[psgibbs]

So all cops are 'agents of state violence'?

Just like all developers are 'evil hackers'.

If people realistically want the situation to get better, they need to embrace the 'good' police officers, rather than automatically ostracizing all police officers equally. Many still really do want to improve their communities.

[shardling]

Probably OP was using "state violence" in its sense as part of a socio/political theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

There's always been a strong connection between punk subculture and anarchist thinking (which is specifically opposed to this type of "legitimate violence"), so its actually a somewhat reasonable thing to bring up.

[Karunamon]

>So all cops are 'agents of state violence'?

Yes. That's what law enforcement is by definition. Non compliance results in (eventual) violence, regardless of the severity of the crime.

P.S. Nice edit. Both "hacker" and "cop" carry some negative connotations without the qualifying "evil" in front of it.

[psgibbs]

I added 'evil' because particularly in this community, the connotation of 'hacker' is not necessarily negative. Many here esteem hackers as people who get things done by taking cleverly manipulating the system, or, alternatively, value results over process (I'd actually really appreciate a proper neutral definition of the term).

[pessimizer]

You're somehow conflating developer and lawbreaker in an effort to explain how cops are something other than agents of state violence. It's a strange argument.

[diminoten]

Non-compliance is a provocation of violence, so naturally it results in violence. It's the price we pay to have a society.

[_ak]

Nowadays police will apply force regardless, and retroactively claim that you didn't comply. Just look at all these videos of people being brutalized and beaten unconscious by police men shouting at them "stop resisting!"

So what you're basically saying is the price for having any policing is that we have to accept a morally and legally corrupt police force.

[Karunamon]

That depends entirely on the law being infringed. Society could do with a lot fewer of them as a whole.

[marssaxman]

There is nothing "natural" about it.

[sesqu]

It comes naturally to a lot of people.

[mindslight]

If the "good" police officers wish to be respected, they should start doing things like outing and arresting the corrupt cops, speaking out against victimless laws that only make everyone a criminal, routinely compensating innocents for damages caused by false arrests/raids/seizures/imprisonment, etc. Until these things are commonplace, it's only proper to consider all of them representatives of their misbehaving organizations.

[jlgreco]

The idiom "A few bad apples..." is commonly brought up in discussions such as theses.

There is something funny about that phrase though... it is not complete. The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel". This is to say that if you do not take an aggressive stance towards weeding out all of the bad apples, the rot will spread like an infection (rotting apples will release ethylene gas which acts as a ripening agent, accelerating the rot of nearby apples) and corrupt all of the apples.

So if we trust our apples:cops metaphor then what we are really saying is that if we overlook the a few bad cops for any significant amount of time, before we know it, all cops will be bad. Obviously crooked cops don't release ethylene gas in significant quantities... instead the Blue Wall is the most commonly cited mechanism of transmission.

I like this idiom.

[hfsktr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Code_of_Silence

For anyone else who might not have heard of it (by name).

[stcredzero]

> The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel".

They don't even have to actually spoil the barrel. Since dramatic events stand out in the human mind, it's possible for a few bad actors to completely change people's perception of groups or their place in society.

This is part of the reason why it's so hard for privileged groups to understand how minorities see things and vice-versa. What's a dramatic, salient event for one group is not so much for the other.

[saraid216]

Flass: [taking a bribe] Don't suppose you want a taste? I just keep offering, thinking maybe some day you'll get wise.

Gordon: There's nothing wise in what you do, Flass.

Flass: Well, Jimbo, you don't take the taste... makes us guys nervous.

Gordon: I'm no rat! In a town this bent, who's there to rat to anyway?

[coldtea]

>So all cops are 'agents of state violence'?

That's the very definition of law enforcement.

>Just like all developers are 'evil hackers'.

No, because that's not the very definition of developer.

A cop is an agent of the state that (and is) ordered to arrest, take down, put in jail, etc people and is authorized to use force for that -- including his gun.

[pessimizer]

If they're not, I want them fired. They are here to find the non-compliant and hit them with sticks until they submit to the judicial system, and to kill them if that's not possible (if we as a society can stomach a death over whatever we're accusing them of.)

[Zigurd]

Appropriate username.

[pessimizer]

A cop that doesn't hit people with sticks is a just social worker.

[pessimizer]

Or 'just a social worker,' rather.

[mindcrime]

So all cops are 'agents of state violence'?

Yes.

[antihero]

Though isn't the idea of state violence a workable one because there are situations in which violence and compliance are in people's best interest - such as shooting a home invader, and secondly because (ideally, and this is where it has broken down) the state is an accountable facilitator of the people's will.

[mindcrime]

Possibly, yes. I'm not passing any judgement here, just pointing out that police, as agents of the State, are ultimately agents of violence, since the State is ultimately just "that entity which reserves for itself a monopoly on the lawful use of violence".

Personally, I agree with Bastiat that the State should be more more than the collective extension to our own individual, inate right to self-defense, so any violence which goes beyond that, I consider improper.

But I've said too much already, HN really isn't the best place for these discussions...