I'm saddened for my country and hope that this can be a turning point for all of us.

"When you get the data into a nice, clean, dense form, stuff just falls out of it" - Saul Pwanson

[1] https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality

This triggers riots and protests, which require the police to work overtime.

They get paid for causing all these problems, and well paid. Their overtime costs must be tremendous. And who ends up paying? We do.

We should claw back police overtime pay for any protests or riots that are caused by the police themselves. I think that's fair and equitable.

This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.

Medical errors, for example, are estimated to cause as many as 250,000 deaths per year [1].

There are millions and millions of daily interactions between police and civilians every year. Sadly, there will be some mistakes, some of which will be caught on camera.

It's important to be aware that what the media can be random, and media coverage is not always correlated with how important or prevalent a problem is.

[1] Johns Hopkins: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

Even if we don't contribute to that personally, can we at least agree to try to avoid doing things to other countries that get in the way of doing that, in really obvious ways like not randomly bombing them and pretending? Can we just admit to ourselves that a lot of global military expenditure is just a certain kind of make work? As Americans, can we then really not think of a slightly more efficient way to allocate the $7.3T that the American government raises every year from tax revenue, much of which we just light on fire policing things parts of people's lives unnecessarily?

Come on. I'm sure we can. This is like taking your hand off the literal stove. I know how horrible this all looks, and it is horrible, but it's also really easy to propose a solution to it. Divest and reinvest. It could be so many flavors of divest and reinvest, and still be a good enough improvement over how things are right now that it would be the most impressive piece of legislation for probably a 100 year span of time if not 200 years. There has to be an opportunistic, ambitious K-street lobbyist or two reading this, right? Wanna take credit for bringing America out of the dark ages? Come on...you know you want to. Now's your chance.

The bar is at the floor. You could write the dirtiest honker of a bill you've ever seen that it could make the ACA look clean. As long as it achieves the right divestments (global windmill fighting) and reinvestments (domestic production infrastructure), you're on the right track. You don't even have to get it completely right the first time. Perfect is the enemy of done here. Just something major and timely, which lets you evangelize divest and reinvest. You can even rebrand it as "digital transformation" if you really want. I would promise to never judge it as management consultant grifting again.

Because if not...I don't know how long this situation will hold. Those riots are just a taste of unease to come, and eventually, the federal branches of the government will understand how much more powerless they are with dislocation of their local constituencies. Someone is going to figure out how to relocate those constituencies.

It's finally time to put all that facial recognition tech to good use.

- Less immunity, and discharge without pension for blatant violations, for example being caught on camera hiding a badge, or deliberately bumping into someone to be able to argue that they were "assaulted".

- Longer police traning. A 6-12months is how long you should train to be an unarmed mall security guy. Two or three years for a policeman seems like a minimum if you want qualified officers.

- Federal overview of all police and common frameworks for what is allowed and expected by police officers.

- Only qualified policemen should be allowed to be managers anywhere in the hierarchy (e.g. running for a Sheriff should require police traning and N years of experience).

- More training focus on deescalation, dialog and avoiding dangerous situations.

- Mental health screening. You don't want anyone who would become violent when in the wrong situation.

At a minimum, watch 100 videos. I did last night, only took about an hour, it's easy to find some to nitpick, some which are ambiguous ... and plenty that are totally horrifying.

If you can watch 100 videos in a row from Greg Doucette's list and say, "the militarization and use of force tactics of US law enforcement are not a problem" then I'd like to hear why you think so given this evidence.

Otherwise you're not speaking from an honest grappling with what these videos contain.

Is the expectation that curfew is an order that should not be enforced in the strictest sense?

From what I could see on the news, parts of your country were being burned down and looted by some rogue elements who used the cover of peaceful protests to spring into action. To protect the lives and livelihoods of those affected, a curfew was imposed, which was then violated. If I lived in those areas I would have liked to see the curfew enforced as harshly as possible because if it is not enforced then I will lose the local businesses who I depend on to live in that area.

