to local politics in America).

-- A Police "Chief" is typically a position that is held accountable by the Mayor. You can ask the Chief for police reforms, but traditionally people complain to the Mayor instead. IMO, this is a bit better than the Sheriff positions, since the Mayor can run on a platform of police reform in theory.

-- A Police Commissioner is held accountable by the City's Board. You need to convince a majority of the board member that there is a problem. Even if you convince your local board member that there's a problem, they will hold no power unless you convince the majority of the board.

-- Some municipalities, such as NYPD, have a citizen complain board, who are the dedicated organization to hear complaints. They'll issue lawyers to citizens who complain about issues to individually represent citizens in court. In these municipalities, the best action you'll get is from the citizen review board.

You would expect directly elected police to increase accountability, but the question as always is: to whom? If the local electorate is racist, they're going to support racist violence from the police.

The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.

I don't. I have a sheriff and I barely keep up with the issue between elections. And to be honest, local police in my area are a non-issue, I've never had issues with them personally. (IMO: this is because I live in a richer suburban area. Police are well paid, college-educated, and low-stress compared to the city police)

Between the county council, my city's mayor, the state governor, the state representative, the state senator, my US Senator, my US Representative, the President, the School superintendant, roughly 4 or 5 different judges, and the sheriff... I'm frankly leaving most of my election sheet blank during elections.

Besides, the Sheriff has been running unopposed for the last decade. Even if there was an issue, its not like there's even another guy for me to vote for.

I'd have much more trust in a Chief or Commissioner setup. I at least know the name of my county executive and somewhat keep up with what my county executive does.

But the only way you can convince me that my local police, that I'm voting for directly, has any issue, is if protests erupted in my local neighborhood. A lot of these videos that are being posted online do not apply to me or my vote.

> The very large number of police organisations produces some stupidities, like a tiny "city" that's mostly funded by stopping people going 1 mile over the speed limit on the nearby highway, but almost all the big problems are the big unitary police forces of the big cities: New York, Chicago, LA, etc.

Is it really? Think about it. The NYC officers who shoved the man were fired pretty quickly. While its basically impossible to fire a Sheriff.

Hypothetically, how would you convince me or raise awareness if my local sheriff was a problem? No major protests were in my neighborhood.

And I'm somewhat connected and informed about these matters. I've got friends who are fully ignorant, or are even 100% on the police side on this issue. How do you expect to convince them to vote for a new sheriff?

Its not really a system I'm a fan of. The voting population only can pay attention to so many issues, we should have our representatives pick (and hold accountable) more positions.

A reference I never expected to see on HN.

It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.

I don't want to watch three seasons of it just to understand the reference. A very obscure reference might deserve an explanation to make the remaining 99.9% of the readers able to understand what you mean.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender#Ba_...

https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Conspiracy_of_Ba_Sing_Se

OP is saying you’d need to be incredibly delusional to deny police are brutal and there’s a problem.

Most of us were forced to read 1984 and didn't really enjoy it. ATLA however, is something that we organically grew up with through high-school / college and actually paid attention to.

My group of friends would be aware of 1984 concepts... such as "Big Brother is Watching" (phrases / concepts which have escaped the book and become a thing of their own). But I don't think we'd recognize the phrase "At War with Eurasia".

Honestly, the only reason why I remember "At War with Eurasia" is because I was a quiz-bowl player and was forced to memorize key phrases from many books I barely read. Even if I did read 1984 in my high school classes, it never actually stuck with me.

1984 is a very popular and influential book.

I fairly confident that if you asked the authors of Avatar The Last Airbender they would tell you straight that they’d based that idea on 1984.

I’d be willing to bet people will be quoting 1984 long after ATLA has been forgotten.

The original two posters in this thread were also intimately familiar with Ba Sing Se / Avatar the Last Airbender. So multiple people here are fully aware of the reference and are in good communication.

I probably wouldn't reach for a reference to ATLA myself. But, apparently its popular enough that plenty of different posters in this very discussion are aware of it and able to explain to other people here the concept.

I'm your age and I never even heard of Avatar the Last Airbender. I'm sure my younger cousins know about it.

My anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise, but I’d love some real data - how are you measuring that?

These are all late 20s, early 30s people, Brazilians, Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch and so on, 1984 would immediately be known by most, quite a few have read it, none (even if they know about ATLA, what many don't) would get the reference.

Interesting I can cite a conversation I had not long ago with them to act as anecdotal data, I'm really interested to see what is the split here.

Since it was American made, that makes it a cartoon and not an anime.

