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by kneebonian 1043 days ago
> I don't live in the US, but from abroad I can tell how messed up the police are over there.

Translation I get all of my information about American policing through highly politicized and charged news storied that become stories only because they are exceptional and then feel justified passing judgment on an entire country that has 3 times the people and land as my country.

3 comments

Okay. I'm an American citizen living in the States. Our policing systems are incredibly messed up and militarized.
We have the most ethnically diverse population in the world. Blacks commit more than half of all US crime despite being a tenth of the population. We’re a gigantic state with both the least restrictive gun laws and the most permissive immigration laws in the world. No comparable nation not named China drives nearly as much as we do.

To say our policing systems are bad is a smear on the hard-working men and women in those systems. The US simply has challenges that European nations do not have. You can (and maybe should) debate whether or not those challenges should be present in the first place but blaming those challenges on the police is just mean.

> We have the most ethnically diverse population in the world

Umm, no:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16...

Except they also get their information on other countries through highly politicized and charged news stories yet those can't compete with how f'd up America's police stories are. But go ahead say it's the news accounts and not the cops behaviors that are the problem. If only the news wouldn't report on it things would be good.
Translation translation: someone has leveled valid criticism about a nationwide problem in a country that propagandises itself to be the best in the world and I've drank the koolaid so now I need to be super touched about it
Adding personal attack on top of nationalistic flamewar is not cool, and the sort of thing we ban accounts for. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html