[jamestnz]

Interesting comment.

> I believe in most other countries jail would have been imminent out of disrespect.

Is this part accurate? In the (admittedly few) countries where I have spent a lot of time and have gained any real experience dealing with the police, they have proven to have a relatively genial and pro-community outlook, aiming more to help people and prevent harm, rather than browbeating and abusing people.

My impression is that the so-called offence of "contempt of cop" (i.e. being arrested for being a smart-ass or upsetting a cop's feelings, rather than any genuine breach of the law or peace) is a bit of a North American phenomenon, but no doubt my perception is being affected by sampling bias there, having been exposed to American media etc.

In my (non-American) experience, you must push things incredibly far to get anything more than a sarcastic laugh or eye-roll or "move along, mate" from a cop.

[NikolaNovak]

>> a bit of a North American phenomenon,

My limited experience/awareness of Eastern European countries - you do not disrespect the police... oh boy, you do not :O

[throw55324]

This was one of the most shocking events I experienced when visiting China.

You read how it’s basically a “police state” but the reality is the people argue and yell at the cops all the time!

Cops in China seem to almost have no authority in regular interactions. My local coworkers would basically just ignore their commands and talk back to them.

Granted, I was in Shanghai and the people I was with were middle class locals, so perhaps that’s why the interactions were like that.

Still, if I acted that way back home, I know I would have been arrested.

[squarefoot]

It (mostly) works like that pretty much everywhere, not only in North America where probably the news system make the phenomenon more noticeable. I think it's the result of bad selection done on purpose: the effect is that it moves the blame to the police rather than those who give them orders and power, and apparently it works. And then there's that thing about steroids abuse which if proven would explain a lot since the side effects of that shit match suspiciously close to how abusive violent cops behave.

[zzzcpan]

It doesn't work like that everywhere, certainly not in Eastern Europe, which is a broad term that includes both police countries and the opposite of police countries, a wide range of policing behavior, but I don't think any of them is as brutal as the US. In Russia, for example, fear of the police is pushed from the very top, people fear it a lot, maybe not as much as in the US, but a lot and disrespecting the police is certainly going to get you in trouble. But in Ukraine it's the opposite, it's not a police country, police don't do and can't do much against disrespect and people can always just runaway from the police.

[sansnomme]

Similarly, photography during a traffic accident is enough to get you into trouble with the cops in Deutschland. There are plenty of ways to run afoul of law enforcement without actually breaching the peace.

[olingern]

I come from small town America and NYC, so I'm jaded. There are a lot of good cops out there who set out with good intentions, but I believe their training is inadequate. In my experience, they do not act as stewards of a community, but rather someone with power who is to be feared.

In regards to my comment of "most other countries," I believe 'most' could be changed to 'many'

[javajosh]

American police are corrupted by a catastrophically broken justice system that, in effect, makes cops judge, jury, and executioner. I call it the "martial law bubble" that surrounds each cop. That's bad enough but what makes it galling is how they expect you to be grateful and friendly when stopped and fined, questioned, etc.

But I honestly don't think its their fault. A working justice system would mean a) getting arrested is no big deal, and b) cops are held accountable for their excesses.

(The system is broken because of capacity, complexity of law, powerful police unions, and voter apathy and ignorance)

[mnm1]

> That's bad enough but what makes it galling is how they expect you to be grateful and friendly when stopped and fined, questioned, etc.

Wow. You are right on the money. So well put and so succinct. This isn't just a problem with cops though. It's in the culture at large. People in power not only expect to hurt others and fuck them over, but also that others should be grateful for being fucked over. Got passed up for the promotion / raise and instead got more responsibility with no increase in pay? You should be thankful you still got a job. Got wrongfully arrested, charged, and offered a plea deal to go to jail for something you didn't do? You should be grateful for the 5 year prison deal. You'll get 30 years at trial. Oh you're innocent? We don't care. Got overcharged by a company for a bill that's not even in your name? You should be thankful you can spend two hours a day every day for two weeks on the phone trying to get the charges reversed before they send you to collections. Got invaded by the US and millions of your citizens slaughtered? You should be thankful and grateful for the US bringing "freedom" to your country. The "freedom" to thank the US for killing your family. In all of these cases and so much more, the victim is expected to be thankful to their perpetrator while the perpetrator is fucking over the victim. It's a huge part of American culture and the police are just one example of it.

[bitwize]

> I call it the "martial law bubble" that surrounds each cop.

