[tptacek]

As someone deeply involved in local politics and in close touch with a large number of neighbors across one of the bluest, police-skeptical municipalities in the United States: this is a message board trope. Everybody expects to be able to call the police. You might, if someone is being their best self, get some hesitation before a call about someone playing at the park who doesn't look like they belong there. Someone trying car doors? 911. You'd be excoriated for seeing something like that and not calling.

This is just not a real thing, this idea that normal people will never call the police under any circumstances. It's even less the case as you go into majority-black neighborhoods, where one of their big complaints is that the police don't come when they call, only when they're walking down the street. They're being actively victimized police, and they're still upset that it's not easier to summon them.

I am speaking positively here, not normatively.

[butter999]

People claiming on HN they won't call the cops might be all talk, I can't possibly know, but if you don't know anyone who won't call the police, you don't know people low on the socioeconomic ladder. And that's fine, there's no shame in that. But people who are frequent harassed by police - yeah, they don't call the police.

Ask a homeless person how they're treated by police and whether they would call 911.

[tptacek]

Yes, I do. Not only that, but those people organize and write position statements, and those statements are: "we can't get the police to come fast enough when we call".

If I have to go all the way to "unhoused person" on the SES spectrum to see the evidence for your argument, I'll consider my point made.

[butter999]

Consider that the people who feel most disenfranchised might not be coming to the meetings and such you're drawing from.

I don't really understand your second statement, it would only make sense to me if you didn't consider the homeless to exist as people. But I take the impression that you don't feel that way. So I don't really see why you feel you can discard them and conclude not calling the police is a "message board phenomenon" rather than a "very low on the ladder" phenomenon.

I've met people offline who tell me they don't call the police in a way I find credible, I don't know what else to tell you. I suppose the reason I responded to your comment was because it felt like a "message board phenomenon" to me, it didn't match my experience interacting with people offline.

[potato3732842]

>this is a message board trope

Speaking of message board tropes: <screeches in samplin bias>

You're not hearing about all the cases where people didn't call the police. You're doubly so not hearing about all the cases where somebody pulled a gun on a package thief (or whatever) because the kind of people who are not calling the police know very well that there's nothing the police hate more than peasants DIYing what they think is their job.

>Everybody expects to be able to call the police. You might, if someone is being their best self, get some hesitation before a call about someone playing at the park who doesn't look like they belong there. Someone trying car doors? 911. You'd be excoriated for seeing something like that and not calling.

Thank god I do not live in your municipality. Sounds like the most unholy fermented cesspit of Karens.

Nobody calls the cops on such trivial "I have no problems so I'll create some out of thin air" problems as "a man in the park who doesn't look right". People have better crap to be doing. I don't even live somewhere particularly poor either.

[c22]

Last time I saw a guy trying car doors I said "Hey, leave my car alone. Get the fuck out of here!" and he immediately left the area. This seems identical to the best result the police could of provided and probably was much quicker.

[tptacek]

He immediately left the area to go try car doors a block down.

[c22]

Probably, but this is what he does after the police talk to him as well.

And really, we want it this way, because the alternative is that the police rough him up or arrest him on basically random hearsay.

The only other thing the police could do is connect multiple calls to one area and increase the presence of random cruisers there for a while in which case the perp will just move to an entirely different area.

This same result can be achieved if each of those concerned citizen callers simply approached the guy and said "Hey, get the fuck out of here!"

Some level of policing is probably necessary for crimes more serious than car-prowling but at a certain point we need to accept what we can and can't change about the world and try to implement policies that reduce the overall societal harm.

I think we could probably save a lot of police resources by adopting a societal focus on civil interpersonal conflict resolution and working to build a society where fewer and fewer individuals consider car-prowling to be a reasonable pursuit.

[tptacek]

(man standing up in the town hall meeting meme)

I am fine with the idea of people stealing stuff from cars spending the night in lockup.

This is what I mean by how message-boardy this logic is. Ordinary people call the police when this kind of thing happens.

[butter999]

At this point this is just a "no true Scotsman." Any counterexample you're offered, you decide doesn't count. I don't know why you're entrenched in this position, but I don't think you're willing to engage with it in a manner compatible with curious conversation. I think you're personally invested in this community and it's guidelines, so I think that's something worth pointing out to you.

[tptacek]

I would rebut that by saying you're the one making an extraordinary claim, and I don't think it's out-of-bounds for me to note that.