What is the expected approach to law enforcement when extreme measures like curfew orders are not obeyed, particularly during a pandemic?

A lot of these videos seem to be omitting the all-important context. In my country I would want the police to beat the ever loving expletive out of people who do go out in large crowds during a pandemic. I would want the police to use all measures available at their disposal to injure and dissuade people from breaking a curfew and unwittingly providing cover for criminals.

Perhaps in first world countries life has become soft and comfortable so there is some expectation of civil behavior from everyone in society, but clearly that has not happened in the USA and many other countries.

Many of the protests are peaceful, and a lot of anger can be easily empathized with, I can't imagine anyone who was not furious after seeing these horrible videos of police inflicted killings. Under no circumstances can I be convinced that looting and rioting is an acceptable outcome. If protesters know that their peaceful assembly is being hijacked by criminals who go out and loot and riot under the cover they provide, and they go out and protest more, then they are complicit in the rioting.

Perhaps these are cultural differences, but coming from a police where the police are infinitely more barbaric, corrupt, rude and ruthless than the USA, I find the police doing the best they can to manage the absolute mess that the citizens are creating.

You all live in a country where many police wear body cameras. That is privileged beyond anything I can hope to imagine for my country. It's weird to empathize with you when you have it so good.

cops are entitled because unions make them this way. take away their safety net and you seeing more terminations and less bullies and entitled people applying for the job.

When a second one crashed, the focus quickly shifted.

It is a common attitude in aviation that even pilot error is really a systems fault. Perhaps opposing buttons are too close together, or some control requires attention to be diverted at the wrong time, or pilots are allowed to fly too many hours without adequate rest, or plenty of other things that could contribute to predictable human failure.

It seems obvious that we can predict human failure in current policing. If two incidents with a 737 lead to an indefinite grounding, what's the right number for this situation?

In the case of the airplane, grounding does not create a public safety issue. And there are, of course, many alternatives that can keep the overall system up and running in the meantime. The solution to police brutality requires much more thought.

Most of these videos are carefully edited to show one side of the story. Others are stories sharing only their side of the story.

Protester brutality far exceeds police brutality. Criminal brutality faaar exceeds police brutality. Yet the extremist leftists are calling to defund the police, which leads to complete chaos and anarchy. Pathetic reasoning from a stone-age, low-IQ perspective.

It's currently at 500+ instances of police brutality. https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1272306977872453634

The fact is, I'm a white dude in my mid-30's, I make a tech salary, and I'm afraid of the police, because an officer with a hair up somewhere could ruin my life for a period of time, if not for good.

A reference I never expected to see on HN.

It's insane, but then you realize that a significant portion of the US population _still_ only watches television news media and refuses to spend extra time looking at other sources, like Twitter.

[1] - https://www.statnews.com/2016/05/09/medical-errors-deaths-bm...

Maybe this type of project would be the thing that gets IPFS off the ground and exposing it to a more mainstream audience.

https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/tree/master/tools...

https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality

I think the issue people are rioting about is that it's not a 1 in a billion chance for everyone. It's more like 1 in a quintillion for a rich white person, and 1 in a million for a person of color. That inequality stems from systemic racism in the police force. What you're saying is that it would be less of a problem if the deaths were evenly distributed across the population. That may be true, but I don't think many people would suggest it as a viable solution to the problem.

Being the imperial power has vast benefits, do you think Rome ruled its provinces just so they had a way to spend money? Being the global power is literally worth money. It's hard to say how much, but I'm pretty sure it's larger than your military expenses.

That said, I'd love to see the US cut back, because your benefit comes at somebody else's cost.

If the net benefit to the US is positive however, do you believe the majority of people would be happy to work more to have the same standard of living, or the majority of well-off Americans would be happy to pay European level taxes to redistribute wealth within the US? I have sincere doubts on both fronts.

No it's not. Police in Europe is, on average, very kind. When they stop you, you don't have to be afraid of anything, and more often than not you stop them to ask for help, even if it's just to ask for directions.

