I was a kid living in the Philly area when it happened. It got lots of local TV coverage of course and it honestly did feel quite crazy having a military like action against a house in Philly, but it never seemed to go much beyond that after it was all over. IIRC it was Mayor Goode who called the action, and being african-american, maybe that helped keep racial tensions down. I can only surmise if it was today that there would be much longer lasting coverage and repercussions.
I think when you get down to it isn't quite as much about race as the news would have us believe. It is more about the plight of the poor vs. authority trying to keep them in their place but by highlighting incidences with racial components like this they can polarize the various groups that would otherwise have common interests.
The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...) but they are often portrayed as polar opposites and played against each other in the news and politics.
I've made the point elsewhere that a lot of activists in the US are shooting themselves badly in the foot by playing up the race aspect over and over in these cases.
They are missing that while there certainly is racism in the US, these problems correlate much stronger with poverty than race: The vast majority of differences in violence along racial lines disappear when you start adjusting for social equality.
By tying it to race, these activists are pushing away large groups of people - both poor people of other ethnic backgrounds, and other people who don't find the race issue comfortable for various reasons (including not so savoury reasons).
And by focusing on the police, rather than the underlying social inequalities, they are likewise pushing away groups that see the police as fundamentally protecting them against a lot of the people that are demonstrating.
At the same time, address the poverty issue, and 1) it has a much more significant impact, 2) it leaves the remaining race issues in much starker relief (it is far easier for racist cops to justify their behaviour when the victim is black and live in a poor area where it is easy for people in the community to accept that a black kid in that area can be scary)
It is heart wrenching to see how off the mark these things end up going.
> The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more corporate bailouts etc...)
Except not. While the TPP and OWS were, in some senses, responses to the same circumstances, TPP seeks generally right-libertarian approaches to addressing those circumstances, and OWS seeks generally left-wing solutions. There's some overlap, but also deep and fundamental opposition. TPP is anti-tax/anti-regulation, OWS is generally for restoring regulations that were removed that they see as having enabled the situations that both TPP and OWS respond to.
This isn't really surprising -- major, widely-felt economic pain is shared, but different ideologies offer different approaches to addressing that pain.
>but it never seemed to go much beyond that after it was all over
That's because MOVE was largely hated by their neighbors (who were also black). They were almost universally considered a nuisance to their area, and their living conditions represented a threat to their neighborhood.
MOVE's confrontational demeanor (to cops & regular citizens) combined with building up a huge arsenal made this a pretty unique and delicate situation.
Importantly, Goode claimed full responsibility & launched an investigation almost immediately after the incident which found the city at fault. Civil lawsuits were filed and money was paid out to the family of the victims.
While not normal by any means, this is different from Ferguson in that there, local government seems to be silent and police are treating everyone like criminals, even the press, and are acting with impunity. We've yet to see the fallout though, but it has been going on long enough.
I would love to read something about how the police didn't kill someone. It seems like most of the people that help other people are "strangers" - are there any kinds of statistics on how often the police actually help? I'd imagine that situations like domestic abuse are cases when they're really successful but other than that it often seems like the police cause real problems that tear people apart.
Police don't kill people almost all the time. Police generally are a net good.
I read this book once called Crisis Management. The main idea was to minimize the consequences of rare actions. So, even though train cars carrying lethal chemicals rarely derail, you build the train tracks so if one were to derail, say on a sharp curve, it derails far from populated areas. Or, even though nuclear reactors rarely release deadly radiocative gases, you don't allow people to build shanties nearby, where they would get lethal doses of radiation if there were an accident.
You can't get rid of adverse cases completely in most real-world situations. But you can work to minimize the consequences when the adverse case shows up. There are times when improving the worst case is pretty cheap, if you think ahead.
Policing is like this. The police very rarely need to use force ('rarely' in the sense of force used/interaction with civilian.) But when they do it makes sense to reduce the worst case: that the force will cause mortal injury. In the MOVE case, just wait them out. There is definitely increased cost, but it improves the expected value of the worst case by much more than the cost. Or, as I saw someone ask, speculatively I have to assume, on Twitter 'what would you do if some 6'4" guy was running at you threateningly?' The rational answer might be 'close your car window and call for backup.' It's never 'get out of the car and shoot him in the head.'
I'm not so sure. The few encounters I've had with the police have made me wonder. I live in a medium crime city and every time I have to call the police for something they never really do anything except write a report and then I never hear from them again.
