[mbrodersen]

The Police seems to be in an impossible situation: if they don’t try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are “racist” (focusing on the rich neighbourhoods). If they do try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are also “racist” (for “targeting” specific races/cultures). It is especially difficult if they try to fight crime in a violent dangerous minority neighbourhood where every routine check/stop can turn into a deadly gunfight in seconds. There are minority neighbourhoods where 97% of violent crime/murders are committed by people of the same race/culture living in that neighbourhood. And yet a single Police incident gone wrong will completely overshadow the reality of this. Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day. Knowing that the next person you stop might try to do his/her best to kill you. While also knowing that any mistake you make will be headline news around the world. It’s an impossible situation.

[zzzeek]

> And yet a single Police incident gone wrong will completely overshadow the reality of this.

that's because when the police kill people, there are no repercussions for them, no matter how much obvious bias, incompetence, disregard for human life, and malice is apparent in their activity. police can literally murder people on a whim and 99% of the time not even be suspected of any crime much less prosecuted. The George Floyd murder required that it was videoed from start to finish for there to be any chance of an actual criminal trial proceeding. All of the police murders that we hear about now are all news because there is now video. Think of all the decades and decades when there was no video, how many people must have been murdered on a whim, without the event even being considered a crime. But even today, obviously immensely negligent acts, such as the murders of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, still basically have zero repercussions for their killers.

This is nothing like the usual "murder rate", where the violence that occurs between people who are not cops is all considered to be crime, and is handled as such. There's no disagreement on what justice looks like. Murder is bad, but aribtrary murder by state actors with no accountability is worse.

> Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day.

please review the accounts of Uvalde as children and teachers were murdered over an hour while heavily armed and armored police stood around and did nothing but prevent anyone else from being able to help. There are many ordinary jobs that are statistically much more dangerous than that of the police including things like roofing, truck driving, construction (source: OSHA https://www.invictuslawpc.com/most-dangerous-jobs-osha/)

[daenz]

>police can literally murder people on a whim and 99% of the time not even be suspected of any crime much less prosecuted

Same with medical professionals. Medical errors kills over 250k people each year in the US. It generally isn't criminal if they make a judgement that results in someone's death. There's been a number of serial killers in medicine because we give medical professionals the benefit of the doubt due to the nature of the profession.

My point is that these professions aren't your average jobs. It's normal for doctors and police to deal with life and death, and to make decisions that could set off a sequence of events that quickly results in death. So either we have to say that nobody deserves to make these decisions, or we have to hold them to realistic standards.

[aaomidi]

Police are protected more than medical professionals.

Also we’re not talking about medical professionals here and mixing them into the conversation is muddying the water.

[daenz]

>Police are protected more than medical professionals.

If that was the case, then why isn't there 250x the public outrage when a medical professional makes an error that kills someone, since they kill 250x more than police do each year[0]?

And I'm not muddying the waters, so I don't appreciate the accusation of bad faith. I think the professions are comparable in nature, but there's a huge discrepancy in how they're treated, despite a massive body count difference.

0. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/

[drekk]

You don't need public outrage. Doctors can be sued and lose their licenses. They don't have qualified immunity. If they get fired by a hospital, it's unlikely they can cross county lines and find another job at any other hospital. None of that is true for cops.

You're being accused of muddying the waters for comparing medical professionals fucking up difficult procedures to cops using illegal escalations of violence against unarmed civilians. I happen to agree.

And it's a problem that only exists in the US. Other industrial nations don't have anywhere near the police killings we do per capita. I'm sure the reply will be that those places are more homogeneous, which is very "it deports the minorities or it gets police brutality"

When cops actually face anything resembling a consequence for taking human lives we can talk about what public outrage is "disproportionate"

[daenz]

>I'm sure the reply will be that those places are more homogeneous, which is very "it deports the minorities or it gets police brutality"

Racist strawmanning

[aaomidi]

Again I’m saying they’re literally afforded less protections than cops.

They do not have qualified immunity.

[Dan_Sylveste]

>we have to hold them to realistic standards.

Yes, absolutely. That's what needs to start happening with regard to police. You've understood perfectly.

[daenz]

Do you think that police are held to lower or higher standards than medical professionals?

[drekk]

How long does a cop go to school for? Do medical professionals have qualified immunity?