The rate of police killings is vastly higher in the US than any other Western country. So something is going on there that is not a universal phenomenon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Grossman_(author)

Here in the Netherlands _basic_ education is 3 years; and then you have another few years to specialize into a specific topic (abuse, fraud, forensics, narcotics..).

In fact, there are plenty of commentators downthread who don't see it as a mistake either. Years of demonisation and propaganda has gone into supporting the belief that as soon as somebody steps out of line it's necessary to beat them back into line, or shoot them if they do not comply. It's no more a mistake than the millions of people in US prisons: it's policy.

Ok, the EU has 445M citizens[1] which means, by your logic, there should statistically be 40% more police "mistakes" than the US. Except there isn't. It is radically lower[2] (1536 for the USA in 2019 vs 51 for the EU in 2018/19).

[1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/figures/living_en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

I lived for a number of years on a caribbean island–modern, mix of people, pretty crowded, but a police force that was just cool af. They just didn’t get aggressive unless it was absolutely, positively, unquestionably a life or death situation. They weren’t invisible, but they weren’t anywhere near as pervasive as we see in US cities.

And I never felt unsafe there. I would walk through the worst parts of the cities at night and no one bothered you. Sure, there was crime, but basically the same shit you see in US cities where the cops everywhere and hyper-aggressive.

There is something going on with our cops and it’s a large and very deep cultural problem.

Other places have police who are drastically scaled back and the quality of life is so much better.

I’m guessing unless we alter our policing structures to where our police understand they need to make the overall community’s day to day quality of life better, these massive cracks are going to continue to widen.

Again, there were far less police and the world did not fall apart, the daily quality of life was significantly higher.

One of the major hurdles we need to get over is the rather large amount of people (and many of the police also belong to this group) who just don’t understand that people have different interests. A bad analogy, but this is a group of people who rage out when someone has pink or green hair. It’s not enough for them to personally choose to have a buzzcut, they’re furious that everyone else doesn’t also have one.

I could probably come up with a better analogy, but I think one of the answers is in there. I’m not sure how we convince those people to live and let live, because at the heart of our policing emergency is that thought process.

Their abuse is literally publicly subsidized.

Lawsuit settlements for the police committing human rights abuses should come out of the police pension fund.

It does not appear that this is money well spent.

On the flip side I'd like to point out that this increased OT often has downstream effects as well, most notably in pensions which are typically based on your last n months of pay. Some contracts include OT in this and some do not. So soon-to-be-retired officers could literally be increasing their pay for the rest of their lives based on increased pay due to working a riot.

There are way too many cases where a cop provokes a confrontation, often by stopping to allow someone else nearby to run into them, and every other cop in the group responds by beating anyone nearby and shoving back anyone with a camera.

You don’t get coordinated responses like that without planning and practice.

Almost all of them had outright wrong, or heavily misleading titles and/or descriptions with contradictory claims in the comments - and almost none of them provided context to the police actions.

This list is really more about stoking emotions than providing evidence of anything.

I mean look at this one...

https://twitter.com/jayjanner/status/1267111893753307137

A large volume of misleading hyperbolic claims by a biased collector/poster don't get more meaningful through volume of posts.

-Traffic cops, patrolmen, and escort/guard details do not need to carry guns. They should not be pulling people over to fish for reasons to search and detain, they should not be arresting people. It's simply not necessary, and we should not use the same people that do SWAT raids for everyday things.

Aside from mass shootings and hostage situations, there are very situations in which shooting is reasonable. Let the criminals get away with the diamonds- imagine you're on the highway when a UPS truck flies past you and the air is suddenly filled with bullets. You're terrified; any one of those could end your life. Then you realize the police are the ones endangering you. Police should be trying to get to safety and get others to safety when guns are fired.

Dominance and submission have zero place in policing and should be legally punishable. The whole concept assumes that criminality is a single entity that will stop doing crimes if the police are dominant enough. It's ludicrous; the police should never be using law as a weapon.

If there is an incentive program doing measurements it must never be measurements of "number of arrests" or similar. It should be measurements of job approval instead.