[DenisM]

The police follow orders from their chain of command that goes up to an elected official. You can petition the elected official, occupy their building, grill them in the media, and vote them out if you convince the other citizens. For example the knee-to-the-neck move was a part of the "orders" in that it was part of standard procedure and it is now being revised and removed. Similarly the tear gas was part of the procedure and has now been suspended by the order of the mayor. This can only be done because of the chain of command.

The people with masks and weapons on the street report to no-one we know, it's either a loose anarchic group or some sort or they report to a warlord. Can you petition the warlord? Occupy their office? Vote them out? This is a regression to the medieval model of governance.

It's all fun and games when no one really disagrees about anything important, but things change for the worse when disagreements start happening. This is how communes fall - either they fail to disagree constructively or they get subjugated by a dictator who forces an agreement.

This is why we tolerate the police for a few hundred years now - on occasion they cause violence that's predictable and can be influenced. The alternative is the violence we cannot influence and that spiral out of control when the going gets tough.

[jakelazaroff]

> This is why we tolerate the police for a few hundred years now - on occasion they cause violence that's predictable and can be influenced.

The point of these protests is that the violence is not occasional. It is endemic, and attempts to stop it stretch back centuries. It has persisted across the country, under both progressive and conservative politicians, despite many, many attempts to eliminate it.

If the violent system we have has successfully resisted change and accountability for hundreds of years, how is this a regression?

[jimbokun]

> The point of these protests is that the violence is not occasional. It is endemic, and attempts to stop it stretch back centuries.

I feel like these statements need to be qualified to be useful.

Has the level of police violence over the years gotten worse, gotten better, or stayed roughly the same?

How does the overall levels of violence compare to places without an organized police force?

[toofy]

> Has the level of police violence over the years gotten worse, gotten better, or stayed roughly the same?

I understand why some people’s initial instinct is to believe this is a new problem, but groups have been desperately trying to get people’s attention about police violence for decades.

Rodney King was nearly 30 years ago. And people were crying for help long before that.

I knew there was a problem before, but seeing things unfold the last week made it clear, this is a much more widespread and a significantly deeper issue than most people realized.

Even with all of that said, I think we would be silly to imply that abuse has to happen for a significant amount of time before it’s justifiable for someone to demand it stop.

[DenisM]

You have avoided answering the question you have quoted. It’s an important question.

[CydeWeys]

The point they're making is that the current level of police violence is still unacceptable, regardless of whether it may or may not have been better or worse in the past.

[skissane]

A question – is the problem with police, or is the problem with US police specifically? Do we have the same problem with police in other countries? Canadian police? UK police? Police in EU countries?

If the US police have this problem and other (wealthy democratic) countries don't – or even if comparable countries have the problem too, just not quite as bad as the US has it – what makes US police different?

Racism and racial inequality. Yes, that's very real, but don't think for a moment other countries don't have that problem too – they do. But yes, historically speaking, the US was very much an outlier of extreme racism – few other countries ever had anything comparable to "Jim Crow laws", and the most obvious comparators (apartheid in South Africa and the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany) are not what the US really wants to be compared to. On the other hand, my personal impression is that contemporary Americans are (on average) actually much more highly committed to anti-racism than people in most other countries are.

Could there be other relevant factors causing problems unique to US police? I think, everyone is (quite rightly) focused on the racial inequality issue, but could there be other causes which might be less deeply entrenched and quicker to fix? Easy short-term wins?

(My thought: US has more independent law enforcement agencies than any other country on earth – force all the smaller ones to merge – bigger police forces tend to have a more professional culture, and a smaller number of big police forces is easier for the media/NGOs/etc to hold to account than a larger number of small ones.)

[frabbit]

As regards the Canadian police (especially, but not limited to the RCMP) they are no angels. Especially if you are indigenous/autochthonous. And that's because they are fulfilling the function for which they were created: taking land and living away from some people. A quick google on the history of the RCMP, their recent shoot-to-kill policies at indigenous roadblocks, the colonial/imperial origins will put Justin Trudeau's hypocritical taking a knee into perspective.

If you really want to feel sick read-up on the Highway of Tears and the systematic brutalization of indigenous women by Canadian society.

[skissane]

I know there are a lot of problems with how police in Australia treat indigenous Australians (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people), so it is totally unsurprising to hear that Canadian police have similar issues.

On that topic, how do US law enforcement treat Native Americans? In the present debate there seems to be very little attention to that question.

[DenisM]

In the US it is believed the opposite - more local power structures are easier to influence through local elections. It may not be a huge problem on the scale of Portugal, but as countries get larger things get worse. Imagine the entire EU having one police force - how do you go about changing anything? In the US you can run for mayor or City Council, much more direct connection.

