This comment is pretty much the definition of a straw-man argument. You're presenting an extreme opinion as the opinion of hundreds of millions of human beings. Just adding to the hate in the world.
Police routinely abuse the public [1]. Yet about half of America believes major changes to policing aren't needed, and about half of America believes we shouldn't reduce the budget of police departments and shift to social programs [2].
It's hard not to conclude from some people's own words that their worldview isn't, basically, "screw over the out-group, protect the in-group" more than "one set of rules applies to everyone."
The term “worship” is used here, not to mean “bowing and praying”, but to imply “they can do no wrong.” Every time there’s an article about police brutality that makes headlines, you can always find comments about how the suspect probably “had it coming”
But the truth is if you went and asked these worshippers about this specific case, or other cases I’m sure you consider egregious, a majority would say yea this is bad.
If you really think that a significant chunk of Americans actually believe something akin to “literally every police action historically and every practice is ok” then you’re totally delusional.
No one thinks that. These super general polls are terrible because they really just serve to confuse. But what’s worse is when people who should know better latch into them because it makes the other side look bad.
The fact commenters here actually think that people who generally happy with law enforcement are also in agreement with every action taken is a really bad look on them, it shows they are happy to reduce their opponents to strawmen publicly, and also that they think that sort of argument is convincing.
For example, I think we need more and better policing in general. I’m happy they exist, but obviously they can be dramatically better. There’s any number of polls that would capture me as status quo. Yet the truth is so far from that - obviously police have a ton of stupid policies, laws are flawed, abuses are rampant. It’s just my solution isn’t removing police or whatever, it’s a case by case fix for each issue.
You can be pro anything but also anti abuses within it. I could come up with a massive amount of strawmen against liberals this way and you’d rightly point out similar refutations.
As far as what I assumed about the "worshippers" comment, I didn't think it was meant to be taken literally. If nothing else that comment can be taken as an indication of how some people perceive those who politically defended the police during recent protests. It's hard for them to understand why nothing has changed.
> It’s just my solution isn’t removing police or whatever, it’s a case by case fix for each issue.
There are several systemic problems with policing in the U.S. The whole idea of "internal affairs" is the biggest, and maybe the most straight-forward to fix. Why are the police allowed to investigate themselves? That is totally inconsistent with the idea of checks-and-balances in our political systems, and should be changed. There seems to be a culture in police departments protecting bad cops, and nothing is being done to change that.
There's so many things we could be doing better, but too often all we get from our representatives are platitudes and partisanship.
Of course policing can get out of hand, and that should be addressed. The communists in their evil utopian vision want to dismantle the police as well as the family.
> Yet about half of America believes major changes to policing aren't needed, and about half of America believes we shouldn't reduce the budget of police departments and shift to social programs
A different way to look at it is that nearly half supports defunding the police - one large city in the US had nearly 50% support for a referendum to abolish the police department entirely.
That's not a majority, no, but it's also much larger than would have been the case five or even ten years ago. To imply that the public discourse hasn't had measurable impact on public opinion is missing the mark.
You're right, but not for the reason I think you intend to imply. Many Americans think Democratic cities are high-crime and Republican suburbs and rural areas are safe. If you look at the data this is completely wrong.
So places actually hurt by crime tend to support the police. Because the medium place actually hurt by crime is somewhere like suburban Louisiana.
> Many Americans think Democratic cities are high-crime and Republican suburbs and rural areas are safe. If you look at the data this is completely wrong.
It is not "completely wrong". It is only somewhat wrong if taken literally as stated, because due to extremely strong political correctness norms, the crucial variable is typically left unmentioned in public. However, most Americans who have the above quoted belief, also understand the impact of that crucial variable. That crucial variable is, of course, how many black Americans live in the area. Once you control for that, you will indeed observe that Democratic cities have higher crime than Republican suburbs. This is why your example was Louisiana, which has very high black population, and so the suburbs have much higher percentage of black residents than other places around the country.
The reason why people think Democratic-ran cities have high crime compared to Republican suburbs, despite the country-level correlation analysis makes nonclear or even wrong, is that they do not do country wide analysis, but instead they look at a particular city close to them, and the actual suburbs and rural areas around it, and if you do that, the pattern actually is obvious, including in Louisiana. The fact that it breaks down on the national level is just Simpson's paradox.
I change my example to New Mexico. 80% White. Very high crime in both metro and nonmetro areas, with nonmetro higher.
I'm not sure exactly what data analysis you're describing. You might find this breakdown of death by assault by state and metro/nonmetro. This dataset doesn't have perpetrator race, so I restricted victim race to white. In the US perpetrator and victim race correlate strongly.
Within any given state, Republican suburbs and rural areas are almost always safer than democrat run cities. For example, in Louisiana, the homicide rate in New Orleans is 41 per 100,000. In neighboring St. Charles Parish it’s 1/10 that. The same thing is true for say Massachusetts. The homicide rate in NYC is 5.7 per 100,000. The homicide rate in Putnam County is 0.4 per 100,000.
The statistic you’re referring to misleadingly disregards regional patterns in violent crime. Southerners are more violent than folks in the northeast, and midwesterners are somewhere in between. But within each region the bill of violent crime is still concentrated in the, usually blue, cities in those states.
All you're observing here is that metro areas get more conservative as you move from dense downtowns to almost-rural exurbia, and crime tends to track density.
To be fair, the right wing of the US didn’t trust the police or government in the 90s after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Now, they seem to trust the local authorities more since the “fuck the police” movement has become about racial justice.
It looks to me like the left dislikes the justice system and local police because of inequality. The right doesn’t like the federal breadth of powers.
This is a common conception, but I think it's totally wrong. I think it's misguided to try and model human behavior by assuming people have ethical axioms and then proceed logically from there.
Plenty of people express skepticism of the scope of government power in the abstract. Anecdotally they almost all behave inconsistently when things get a little more concrete.
I tend to assume that when people say "reduce government power" they mean "the government should keep helping me, and stop helping others". So far that's nearly always been right.
For example many Republicans have (correctly) condemned the treatment of the Jan 6 traitors by the system. They say it's wrong for someone to have to live in a cell flooded with raw sewage, yet they don't care their local jail treats ordinary people similarly.
A related example is abortion. Traditionally Republicans said they wanted to delegate abortion regulation to states. After they won that some started to say the Federal Government should ban abortion. Very very few Republicans condemned that.
I've focused on right-wing examples because their motivated reasoning has had more significant impact recently in this area. But the left exhibits similar flaws. Plenty of "in this house we believe" families that call the cops on people peacefully minding their own business because they felt uncomfortable.
I don’t know that this really shows anything other than how dumbed down discourse has become in the social media era.
Defund the police was a dumb rallying cry and a disaster in the cities that tried it
I always enjoy seeing this line of reasoning because it seems completely unique to people in tech. A group is not a set of individuals, or at least that's what's meant when non-tech people talk about them. When the parent says "half the country" they don't mean "the set of all people who worship the police is around 150 million" they mean "the political body that is backed by around half the country has chosen to adopt as a core tenant a largely uncritical support of police."
Probably, but I try to keep in mind that the intersection of tech and internet skews neurodivergent and that it's possible that it's really is just a misunderstanding. I work with people every day who really are that literal.
1: https://twitter.com/search?q=cops%20common%20from%3Agreg_dou...
2: https://news.gallup.com/poll/393119/americans-remain-steadfa...