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To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is n

by devcpp 6y ago

To be fair you are comparing an adversarial job with a cooperative one. A crane operator won't feel unsafe, or confronted by someone he calls hostile. This is no excuse whatsoever for the multitude of outraging problems in the system, but the comparison isn't straightforward.

baddox 6y ago
Quite the opposite. The adversarial job should have higher standards of conduct, not lower.
- user_0x 6y ago
  This is exactly how I think about the police issue in the US. If someone has more power, as in, they are allowed to carry guns and arrest people if they need to, then those people also cannot expect it to be a "normal" job where they matter more than who they are working with (the public). The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.
- riffraff 6y ago
  But the comment wasn't saying the behaviour is fine, just that the job is more likely to produce this sort of content. 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.
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    Or police vs tekno dancers (remember CzechTek 2005?)
    - Gravityloss 6y ago
      Didn't know about this event, very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005
    - butterknife 6y ago
      I was there. This is why I left the rotten country. They were using it as some free for all practice complete with tear gas grenades and a water cannon truck. They even brought a tank to show off.
      - TomMarius 6y ago
        All places seem to be similarly bad today. Where did you go?
        butterknife 6y ago
        You will laugh. UK. I value the respect of law that penetrates their society noticeably deeper than in Czechia.
  - baddox 6y ago
    The comment mentioned fairness, which is different than simply what we would predict.
- alexashka 6y ago
  All humans, not just jobs, should have higher standards of conduct, don't you think? Where are you going to get the humans who are able, wanting and willing to live up those higher standards is my question for you. Last I checked, anyone can decide at any moment to be completely broke, a drug addict, a criminal, an alcoholic, a piece of shit, have an unlimited number of children and everyone else has to support them for some reason. What kind of standard of conduct is that? You won't ever get people to conduct themselves properly if ignore evolution and pretend you can magically educate people into not being animals. Americans don't even bother with trying to live up to the education myth, given how much they pay school teachers. They think they can just import people with higher standards of conduct when they have to and outsource the rest. It's more profitable this way you see, to ignore reality, fund bogus economics, manufacture consent and have this planet go to shit. It's more profitable this quarter you see.
  - baddox 6y ago
    If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever. Similar logic would apply to a position for a crane operator or a pilot. If an airline had a pattern of pilot errors, and their excuse was “if we required all our pilots to have adequate pilot training and meet stringent skill requirements, it would be very difficult to hire pilots,” would you accept that?
    - alexashka 6y ago
      I've thought of a shorter way to answer your question. > If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever. Let's say we decide to pay police officers 1 million/year and really raise their standards. Great! We did it! Why don't we just do that across the board? The answer is - we have a limited number of highly capable people. I see the shortage of highly capable people as a problem. My previous post was a way of highlighting that. One would have to think big picture to understand the point I was making. Regarding leaving positions unfilled - I'm not sure you've thought this through. Imagine we have a shortage of doctors and your appendix burst. Would you rather a medical student try and save your life at say, an estimated 50% success rate, or simply die?
- downerending 6y ago
  Unfortunately, criminals aren't going to have higher standards of conduct, even if they "should". That's why we call them criminals. And the police have to deal with these people all day long--there's no easy comparison to other jobs.
  - hobs 6y ago
    Peaceful protestors are by definition not criminals. People whose rights are violated by the police? Often not criminals as well! 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.
    - vorpalhex 6y ago
      Right but when you start throwing rocks and glass bottles, when you start blocking ambulances and firetrucks on highways, well then you aren't a peaceful protestor anymore.
      - hobs 6y ago
        How about this child shot in the face with a mace canister? Peaceful or violent protestor? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/outrage-video-police-mace-child-seattle-protest 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.
        downerending 6y ago
        Yeah, that sucks. Your description makes it sound like their face was impacted by a metal canister, but looking at the picture, they seem to have simply been maced. 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.
noobaccount 6y ago
A reasonable crane operator would hopefully call for help and not push it to the limit. Personally, I’m not convinced cops need to go for a 100% apprehension rate all the time no matter what with 100% control of every situation. Mostly because of the rate at which crimes happen without a cop around and then go unresolved.
cm2187 6y ago
And this document uses a very liberal definition of police brutality to say the least. In this document, a lot of references to "police arrests someone", "police pushes back a crowd or clears a street", etc...
- camillomiller 6y ago
  Enjoy your alternative reality
  - jagrsw 6y ago