[daenz]

Doctors acting on behalf of the state, like prison doctors, do in fact have qualified immunity. The profession is not the pre-requisite, it's being employed by the state. So it's not as simple as the implication that only police have it.

0. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/1995/dec/15/contract-ph...

[robonerd]

> Medical errors kills over 250k people each year in the US.

Indeed, and it doesn't show up on the CDC's leading causes of death list, even though it should rank in third place.

> Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) third leading cause of death — respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year.

> The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC’s way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate.

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

Personally, I think unchallenged hero worship of medical professionals has something to do with it. Similar to the way widespread [albeit less universal] hero worship also shields police.

[mdp2021]

> aribtrary murder by state actors with no accountability is worse

It is treason.

(It is abuse of the powers assigned by the State.)

[AlexandrB]

> Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day.

Now imagine being a logging worker, risking your life every day[1], and not having anyone ever say this about you.

[1] https://advisorsmith.com/data/most-dangerous-jobs/

[Dan_Sylveste]

I think plenty of people say that, actually. There was a very popular discovery channel (or maybe history channel) show that followed around various groups of loggers and just about every episode had someone getting injured or barely escaping injury.

Deadliest Catch, similarly, highlighted the risk faced in one of the other most dangerous jobs, offshore fishing.

[drekk]

That's wonderful! Do loggers or fishers have the ability to kill someone off duty without repurcussions? Do they get paid similarly? Do we give them discounts at stores?

[aaomidi]

A single show vs an entire culture lol

[usrn]

Where I grew up we heated the house with wood and talked about professional loggers quite a bit.

[inetknght]

The problem isn't policing and racism. Racism is the symptom. The problem is all of the other problems that lead to the increase of violent crime in the first place. Police are put into an impossible situation indeed.

[feet]

Police are also part of the problem. They enforce the systemic violence enacted by shitty policy.

Which is weird, because during the pandemic a whole bunch of police were super vocal about not wanted to enforce 'unjust mask mandates' yet they'll go and terrorize minority communities with glee

They are definitely part of the problem, but you're right that it extends far beyond just them

[panny]

>Imagine being a police officer risking your life every single day. Knowing that the next person you stop might try to do his/her best to kill you. While also knowing that any mistake you make will be headline news around the world. It’s an impossible situation.

Defender problem. Just like how pen testers are insufferably smug that throwing random input at your endpoint causes unexpected problems. Nevermind that building secure endpoints is harder than building random fuzzers.

[cuteboy19]

but the pentesters are right and you should be thanking them for finding the xploit

[feet]

That's not how we do things in the US. Here we punish whistleblowers and tell you that what they found isn't a real problem, the problem is actually the brown people crossing the border

Don't look up

[joe_the_user]

...if they don’t try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are “racist” (focusing on the rich neighbourhoods). If they do try to fight crime in a minority neighbourhood then they are also “racist” (for “targeting” specific races/cultures).

Let me outline the counter claim. Police spend more effort on actually solving crimes in rich neighborhood (as per article) but they still need arrests in poor neighborhoods so they arrest people more randomly and on flimsier pretexts. When people complain, they throw out the line you have above.

[s1artibartfast]

This does not match with my experience in poor areas. In my experience, the bar to get in trouble with the police is higher because of the vastly greater violent crime rates. Most minor laws see zero enforcement

[vorpalhex]

Do you have any data for this counter claim?

[scotty79]

Admit only minority people into the Police force. Problem solved. If a Policeman kills minority unlawfully then it's just minority on minority crime so nobody will care.

[anon291]

Minority police shoot members of their own minority more often than whites though, so this policy would likely mean more dead black men

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/bad-policing-bad-law-not-bad-ap...

That's the data, not my opinion.

[samhyde69]

Yes, but fewer cities would burn as a result.

[MrMan]

ah yes the burning cities !

[scotty79]

I didn't mean it would solve the problem of Police killing minorities, just a problem of public caring about it.

[Tao3300]

Half the officers charged over Freddie Gray's death were black. No one was less mad over it because of that.

The system can be racist even if its constituents aren't. It shouldn't be a new or unfamiliar idea to anyone here that complex systems can have unexpected outcomes, biases, and emergent properties.

[scotty79]

Top ranking guy was white though? Right?

[s1artibartfast]

Some of the worst police departments are majority minority with minority leadership all the way up to the mayor's office. This is obviously not a solution

[feet]

Found the racist

Further reading (I'm not typing all of this again):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31926859#31955340