[skissane]

More local power structures are easier to corrupt.

And I’m not suggesting the US should have one police force for whole country, or that EU should take over policing for its member states. In a federal system like the US, local policing is a state government responsibility. So I wouldn’t advocate going any further than merging local police into state police. And in bigger states, like California and Texas, even that is probably going too far-but one could at least merge city police forces into the county level.

[dmode]

I don’t know why you are getting down voted. I think your comments are asking genuine questions

[AnHonestComment]

Police are safer than cars, by an order of magnitude.

The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police.

So, empirically, it seems like the violence is occasional except when you go asking for it and the protestors just have a problem with authority and society at large.

It’s why their complaints are big on individual sob stories but lacking statistics to back them up.

[dragonwriter]

> Police are safer than cars,

For whom and per...what? Encounter? Mile traveled with them?

> The only violence I’ve seen from police that doesn’t seem like an anomaly is violence that protestors incited by starting a conflict with the police.

That suggests to me that either your perception of provocation or of anomaly is skewed (or that “anomaly” is used in the software sense of “behavior out of line with spec” rather than the more general sense of “behavior out of line with what is normal”.)

> So, empirically,

You just recounted what is, by the terms used, your subjective impression, and termed your conclusion built on that (which go far beyond what is justified even if that impression was undisputed fact) “empirical”.

That’s...not what that word means.

[AnHonestComment]

Per arrest to one year of driving: you would have to be arrested ten times in a year for your risk from the police to match your risk driving a car that year.

Per arrest for violent crime (where most of the deaths occur), blacks are safer than whites.

I’ve been reviewing the footage from Seattle — and protestors started every instance of violence by first getting forceful with the cops.

Show me any evidence that there’s an endemic problem of violence — because nothing I can find in either statistics about harm or footage from protests suggests there is.

That’s an empiric conclusion: studying the statistics about how often police harm people and comparing them to other sources of risk — which show they’re relatively minor.

[andrewzah]

> I’ve been reviewing the footage from Seattle — and protestors started every instance of violence by first getting forceful with the cops.

That's funny, because the majority of the clips I've seen have unprovoked or inappropriate responses from the police. Seattle alone [0] has had numerous incidents. It's trivially easy to see this, to the point that one would have to ignore many incidents to say "every instance" was started by protestors.

I believe that you are not arguing in good faith.

[0]: https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/repor...

[AnHonestComment]

Can you elaborate on which of those clips you find that the police initiated or acted inappropriately?

The first one is what we should want to happen — a misplaced knee was moved by a colleague. There’s no context to decide if police inappropriately started an altercation. There’s no extended period of a knee on someone’s neck.

The second is police responding to someone on the ground fighting them and physically resisting arrest.

The third is pepper spraying a crowd that was refusing to move and let the police form a line, after someone lunged at the police.

The fourth is completely context free, and while unfortunate that a child was there, it doesn’t give us context to judge.

Your source also is using selective clips, that remove context to focus on emotionally triggering scenes.

[ubercow13]

It doesn’t seem minor compared to other countries police forces. Why should being killed by the police be acceptable as long as the risk is lower than that from traffic?

[tekknik]

Because we need laws and punishments to enforce those laws. What other countries have a population as diverse as the US and then let’s see some stats.

[CydeWeys]

What does this comparison have to do with anything though? Traffic deaths are themselves dwarfed by deaths from cancer and heart disease. So what?

[Apocryphon]

The tech industry is trying to get rid of cars as we know it by inventing self-driving technology, so I'm not sure how germane they are to this conversation. Can we not work towards addressing multiple causes of death in society?

[noobaccount]

I believe the issue today is that the police are causing violence against the people with little power in our political system. To those people the distinction you are making is without a difference.

[DenisM]

I feel like you're taking my reply out of context. Specifically I was addressing this questions:

> Can you tell me what it is that makes these people dangerous and scary, but the similarly armed protestors who showed up at government buildings a month ago — or, frankly, the police — fine?

and explaining why replacing police with warlords is not progress.

Are some classes of people unable to influence the system? I readily agree with that. Are we making our society better by replacing police with warlords or anarchists? I argue not.

[tshaddox]

It’s bizarrely contradictory to use democracy to decrease the accountability of elected officials, because no matter how bad the supposedly democratic government is, you can always just say it’s the public’s fault for not voting good enough or hard enough.

On the contrary, I think if a government claims to be democratic, then they are accountable for aligning their policies and outcomes with what the public wants. A democratic government should be actually accountable to the public.