    I live in EU (where, generally, the police is trained to minimize-harm, rather than take-control-by-all-means), and I feel a bit the same about this list; a sizeable share of those videos show regular-ish riot control techniques IMO (pushing the crowd down the street etc.). Then, many show police overreaction or outright brutality. But, then, why mix all of those in one big list and call them simply 'brutality'? As much I sympathise with protestors and the cause, there's this not-very-wise tendency among this side of the conflict to portray themselves as 100% peaceful victims, and police as almost universally working for the forces of darkness. So, I see it as a sad (yet, probably, temporary) tendency, that even the side which I'm sympathising with is feeling that treating me like a gullible person is OK - "The first casualty of War is Truth".
    - partyboat1586 6y ago
      I also live in the EU and sometimes I get annoyed by how soft our police are. I've seen multiple officers unable to take down one violent criminal. Why is there not hand to hand training and strength training? With proper training surely they could do it cleanly without injuring the perp. I've seen (videos of) cops just walking away from armed criminals, letting them rob a store then tracking them down 6 months later after they do the same thing twice more. When I look at the US I see the opposite problem. Police shooting a man in the back multiple times. Police using excessive force when arresting people for non violent crime. Police just generally power tripping. From that perspective I can see why you would want to defund the police but I really would hesitate to do that. The EU is fine with a softer police force because we mostly have no guns and when there are real terrorists we can still bring in armed police. That is not the case in the US plus you are talking about fully defunding the police. Seems like a dangerous experiment to me. Why not reform instead?
madaxe_again 6y ago
I’ve worked in many adversarial roles, and I have never once shot a customer.
- shard972 6y ago
  How often do you need to prevent a customer from stabbing a random person?
camillomiller 6y ago
So just compare It to police officers in other Western countries...
- shard972 6y ago
  What other western countries have 13% of the population as Africans?
- harry8 6y ago
  There's a dead comment in reply to this. I disagree with it as strongly as anything I've seen on HN. I think it racist. I don't think it should be hidden. It highlights a mentality that needs to be known about and considered including any possible sensible response to it. Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country" To what extent do these, not uncommon - even here, sets of beliefs contribute to the problems of violence in policing? Not something that seems to me like a good idea to pretend does not exist or is minor or fringe.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country" Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Haiti, and Malaysia or Mexico, Madagascar, El Salvador, and Rwanda, depending on whether you take the CIA's numbers or the World Bank's. If you look at the list, you'll see that the European countries are closer together and in a different area of the list, the US isn't in their group. Wouldn't that be a better indicator for "similar countries" than average internet speed or NATO membership status? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
    - harry8 6y ago
      The rationale for Brazil was explicitly the same one in the dead comment. But yeah, that's pretty radical what you're saying too. Maybe it's fair that you should only compare the richest nation on earth with much poorer developing nations with a short track record of democracy. Not sure I'd agree.
DeonPenny 6y ago
I agree, but the more I hear about the defund the police narrative the more an agree. Some of these interaction have 0 reason to be adversarial. For example the Rayshard brooks shooting. Why was a gun needed to wake a man sleeping in a car. Why are guns needed to hand out speeding tickets. I get that guns are needed if a bank is being robbed. But this is glorified customer service work. Imagine your car breaks down and the AAA guy who came to fix it had a gun. Like y tho?
- rutthenut 6y ago
  Hmm, let me see. Why might the police need guns to hand out speeding tickets? Perhaps it's because at least some of the people they stop, for speeding or other possible offences, won't take kindly to being stopped and in many parts of the USA, those in the vehicle may be permitted to carry guns of their own... Glorified customer service work? Far from it
  - baddox 6y ago
    But we actually have data on this. Traffic stops are not particularly dangerous for police in the United States. There are laws in place about how legal gun owners must notify law enforcement during traffic stops. In fact, there is no shortage of video of law-abiding citizens in the US notifying law enforcement that they have a legal firearm in the vehicle and receiving a disproportionate response. But you don’t even need to look that closely. There are also video clips of police stops where police tell someone to get their ID, and then immediately murder the person for reaching for their ID.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > There are laws in place about how legal gun owners must notify law enforcement during traffic stops. Isn't the issue with laws that those breaking them don't usually care about laws? I'm sure you have laws in place against murder, and murder still happens. "But there's a law against burglary, why would you want additional protection and have a strong door" isn't a good argument. There are good arguments (and the whole issue is a good gun control argument in general), but that really isn't one.
sambeau 6y ago
Most of what a good police force should be doing isn't adversarial. The police should be trained like peacekeepers.

