[MyOutfitIsVague]

I'm not a left winger, and I generally respect the police, but everybody I've met with a "thin blue line" American flag decal or sticker has been a total asshole. It's not just hatred of the police. Connotations change over time, and the general connotation of "the thin blue line" in the US at the moment is unabashed support of far-right authoritarianism.

[milesrout]

The phrase has nothing to do with any flags used much later by US policemen. That is the whole point of the thread.

>far-right authoritarianism

Get a grip. Even if it were a reference to what you say it is, that has nothing to do with the "far right". It is stock standard centre-right (and centre-left for that matter) position in the US to support the police in principle (if not, obviously, in every action theyve ever taken). The "defund the police" types are a minority of a minority.

[mindslight]

Regardless of its history, the current popularity of the phrase is most certainly part of the neofascist movement in the US. Its rise was a direct response to the "Black Lives Matter" call for accountability - essentially doubling down on asserting that lawless behavior by the police is justified in service of some authoritarian "order", regardless of the destruction of everyone else's rights. In a free society, the police are a necessary institution [0] for upholding the law, not a special class of enforcers unbound by it.

[0] how do you think police get so biased against everyone else to begin with? they're effectively dealing with the shittiest rungs of society on repeat, so they form a pattern and end up applying it to everyone they meet

[milesrout]

I don't think the police are "biased against everyone" in the first place. Nobody has said that lawless behaviour by the police is justified in the service of order. What is said is that the police are entitled to use force and have to make quick decisions about the use of force in very trying circumstances on a daily basis. In a country of 330m people full of guns and with highly differential rates of violent crime in different communities, it is not necessarily the case that different rates of police use of force against black people implies police racial bias. It is also not reasonable to tar the entire institution across the entire world just because of a couple of stand-out incidents when those incidents are viewed across the backdrop of the sheer volume of police interactions every day.

So yes, to make it concrete and cut past the bullshit euphemisms, sometimes the police will shoot an "unarmed" black man. Sometimes, very rarely, the so-called "unarmed" person not only doesn't have a gun but doesn't pose a real threat to the life or limb of another person. That sucks. But we cannot get rid of those "type I errors" without curtailing the use of force in a way that produces more "type II errors" in the sense that the police don't use force in a scenario where they should have, and someone gets hurt unnecessarily by someone that should have been disarmed or killed by a policeman earlier.

That is in no sense a defence of those extremely rare cases where a policeman just murders someone and there is no justification or excuse.

It is not unreasonable for them to point out that if they are held to an impossible standard where they get blamed if they don't perfectly protect the public but they also get blamed if they ever have to make a split second decision with limited information, choose to use force, and it turns out not to have been necessary, that that impossible standard is not fair.

None of that has anything to do with "neofascism" or "authoritarianism", which are simply bogeymen invented by the left.

[mindslight]

It seems like you must not be American. For starters, we have the 2nd amendment here, which means that someone simply being "armed" does not mean they deserve to be summarily executed. Talking about "type I and "type II" errors is completely missing the problem - the situations that have drawn extreme outrage were created and escalated by police themselves. This identification with a singular all-powerful government perspective that asserts some active judgement must be performed (as opposed to say retreat, regroup, and call for backup) is a large part of what I mean by authoritarianism. Just because you're steeped in it so deeply that you cannot recognize it does not mean that it is a "bogeyman".