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 Originally Posted by OngBonga
I agree. This is cause for outrage. But don't punish society by making the streets less safe. Take the badges off these cops, prosecute them if necessary. Send the message that they won't get away with being irresponsible and trigger happy. But police still need to be able to deal with someone drunk at the wheel of the car. In the UK, that's grounds for arrest. If they simply arrested him, let him sleep it off in a cell, and dealt with him in the morning, this would be no problem.
I'm not talking about punishment. I'm talking about taking a clear-eyed stock of what we have and how we got here. I'm talking about understanding the perspectives on all sides and listening to responsible adults describe their problems with the current system.
Taking badges from the cops is near impossible in the US, which is a solution gone out of hand. The solution being that police serve a particular function that puts them in position to make life-or-death decisions, and that stress must be allowed some leeway in interpreting things like murder.
I agree that police need some protection and understanding when it comes to prosecuting their in-the-moment decisions. I agree that cops need to be allowed leeway. In life-and-death situations, one must act fast and that can mean less consistently "correct" results. I do want cops to feel empowered to react in ways that end threats to society.
However, the US doctrine of "qualified immunity" has been pushed way too far. In effect, a police officer cannot be prosecuted for actions taken in the line of duty unless an (in practice) identical case has been successfully prosecuted. In effect, the way these laws are treated today is that there is always enough different for the defense to note that there is not direct legal precedent to prosecute and the case is thrown out.
Some regions have made subtle changes to this over the past year, but system-wide, it's mostly the same.
Originally Posted by OngBonga
If I were a cop in USA, I'd live in fear of my life with every interaction with the public. Guns are the problem here. If the population is armed, then the police need to be.
I agree.
I do question if everyone who arrives on the scene needs to be armed, though.
I question if having an unarmed person on the scene, trained in conflict deescalation, who is in primary charge of the situation would help get fewer violent outcomes.
I agree that having "combat" trained police is essential to an effective police force. I question whether the ones with primarily combat training should be the ones in charge in all first-response situations.
Question. I'm not making assumptions one way or the other. I'm brainstorming, here.
Originally Posted by OngBonga
I find it hard to believe this is a common occurrence. Most people if they fear for their lives will simply comply, act very passively, they're not going to leg it or fight armed cops. People shouldn't be afraid of police, assuming they are not criminals, and if they are then that is a problem that needs addressing.
Over the year of 2020 people died by being shot by police at a rate of about 2 per day in the US.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/...olice-by-race/
I wish it was uncommon, but it's not.
Note that ~12% of the US population is black, but the ratio of blacks killed in this way is well above that.
Originally Posted by OngBonga
But as I said before, it can't come at the cost of taking police off the streets altogether. That doesn't make people safer. Most people who get shot by police needed shooting because they were a serious threat to other people. The police should be doing everything possible to ensure people who don't deserve to be shot don't get shot. Sometimes it will inevitably happen, and when it does, it gets massive media attention.
Unfortunately, it happens every day and the media attention just isn't there unless there's massive external coverage. Like with George Floyd, there were multiple non-police controlled cameras on the incident that went public. What we all saw on those videos was unmistakable. It was clear cut.
The fact that that's what it took to get the first police officer convicted of murder in the state of Minnessotta is antithetical to your assumption that police abusing their power will get media attention at all, let alone massive media attention.
If there were no cameras on that situation, 100% of the time, Chauvin walks. 100% of the time, their initial police report is taken as fact, and their assertion that he was resisting arrest and continuing to struggle while restrained would have been the reported news.
Originally Posted by OngBonga
As you describe that incident, then there is no way this man should have been shot. He should have been quickly arrested and left in a cell overnight. So the policing here seems very much lacking in competence. That needs addressing, no question.
So we agree that there are reasons that certain groups of people in the US might view the police as a threat to their freedom, and even their life?
Not saying those groups are right, or that the actions by these 2 cops in Atlanta is what all cops would have done in that situation.