Ironically, given the discussion about Japanese cops, I refer to it by a Japanese term: kirisute-gomen, "the privilege to cut and leave". If you were a commoner and offended a samurai, the samurai had the legal right to kill you with his sword and didn't even have to report it (hence "cut and leave".) Samurai also used live commoners as swordsmanship practice dummies, but this practice was nominally illegal (still rarely enforced though).

And that's what cops are in the USA: a special privileged warrior class with rights to use violence indiscriminately that commoners do not have.

[petre]

Good thing they were denied carying swords after the Meiji Restoration then.

[bitwize]

Yeah, I'm deliberately comparing modern police with conditions in feudal Japan for a reason :)

[javajosh]

My knowledge of this era is limited to the 80's mini-series "Shogun", based on the book by James Clavell, but wow, I never made that connection before, thanks.

[zzzcpan]

> but rather someone with power who is to be feared

That's the core of police country idea.

[ryanlol]

Will training really turn assholes into stewards of a community?

[kekebo]

It may alleviate some performance anxiety in a high pressure job with huge responsibilities, but is up against a range of management decisions like quota based policing and other systematic factors influencing policing away from stewardship in a community. Trying to reduce it to a single factor may be simplistic given the complexity of the problem.

[netsharc]

It seems for the US it's not, there's groupthink that some citizens are the enemy and they're hungry for police blood. That's why they say "thin blue line" or "cops lives matter", and they aren't even being ironic.

[fsloth]

People learn by example. Either you give the well thought out patterns of behaviour with training, or, they learn them in the field. So, with proper training, they would not necessarily have to have to mirror the learned bad habits of others.

[threatofrain]

Police have no such legal obligation to be stewards of the community, anymore than Google must be the champion of righteousness. From what do we assume that without incentive or structure that one day moral expectation is sufficient to bring forth the character and quality we expect?

Is this not similar to calling for more medical or legal ethics classes?

[majos]

Police do have such a legal obligation. The whole point of a police force is to maintain public safety. You might argue that this has been corrupted into “arrest people” by quotas or bad culture or civil forfeiture or revenue-based policing or whatever, but their mission statement is fundamentally about keeping people safe. That’s totally different from a for-profit search engine.

[threatofrain]

Where does this legal obligation come from? State law? The constitution? Is the mission of an organization the slogan they put on cars or websites?

Expecting police to be stewards of the community is the same as expecting ICANN to be stewards of the web — it’s a lot of unchecked moral assumptions for how things are supposed to work, rather than structuring a result to happen. It’s also a failure to discuss the imperatives created by who feeds whom, and why moral presumption of police workings should matter in the face of that.

Americans believe it is the structure of their federal government which generates stressful imperatives for different bodies to behave “well”. What structure guides any faith or optimism that police will be stewards of the community?

Have American police been generating a lot of faith and optimism recently?

[mandelbrotwurst]

Are you citing the non-binding "protect and serve" motto, or something else? Enforcing the law isn't necessarily about keeping people safe - whether that's true depends on what the laws are.

[glangdale]

You could easily get put away for "contempt of cop" here in Australia. This goes double if you are the wrong sort of person to talk back to a cop: e.g. indigenous. For a while there was a holy trinity: "disorderly conduct" (anything they wanted), "resisting arrest" (when they grab you randomly) and "obscene language" (when the person says 'fuck this').

Maybe things are better in NZ but I would not experiment with "contempt of cop" here in Sydney unless I had a nice clear schedule and didn't mind spending a bit of time behind bars.

[HatchedLake721]

Eastern Europe, Russia - be nice and respectful to the police, otherwise it’ll cost you time and sometimes can hurt

[kristianc]

> In my (non-American) experience, you must push things incredibly far to get anything more than a sarcastic laugh or eye-roll or "move along, mate" from a cop.

It probably depends on where you are too. I witnessed a guy beating his kids with a belt in full public view outside a Chick Fil A two blocks from Times Square - the police had no interest at all in chasing it up.

[kshacker]

In today's age? This millenium?

[kristianc]

Yes - when I followed up with the cop he said that the man had a right to chastise his child.

At which point I pointed out that there is reasonable chastisement and beating a cowering kid with a belt.

[ekianjo]

> countries where I have spent a lot of time and have gained any real experience dealing with the police, they have proven to have a relatively genial and pro-community outlook, aiming more to help people and prevent harm

Where have you been?

[ur-whale]

>My impression is that the so-called offence of "contempt of cop" (i.e. being arrested for being a smart-ass or upsetting a cop's feelings, rather than any genuine breach of the law or peace) is a bit of a North American phenomenon

correlates with my experience as well.