[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.

[QuercusMax]

You might have a point if we actually had an anti-police-corruption movement led by police officers - but we don't. The people who are supposed to be protecting us and enforcing the laws are really just bullies who like to abuse people, or they'd do something about it. They keep voting for union leaders who will cover up their crimes.

[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.

[pstuart]

I understand your concerns about this (living outside Portland OR) but would counter that there's plenty of chaos with the current system.

I lost my brother to heroin decades ago and the laws on the books did nothing to prevent it, and a better system could have helped prevent it.

It would have to be done "holistically" (coordinated with the legal system, policing, health care, etc) but it's technically viable. The only thing stopping us from doing it is, um, us.

Even if it wasn't truly legal, it could be vastly overhauled if it actually was about doing what it pretends to be about: protecting us from the dangers of drugs.

[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.

[pstuart]

All good -- I just wanted to clarify.

Police reform would be simple to implement if we could all agree on what that looked like.

[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...