Just that these situations are not isolated incidents, and that there are reasons people could interpret this pattern of incidents as a threat to their freedom and livelihood. Rational people. Honest, non-criminal, loving, hard-working people.
If I may inject a shitty metaphor:
If you can't tell which mushrooms are poisonous, you fear all unknown mushrooms.
Originally Posted by OngBonga
You refer to this a lot, and while I'm not arguing with you, all I'm aware of is cannabis, which is no longer treated with the same degree of gravity in USA (for the most part, best I can tell). What other racist laws exist? I'm almost certain this is not a problem in the UK. Cannabis laws here discriminate against a fuck ton of white people as well as black people. Weed isn't really black culture, it's human culture.
Law should be easier to change than the behaviour of individual police.
Marijuana was boosted to a schedule 1 drug by the Nixon administration to oppress Nixon's opposition - hippies. The example that using a law to persecute Americans is right there, just this one wasn't targeted at blacks. This kind of law-making has a long, long history in the US.
A brief history of the systemic denial of the right to vote by colored communities:
https://www.americanprogress.org/iss...can-democracy/
Or here's a tiny snapshot of why understanding the history is vital to understanding the present.
The point is that this level of insidious division and unequal treatment is everywhere in the US. Racist law makers realized they couldn't use the N-word, so they found other ways to deny privileges to black people and other culturally marginalized groups.
The isolation of wealth from certain communities is still a monumental factor in the wealth depravity of many inner-city communities of various marginalized groups. Banks continued to use racist practices in giving loans for decades after the whole red-line stuff in that video I linked. That's semi-tangential to the legal side of things, but indicative that this insidious racism that we'd all love to write off as a conspiracy theory is a conspiracy, but it's very real, and well documented.
Originally Posted by OngBonga
I appreciate you're not saying abolish the police, oskar said that, and that's why we're talking about it. You seem to be saying things that I agree with... reform. Where we disagree is the need for an active police force. You were the one who pointed out ancient civilisations didn't have police forces. I've argued you can't compare civilisations. I'm saying we need a police force, and I can't really figure out if you agree or disagree because you're so defensive when I mention the word "abolish".
Not even ancient civilizations. I don't know of a civilization 200 years ago or prior that had a standing civilian-regulating militia.
We can talk about the Spanish inquisition and other historically short-lived movements, but those are different enough to set them apart, IMO.
The Romans had soldiers stationed in major cities, but they were largely there for defense of the place, and not for regulating the civilians, though they would step in when needed. This is more common throughout history.
The reason I point it out is to spur the notion that the assumption that - of course in order to have law and order in a civilization, you have to have police - is simply not a fact. It's only come into prevalence in the past ~150 years or so.
My point isn't to say that modern societies definitely don't need police. My point is to break the implicit assumption that we do. My point is to open the door to investigate why we made this change, and what we can learn upon a reflection of the past 150 years of its implementation.
Societies evolve. Technology changes. Population pressures change. I don't suspect that the presence of a well-trained police force is a negative change. Quite the opposite.
Originally Posted by OngBonga
We should all want the same thing... law and order, public safety, a civilised society.
I believe that policing in some form is necessary for societies of modern scale to function smoothly.
A lot of what was happening prior to formal police forces was vigilantism, without formal courts or even normalized laws, let alone equal enforcement. I'm not trying to suggest it was the good-old-days. I'm just saying we should examine what we get for our money.
That hints at what I suspect we get - a normalized implementation of law - but I suspect it's much more than that.
It's just that this normalized implementation is a privilege (in the US) afforded to certain groups and not others, so ineffective on the greater scale of public support, IMO.
Originally Posted by OngBonga
I mean it's like blaming soldiers for the atrocities of war. The crimes are committed by those pulling the strings, not the puppets.
That depends a great deal on the specifics.
What were the exact orders? What were any implicit orders? Did anyone violate international war crimes? Who?
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