by devcpp 6y ago

baddox 6y ago

Quite the opposite. The adversarial job should have higher standards of conduct, not lower.

user_0x 6y ago
This is exactly how I think about the police issue in the US. If someone has more power, as in, they are allowed to carry guns and arrest people if they need to, then those people also cannot expect it to be a "normal" job where they matter more than who they are working with (the public). The standards of conduct need to be draconially high, because a police officer has the power to ruin a person's life.
riffraff 6y ago
But the comment wasn't saying the behaviour is fine, just that the job is more likely to produce this sort of content. 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.
- TomMarius 6y ago
  Or police vs tekno dancers (remember CzechTek 2005?)
  - Gravityloss 6y ago
    Didn't know about this event, very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CzechTek#CzechTek_2005
  - butterknife 6y ago
    I was there. This is why I left the rotten country. They were using it as some free for all practice complete with tear gas grenades and a water cannon truck. They even brought a tank to show off.
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      All places seem to be similarly bad today. Where did you go?
      - butterknife 6y ago
        You will laugh. UK. I value the respect of law that penetrates their society noticeably deeper than in Czechia.
- baddox 6y ago
  The comment mentioned fairness, which is different than simply what we would predict.
alexashka 6y ago
All humans, not just jobs, should have higher standards of conduct, don't you think? Where are you going to get the humans who are able, wanting and willing to live up those higher standards is my question for you. Last I checked, anyone can decide at any moment to be completely broke, a drug addict, a criminal, an alcoholic, a piece of shit, have an unlimited number of children and everyone else has to support them for some reason. What kind of standard of conduct is that? You won't ever get people to conduct themselves properly if ignore evolution and pretend you can magically educate people into not being animals. Americans don't even bother with trying to live up to the education myth, given how much they pay school teachers. They think they can just import people with higher standards of conduct when they have to and outsource the rest. It's more profitable this way you see, to ignore reality, fund bogus economics, manufacture consent and have this planet go to shit. It's more profitable this quarter you see.
- baddox 6y ago
  If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever. Similar logic would apply to a position for a crane operator or a pilot. If an airline had a pattern of pilot errors, and their excuse was “if we required all our pilots to have adequate pilot training and meet stringent skill requirements, it would be very difficult to hire pilots,” would you accept that?
  - alexashka 6y ago
    I've thought of a shorter way to answer your question. > If you can’t find someone to fill a position as a police officer, I would suggest increasing the compensation or leaving the position unfilled before simply accepting anyone who might want to be a cop with no standards whatsoever. Let's say we decide to pay police officers 1 million/year and really raise their standards. Great! We did it! Why don't we just do that across the board? The answer is - we have a limited number of highly capable people. I see the shortage of highly capable people as a problem. My previous post was a way of highlighting that. One would have to think big picture to understand the point I was making. Regarding leaving positions unfilled - I'm not sure you've thought this through. Imagine we have a shortage of doctors and your appendix burst. Would you rather a medical student try and save your life at say, an estimated 50% success rate, or simply die?
downerending 6y ago
Unfortunately, criminals aren't going to have higher standards of conduct, even if they "should". That's why we call them criminals. And the police have to deal with these people all day long--there's no easy comparison to other jobs.
- hobs 6y ago
  Peaceful protestors are by definition not criminals. People whose rights are violated by the police? Often not criminals as well! 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.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    Right but when you start throwing rocks and glass bottles, when you start blocking ambulances and firetrucks on highways, well then you aren't a peaceful protestor anymore.
    - hobs 6y ago
      How about this child shot in the face with a mace canister? Peaceful or violent protestor? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/outrage-video-police-mace-child-seattle-protest 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.
      - downerending 6y ago
        Yeah, that sucks. Your description makes it sound like their face was impacted by a metal canister, but looking at the picture, they seem to have simply been maced. 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.

noobaccount 6y ago

A reasonable crane operator would hopefully call for help and not push it to the limit. Personally, I’m not convinced cops need to go for a 100% apprehension rate all the time no matter what with 100% control of every situation. Mostly because of the rate at which crimes happen without a cop around and then go unresolved.

cm2187 6y ago

And this document uses a very liberal definition of police brutality to say the least. In this document, a lot of references to "police arrests someone", "police pushes back a crowd or clears a street", etc...