Actual genres would be "Shonen" (Dragonball Z, Full Metal Alchemist, My Hero Academia), "RomCom" (Ah My Goddess, SNAFU), "Magical Girl" (Sailor Moon, Pretty Cure), Mecha (Gundam), "Sci Fi" (Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in a Shell), "Mindfuck" (Evangeleon, Paprika, Paranoia Agent), or "Isekai" (Overlord, Sword Art, Slime)

And a few shows are blend between genres. Both Inuyasha and Kenshin are Shonen + RomCom blends for example. There are a few shows I can't pin down exactly (Little Witch Academia doesn't seem to follow any genre rules... too many action scenes / stress to be Iyashi. Not enough transformation scenes to be magical girls. Not cute enough to be a moe. Too much supernatural to be slice of life)

---------

Each genre of anime has its own art style, expectations, and writing style. Avatar would probably be a Shonen if I were to pin it to a specific genre (Child protagonist, action scenes aimed primarily at young male audiences... a "Shonen" or young male demographic). Avatar's artstyle is reminiscent of Shonen as well.

Paprika is definitely an "anime", but look at Paprika's art style: https://i.imgur.com/Sf0jtn0.png

Or "Night is short, Walk on Girl": https://i.imgur.com/Tz7w9bo.png

Both Paprika and "Night is short..." are anime and considered anime by the whole community. But stylistically, they are no where close to Avatar, DBZ, Full Metal Alchemist.

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The most consistent definition of anime is Japanese origin, or at least "Eastern" cartoons. "Anime-style" describes Avatar, Teen Titans, and RWBY. But its not really acceptable in the community to call those shows "anime". But I guess if we want to get technical about genres and definitions, "Anime" is a word that's too ill-defined to really be useful in these kinds of discussions.

I think it’d be counter-productive if everyone who didn’t understand a reference or technical concept on here wrote a comment asking for a shortcut explanation rather than maybe five minutes Googling and maybe watching a quick YouTube video (in this case).

I guess I'm in favor of obscure references, I think even if I hadn't understood I would think that must mean something really delusional.

Quick spot check in my company's Slack channel -- One person in our team of 12 knew what the reference met.

But of course that's not going to happen. For modern people with attention span of a goldfish it's too much of an effort to read long texts - thus they'll just keep watching the news, or reading short, one-sided tweets full of hate.

I don't blame them, Twitter is it's own special hell and widely regarded as a bubble.

Twitter as another resource was an example. But yes, you can look on Twitter and find many different perspectives about a topic. I would think someone who knows how to spend some time understanding multiple perspectives of an issue knows how to look in many different places for them.

As far as the rest of your comment, I think you're going way off-base here. Sorry.

Some people just don’t spend their time watching TV.

Edit: I know downvote edits are frowned up but... I need to ask: why are people downvoting this? Do you not think NCIS is good example of a mainstream show?

Also, HN is a global community, and even though many television shows are watched internationally, their impact on pop culture overall can be drastically different. So, you can't assume a major show in your country will be readily recognized by your fellow nerds in another country.

Let me remind you that the whole discussion started by me highlighting the popularity of The Last Airbender (due to Netflix, as someone pointed out) by comparing it to a mainstream show. I could have taken any popular show but thought taking the one topping the charts would be enough to illustrate it. Apparently not, and in the future I must carefully review the viewing habits of the whole HN community in order to make a point and not offend anyone.

So let me revise the comment: The Last Airbender is as mainstream as any other popular show today.

Looks like the original show only (at #2, after NFL). New Orleans is at #22 and Los Angeles at #28.

If you read the sibling comments they are trying to say NCIS is not mainstream at all since TV ratings mean nothing, making the opposite point of yours. You guys are impossible.

The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.

In fact, you cant really call someone a criminal until they've been convicted of a crime - cue the video of the cops being called by the black store owner, punching him in the face and breaking his jaw while the white thief leaves.

This is a technical nicety not available to a policeman in a real situation. If someone points a gun at them, that someone is a criminal, even if they are "technically" not.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/outrage-vide...

It is extremely hard to react with anything but EXTREME vitriol to comments like yours - police are using excessive force deliberately, and then arresting people with no cause who post videos of their crimes.

Without more context, I'm guessing their parents took them to a protest and acted illegally. If so, I think that's rather poor parenting.

There doesn't seem to be a link to the full video (or any video), so take that with a grain of salt.

Even countries with less violent police corps often have episodes like this.

To keep it out of political rallies, just think of police vs hooligans in Europe.