you obviously don't know a lot of officers. maybe you should meet some and hang out with them for a few days.
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Personal experiences don't override statistics or legal precedent. I don't need to "hang out" with officers to understand the well documented patterns of police misconduct or the Supreme Court rulings about their lack of duty to protect citizens.
The "just meet some nice cops" argument is precisely how institutions avoid accountability for systemic problems. Individuals, and how nice they might be, are irrelevant when discussing institutional failures.
The Supreme court ruling has absolutely no bearing on this.
What statistics, what well documented patterns? You mean biased selection of footage from Reddit?
And yet you're letting your own personal experiences override statistics, yourself? What's the prevalence rate of abuses of power among law enforcement officers?
"Well-documented patterns of abuse" are not statistics! But, if I'm mistaken and they are, please let me know what percentage of police officers engage in abuse of power in their career. I'd love to see those kinds of statistics!
Allowing cops to get away with abuses is also an abuse. So, for example, if a cop murders a citizen and gets away with it, not only is it that cop that has abused their position of authority, but every other cop at that precinct who knows what happened is abusing their position of authority.
I'm not sure that sort of thing is something you can tie up neatly into a bow and present as some set of statistics. But it's a phenomenon that's very real.
This is yet another deflection. If you cannot do anything other than wave away your lack of evidence, I'm forced to conclude that you actually have no idea what you're talking about.
Tons of people have seen things they can't explain, and are convinced that ghosts and the supernatural exist. Those phenomena are "very real" to those folks, too.
To be clear, I agree that police abusing their power is a "real phenomenon", in the sense that it certainly happens. But until you can provide ample evidence that these behaviors are thing a significant minority of police officers take part in, then your generalizing them to all police officers is just about as "real" as ghosts.
I don't care if they're "good people" individually. Every atrocity in every history book was committed by "good people" working together (though people tend to obscure that either for comfort or because they want to repeat history). The system is rotten.
Well, you should. Saying "cops are thugs" because some cops are thugs is no different (morally speaking) than saying "black people are criminals" because some black people are criminals. It's wrong to judge an entire diverse group of people by the actions of a few, period.
Cops have the protection of the law and a government granted mandate for violence. They're not a bunch of individuals deciding to act in a particular way. They operate in a system that will protect them for thuggish behaviour. If they happen to be "nice people" as individuals, they still have the option to be a thug without penalty. They still choose to implicitly support wide spread inequality and consequence free violence.
If, as an individual citizen, I'm aware of a serious crime being committed, I have an obligation to report it. If a "good" police officer has knowledge of crimes committed by "bad" police officers and they don't report it, then they are no longer a "good" police officer.
Your analogy is a false equivalence.
They are categorically thugs. It is literally their job to enforce literally anything with up to lethal violence. It is dressed up in due process and whatnot but it is still thuggery. The difference between, idk cops in France or whatever, and cartel enforcers or a medieval lord's men at arms is mostly one of process, available money and social norms.
Bullshit, it's completely different.
A non-criminal black person has no control or responsibility over a random criminal black person.
A police officer absolutely can speak up, speak out, and blow the whistle when one of their fellow officers does awful things. But most will just keep their mouths shut and help (actively or passively) with whatever coverup the institution decides is appropriate.
We're not talking about guilt by association, here. We're talking about guilt by failing to speak up; their silence makes them complicit.
>A non-criminal black person has no control or responsibility over a random criminal black person.
Exactly. It's not like we can kick people out of a race like it's a profession. Though I think that would make a very useful feature in a comedy plot.
This is such a flaccid and unsatisfying reply. But really, what can you say when your initial comment was so throughly dismantled?
you're right i have changed my opinions about my father, my brothers, my cousins, and many of my friends, because of a hacker news dismantling. i have now realized they are of course statistically thugs who have no interest in protecting citizens.
My cousin successfully sued because he suffered constant racist treatment and was passed over for several promotions that went to less qualified and less experienced white men. He subsequently had to move out of the county because the harassment only escalated after he quit. I'll be sure to let him know that he just ran into a few bad apples, but for some reason he was not keen to try again elsewhere.
I know some cops in Seattle PD who routinely refer to people in the (minority) communities they police as "subhuman scum" and wish they wouldn't have so many limitations of use of force.
They seem to be doing pretty well career-wise, too, so it seems that this is not an uncommon sentiment there.
sorry i dont want to get shot