[Workaccount2]

The main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.

If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.

But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.

This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.

[ryandrake]

ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.

If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.

[drdeca]

Suppose you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and 500000 actors are “good except that they protect that one guy”, and then the one guy dies of a freak heart attack, and then all but one of the 500000 are replaced with “good actors” except that they defend the guy who remains from the 500000.

Are they bad actors?

[pstuart]

You're reducing it down too far. Policing has a problem policing itself -- it's very well documented.

People take it too far in both directions, but it's safe to say that there's more than one bad actors and the system demonstrably tolerates and defends them right up to the point where they are forced not to.

[drdeca]

Right, there’s clearly a problem, and I think even a systemic problem. I just don’t think it follows that literally every officer is therefore culpable. I think I would say that probably almost every police union leader is culpable.

[roywiggins]

The good cops, such as they are, get run out if they try to challenge the institutional problems in police forces. This radically restricts how good a cop can be while still being a cop.

Can good cops speak up about bad cops and keep their job, or do they have to remain silent? How many bad things can you see in your workplace without quitting or whistleblowing while still being a decent person? Can they opt out of illegal but defacto ticket quotas and still have a career? Does writing a few extra tickets so you can stay in the force long enough to maybe change it make you part of the problem?

Many people look at the problems in policing and say that anyone working inside that system simply must have compromised themselves to stay in.

[QuercusMax]

And who votes for those union leaders? The cops. They vote for corrupt people to protect their own corruption. It's a corrupt system from top to bottom.

[drdeca]

Well, who votes for politicians? The public. Are all members of the public therefore culpable?

Voting isn’t a means by which every voter’s preferences are amalgamated into a coherent set of preferences.

Voting is better than the available alternatives, but one person voting for something better doesn’t make the outcome of the vote be that better thing.

[pstuart]

I explicitly stated that it was "more than one" and in no way intimated that it was all cops.

One of the simplest things we could do as a country to help mitigate this is to end the War on Drugs. It was never about protecting people, and was always about enabling oppression of "others".

The other simple thing to do is to stop using cops for "welfare checks" and mental health crises -- those situations are uniformly better handled by social workers. This has tragically been put under the category of "defund the police", but the idea itself is sound. The "defund" slogan is so bad it's almost like it was created to sabotage the effort.

[lotsofpulp]

As much as I understand ACAB due to their systemic corruption and acting as a gang to provide their friends and family with more “justice” than others, I disagree with ending the war on drugs.

While it would be nice to think we can live in a world where everyone can be healed from mental problems (including drug addiction), I don’t think it’s possible to come back from the hardest of drugs (on a population level). The only thing you are inviting is chaos into your neighborhood.

[drdeca]

Sorry, I think I replied to your previous comment too quickly without reading it carefully enough.

I was trying to defend my previous comment, and didn’t adequately consider your point.

[Workaccount2]

The fact that 6 people replied to my comment in order to "correct me" on something that is less deadly than hunting accidents, is the most evidence I can offer for my point.

In the signal of things that are damaging society, negatively impacting individuals, police-brutality-self-investigation-no-harm-found is so far down in the noise floor, it should be about as worrying as people who live on busy street intersections not trimming back their hedges for safe driving visibility.

But somehow, here are 6 people deep in random HN comments telling me all about the importance of trimming hedges. Err, reforming police.

[defrost]

> something that is less deadly than hunting accidents,

Is this a lazy figure of speech?

US police have recently been killing ~ 1,100 people in the US per year.

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

Near as I can tell that's more than a decades worth of hunting fatalities in the US.

  IHEA published a report of 79 fatal hunting-related accidents in 2001. Twenty-nine fatalities resulted from hunters’ failures to identify targets; 11 resulted from hunters’ inability to see victims; 10 resulted from hunters firing while swinging on game (the hunter follows a moving target with their firearm).

* https://ammo.com/research/hunting-accident-statistics

( Not a great source, it has some obvious errors but largely meshes with other sources, I admit I've not found a good comprehensive report on the overall state of US hunting acidents, I did look at a several good state summaries )

[everdrive]

>If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.

