[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.

[andrewzah]

So because not every clip has the full context wrapped up in a pretty bow, they're impossible to evaluate? To meet your level of standards, every single person would have to be recording video 24/7 and attach a written summary to every video. People don't really record things until a situation arises, so while we should take caution to understand the preceding events, we can evaluate things with the current information presented.

Blindly chanting "there's no context" to every single video is problematic at best; it's a dog-whistle for cop apologists at worst.

We have videos of cops shooting projectiles at people on their own private property; cops approaching people who are walking away and just shoving them or beating them up for no reason; cops driving vehicles (or horses) into crowds or towards pedestrians; et cetera. One needs to be adamantly ignorant in order to believe that every single instance has been instigated by protestors.

Saying "protestors started every instance of violence" and now going "wait, we need the context to judge these videos" makes me believe you have zero intent of approaching this from a viewpoint other than one that vilifies protestors and glorifies cops.

[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.

[ubercow13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

Seems the problem is approximately 90 times worse (!) than the UK for example. The UK is somewhat less diverse, but what has a diverse population got to do with it? That might explain some of the killing, but it doesn't justify it.

[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?