[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.