This line of thinking will either be totally unable to ever build a large organization, or else will pathologically explain-away wrong-doing due to black and white thinking.

[MSFT_Edging]

A large organization that gives their employees paid vacation when any other person is sent to prison isn't an organization worth having.

[nickff]

This sort of thing is unfortunately very common in many large bureaucracies, especially across the government. A notable (and likely controversial) case in point is teachers who (sexually or physically) abuse students, and are kept on the payrolls, often in ‘rubber-rooms’. Are public schools worth having?

[collingreen]

I guess the equivalent here is the teachers and the teachers unions covering up that abuse, moving the abuses around to other schools, and lobbying for special protection for those abusers even after they are caught and convicted.

Its not perfect as an analogy since police are the state's sanctioned violence and teachers are not, nor are teachers in charge of preventing rape generally, but it kind of works since kids generally do have to go to school of some kind.

I expect in the above hypothetical the person you're asking would agree that yes, all teachers are part of the rape problem. The logic is the same and it hinges on the idea that allowing and intentionally enabling <very bad abuse if power> instead of fighting to expose and stop it makes you part of that problem even if you aren't directly doing the bad thing. Doubly so if your job is to expose and stop that abuse in every group except your own.

[nickff]

Teachers in many jurisdictions (I don’t know about every jurisdiction) are required (and paid) to take training in spotting signs of sexual or physical abuse, and are (at least often) legally required to report it. In that sense, they are ‘in charge of’ preventing sexual abuse.

[QuercusMax]

I don't think many teachers think that abusing students is part of their job, but there are LOTS of cops who think that abusing their power to kill / maim / steal from / rape citizens is JUST fine.

[MSFT_Edging]

Police killed about 1200 people last year, with 118 happening during a wellness check, 116 during a traffic stop, and an additional 213 for unspecified non-violent offenses.

Only 10 officers were charged with a crime from these cases. What do the 'rubber-room' stats look like?

https://policeviolencereport.org/

[nickff]

The statistics for sexual abuse in educational settings are not quite as clear as those for police-involved homicides (and I am not a subject-matter-expert), but the numbers which do exist are quite alarming.

The Wikipedia article includes a claim that sexual abuse in public schools is 100x the abuse by priests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_harassment_in_education...

This NIH study finds 1% of students reporting grievous sexual misconduct by educators: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35499558/

This Ontario study finds a much higher prevalence of abuse (internationally): https://www.learningtoendabuse.ca/resources-events/pdfs/Teac...

[drewbeck]

If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.

As you say, stats very often obfuscate.

[gruez]

If we apply your logic, would you say it's fair to go around and say "all teachers are bastards", when referring to teacher unions that make it hard to fire incompetent teachers? Or maybe "all doctors are bastards" when referencing how the american medical association (the trade association for doctors) makes it hard for more doctors to be admitted?

[shadowgovt]

Sure, but one key difference is that if either of those groups steps outside the law, you can recourse to the law to check them.

Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem. This is before one even starts unpacking the knapsack of how much law is designed to protect the police from consequences of performing their duties (leading to the unfortunate example "They can blow the side off your house if they have reason to believe it will help them catch a suspect and the recompense is that your insurance might cover that damage.")

[gruez]

>Since police are part of the law, when they don't hold their own accountable, there's no recourse. And that's a real problem.

I don't see how this is a relevant factor for the two cases I mentioned. Sure, it's bad that are part of the justice system, and therefore you can't use the justice system to correct their misbehavior, but you're not going to involve the justice system for incompetent teachers, or not enough doctors being admitted. For all intents and purposes the dynamic is the same.

[shadowgovt]

> incompetent teachers

I'm not really talking about incompetence, and incomptenece isn't the largest issue in the category of "things that make people say ACAB."

https://www.wtrf.com/top-stories/teacher-charged-with-sex-cr...

I am not at all joking when I make the claim that police committing sex crimes is a problem that is frequently swept under the rug by both police internal affairs and the judicial system.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/08/daniel-holtz...

[thatcat]

Teachers and doctors may abuse their authority, but there is a sharp legal limit to what they can get away with.

[ethbr1]

There are sharp legal limits to what cops can get away with: they've just historically been unenforced by government prosecutors and/or juries.

