[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

For me it's a bit like the whole "woke-ism" thing.

The vast majority of people enjoy each other and don't subscribe to the vitriol that comes from both sides. In that manner, the internet is a bit of an echo chamber where if you get all of your impressions of the world from it, you'd think people were constantly at each others throats.

The news is the same way, they report negativity, so it has a real tendency to make you start thinking of the world in such a negative way.

That's not to say there aren't real threats out there, but the vast majority of people are just trying to get through their day.

This happens to police officers too, most of their interactions with people are negative due to the nature of their work, over time that starts being their default position towards people. I'll never forget the time I walked into a bakery and decided to get a cupcake for the police officer sitting in his car outside the shop (he was blocking the alley, unsure why). The change in his face from defensiveness to pure joy when I walked up to this vehicle was easily worth the money spent.

[firewolf34]

from the "assume ignorance before maliciousness" standpoint, a lot of the impression you speak of is just a fact of us humans reporting on the (perceived) more critical news, (perhaps also maybe the more profitable news) - but is more (in my opinion) a natural result of the news having limited time/bandwidth to report on a near-infinite content production source (the world)

A side effect (and the end result) is that we all end up having poor [Bayesian priors](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability) in our heads - this disproportionate reporting practice at large impacts our understanding of the world, as you describe. And I bet there's a feedback loop: the more skewed our model of the world, the more we will produce/consume skewed content.

I think this is not something you can ever truly do completely away with because of the many factors that it arises from, not limited to our psychological biases that tend us towards liking or interacting with certain form of content more than others... but certainly there should be more controls.

[seabass-labrax]

There's a positive aspect to employing police officers to be present even when there is no tangible risk of crime or danger.

Where I live, it's extremely unusual to ever see a 'bobby on the beat', so when I recently visited a city with thirty or more police officers with riot vans congregated at the docks, ironically I felt slightly uncomfortable - what mortal danger could be present around the corner to justify so much police attention? It turned out to just be a big football match, so there was not such a huge danger after all and the police would no doubt be able to diffuse any disturbance immediately.

If there had been no police around, it would never have occurred to me that there was a risk, even though I would have been tangibly less safe without their presence.