camillomiller 6y ago
Enjoy your alternative reality
- jagrsw 6y ago
  I live in EU (where, generally, the police is trained to minimize-harm, rather than take-control-by-all-means), and I feel a bit the same about this list; a sizeable share of those videos show regular-ish riot control techniques IMO (pushing the crowd down the street etc.). Then, many show police overreaction or outright brutality. But, then, why mix all of those in one big list and call them simply 'brutality'? As much I sympathise with protestors and the cause, there's this not-very-wise tendency among this side of the conflict to portray themselves as 100% peaceful victims, and police as almost universally working for the forces of darkness. So, I see it as a sad (yet, probably, temporary) tendency, that even the side which I'm sympathising with is feeling that treating me like a gullible person is OK - "The first casualty of War is Truth".
  - partyboat1586 6y ago
    I also live in the EU and sometimes I get annoyed by how soft our police are. I've seen multiple officers unable to take down one violent criminal. Why is there not hand to hand training and strength training? With proper training surely they could do it cleanly without injuring the perp. I've seen (videos of) cops just walking away from armed criminals, letting them rob a store then tracking them down 6 months later after they do the same thing twice more. When I look at the US I see the opposite problem. Police shooting a man in the back multiple times. Police using excessive force when arresting people for non violent crime. Police just generally power tripping. From that perspective I can see why you would want to defund the police but I really would hesitate to do that. The EU is fine with a softer police force because we mostly have no guns and when there are real terrorists we can still bring in armed police. That is not the case in the US plus you are talking about fully defunding the police. Seems like a dangerous experiment to me. Why not reform instead?

madaxe_again 6y ago

I’ve worked in many adversarial roles, and I have never once shot a customer.

shard972 6y ago
How often do you need to prevent a customer from stabbing a random person?

camillomiller 6y ago

So just compare It to police officers in other Western countries...

shard972 6y ago
What other western countries have 13% of the population as Africans?
harry8 6y ago
There's a dead comment in reply to this. I disagree with it as strongly as anything I've seen on HN. I think it racist. I don't think it should be hidden. It highlights a mentality that needs to be known about and considered including any possible sensible response to it. Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country" To what extent do these, not uncommon - even here, sets of beliefs contribute to the problems of violence in policing? Not something that seems to me like a good idea to pretend does not exist or is minor or fringe.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country" Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Haiti, and Malaysia or Mexico, Madagascar, El Salvador, and Rwanda, depending on whether you take the CIA's numbers or the World Bank's. If you look at the list, you'll see that the European countries are closer together and in a different area of the list, the US isn't in their group. Wouldn't that be a better indicator for "similar countries" than average internet speed or NATO membership status? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
  - harry8 6y ago
    The rationale for Brazil was explicitly the same one in the dead comment. But yeah, that's pretty radical what you're saying too. Maybe it's fair that you should only compare the richest nation on earth with much poorer developing nations with a short track record of democracy. Not sure I'd agree.

DeonPenny 6y ago

I agree, but the more I hear about the defund the police narrative the more an agree. Some of these interaction have 0 reason to be adversarial. For example the Rayshard brooks shooting. Why was a gun needed to wake a man sleeping in a car. Why are guns needed to hand out speeding tickets. I get that guns are needed if a bank is being robbed. But this is glorified customer service work. Imagine your car breaks down and the AAA guy who came to fix it had a gun. Like y tho?

rutthenut 6y ago
Hmm, let me see. Why might the police need guns to hand out speeding tickets? Perhaps it's because at least some of the people they stop, for speeding or other possible offences, won't take kindly to being stopped and in many parts of the USA, those in the vehicle may be permitted to carry guns of their own... Glorified customer service work? Far from it
- baddox 6y ago
  But we actually have data on this. Traffic stops are not particularly dangerous for police in the United States. There are laws in place about how legal gun owners must notify law enforcement during traffic stops. In fact, there is no shortage of video of law-abiding citizens in the US notifying law enforcement that they have a legal firearm in the vehicle and receiving a disproportionate response. But you don’t even need to look that closely. There are also video clips of police stops where police tell someone to get their ID, and then immediately murder the person for reaching for their ID.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > There are laws in place about how legal gun owners must notify law enforcement during traffic stops. Isn't the issue with laws that those breaking them don't usually care about laws? I'm sure you have laws in place against murder, and murder still happens. "But there's a law against burglary, why would you want additional protection and have a strong door" isn't a good argument. There are good arguments (and the whole issue is a good gun control argument in general), but that really isn't one.

sambeau 6y ago

Most of what a good police force should be doing isn't adversarial. The police should be trained like peacekeepers.