[mrwrong]

you are definitely going to start involving the justice system if teachers and doctors start physically abusing people, illegally detaining them and killing them!

[roywiggins]

that is unfortunately less true that you might think for some students:

https://www.propublica.org/article/garrison-school-illinois-...

https://www.propublica.org/article/shrub-oak-school-autism-n...

https://autisticadvocacy.org/actioncenter/issues/school/clim...

https://www.the74million.org/article/trump-officials-autism-...

"Selected Cases of Death and Abuse at Public and Private Schools and Treatment Centers"

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-09-719t.pdf

> Death ruled a homicide but grand jury did not indict teacher. Teacher currently teaches in Virginia

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/area-special-ed-tea...

[vel0city]

How many teachers are getting off on murder charges due to their position as a teacher?

Seems like a pretty big difference.

[febusravenga]

They only murder talents and/or curiosity in children or self esteem.

(I'm totally not ATAB here, just agree that parent post analogy)

[collingreen]

Using murder in this context to minimize -actually murder- is pretty bad taste.

[IAmBroom]

Words matter.

Your rebuttal doesn't.

[alexashka]

Yes.

It's not the root however. The root is nepotism. What you're describing is one of ten thousand problems nepotism causes.

[adrianN]

Misanthropy is the logical conclusion /s

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.

This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.

[GuinansEyebrows]

pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).

one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."

another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".

there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.

[0x457]

> modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers;

That's not (entirely) true, though? Every modern police department has its roots in London Metropolitan Police Force which had nothing to do with salve catching can't say much about strikebreakers, but I know specifically LMPF went on multiple strikes themselves. It had also nothing to do with solving crimes, that's just a bonus.

[drdeca]

My favorite slogan is “Slogans are always bad.” . It can be interpreted in a lot of different ways that make a lot of sense, and that’s why I repeat it often, without clarifying what I mean by it.

[GuinansEyebrows]

and yet, here you are, indirectly swiping at something instead of just saying what you mean :)

[ImJamal]

That is a lot of words to make a claim that nobody would accept if they used it for other issues. If somebody said that all blacks are criminals and used your exact argument, nobody would buy it.

[GuinansEyebrows]

ah yes, race, something famously chosen

[lotsofpulp]

You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).

Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.

[roywiggins]

And when a cop tries to do something about it, this is the sort of thing that happens. This guy seems like he's trying to do the right thing, but the system is designed so he can't:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/04/nypd-lawsuit...

> Bianchi claims his superiors retaliated against him for his stance against the “corrupt” cards after he was warned by an official with the Police Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police union, that he would not be protected by his union if he wrote tickets for people with cards. And if he continued, he’d be reassigned... The lawsuit cites several instances where his NYPD colleagues complained about his ticket-writing, including on Facebook...

> Bianchi’s service as a traffic cop ended last summer when he wrote a ticket to a friend of the NYPD’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the lawsuit states.

[teraflop]

Adrian Schoolcraft is the name that comes to mind for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft

> Schoolcraft amassed a set of tapes which demonstrated corruption and abuse within New York City's 81st Police Precinct. The tapes include conversations related to the issues of arrest quotas and investigations. [...] Schoolcraft was harassed, particularly in 2009, after he began to voice his concerns within the precinct. He was told he needed to increase arrest numbers and received a bad evaluation.

His fellow officers had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. They told the hospital that his claims were a sign of paranoid delusions. He was eventually vindicated, but his career was destroyed.

[hydrogen7800]

It's been a long time since I heard this, but I believe there is recording here [0] of his colleagues forcing themselves into his apartment to have him committed.

[0]https://www.thisamericanlife.org/414/right-to-remain-silent/...

Also, watch Serpico. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0070666/

[ImPleadThe5th]

"If you research police corruption you'll probably find out the police are corrupt."

Large corporations and the police both have statistically significant problems to be a concern to the average person.

Frequency isn't the issue it's recurrence across municipalities. That's what makes it clear there is a systemic issue.

Imagine if we didn't make laws about murder because "It's not that frequent of a problem only 1 in 500,000 people are murdered"