In one instance when my car was stolen I was victimized more by the police than the car thief. The cops when they found my stolen car towed it to a lot and then told me they had found it via registered mail at which point I had to go pay several hundred dollars to get my car back that was only worth several hundred dollars to begin with. Also couldn't just write it off and leave it because they would still come after me for the towing and storage fee which was $50 per day. On top of that when I went to get the car the employees at the police station were _literally_ illiterate and made so many errors in transcribing my name and VIN number onto the vehicle release form that the towing company questioned whether it was actually my car!
In another instance when my car was the victim of a hit and run it took the police 4+ months to get the police report to the insurance company so that that they would pay for the repairs.
I mean if you can't take reports and return stolen property efficiently what the heck are you there to do?!
I had a buddy who worked at Pizza Hut in a rural town most of his life. Did a great job and when he went to college in Minneapolis, Pizza Hut offered him his own shop, in the middle of what would be considered "the ghetto".
First night he's managing, a group of kids come in and rob the store of a large bank of small vending machines. You know the kind. They have stickers and gumballs and such. It was like six of them, all bolted together. He freaks out, calls the cops and you know what their response was?
"Uh yeah, our officers have far more important things to do then petty theft. We'll send an officer out when he has a chance." It took two weeks before he saw a cop who took the report and he never heard back after that.
Sure he was pissed, but I had to explain that in bigger cities, there's always something more important than what happened to you. Got mugged? Yeah, well someone just got murdered. Your car got stolen? Yeah, well a gang member just shot up a McDonald's because his fires were cold and shot three people.
So for all the people who complain that "Isn't there something more important you could be doing?" Well, yeah, but don't get pissed then if they blow off whatever petty incident you were involved in to go catch a real criminal.
That sounds reasonable as a high level explination. However, the real reason police blow off 'small' crime is they have quotas. So, if there not going to actually catch anyone so it's a 'waste' of there time. Get someone's license plate and the police are all over a hit and run have a vague description and you just became more paperwork.
Which is why drug crime is so heavily inforced. It's easy to get a steady stream of people.
As a side note, I once had a cop show up and say someone found your cellphone come to the impound if you want it. 'wasteful' sure, except the odds where vary good I would be there so it's worth a little effort.
Police are not supposed to be a net good. They are a classic solution to a game theoretic prisoner's dilemma. If there were no enforcement of laws by police, it would be in everyone's best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of whether other people steal, you'd be better off doing it. So as a classic solution to the prisoners dilemma, you introduce a force that strictly decreases everyone's utility function. How can this be a good thing? Well, because it changes everyone's optimal strategy from stealing to not stealing, reaching a global optimum. Now you'll notice that this strategy only improves things if it actually changes people's behavior. If people continue stealing anyway at the same rates, then things have only gotten worse (unless you subscribe to punitive, rather than deterrent punishment). So the primary purpose of police is deterrence through the threat of negative reinforcement, not "helping people". Further, whenever police actually have to enforce laws, its a sign that something has gone wildly wrong. The deterrent didn't work, and things are worse off than if there were no police at all. Of course, in reality criminal behavior has a lot of motivators and it's not possible to change everyone's optimal strategy just by raising punishments, so you're going to have police enforcing laws. But there is no police department that is more successful than one where the police just sit around and do nothing.
If there were no enforcement of laws by police, it would be in everyone's best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of whether other people steal, you'd be better off doing it.
This makes no sense if you've ever interacted with other humans. There are several logical societal deterrents to stealing beside police. (Ostracism, retribution, foresight, modeling…)
You're missing the forest for the trees. The fact that some people's utility function supports not stealing by default is irrelevant to the structure of the game. It's still a prisoners dilemma and the existence of the police is justified in its efforts to modify the game's structure.
A prisoner's dilemma is a wholly fictional and game-theoretic construct involving single, isolated interactions among perfectly rational agents.
None of that has anything to do with humans. Humans never play the prisoner's dilemma because they're never any of the above concepts. Humans are certainly not perfectly rational, and almost always interact with the same set of people. You can't apply such an abstraction to public policy.
Yea, right... You can't apply math to public policy - only stories and soft science. Math is absolutely useless because it's abstract and ... "fictional".
It was sarcasm. I'm implying the most common societal deterrent used in the US, based on my observations. I honestly have no idea how we could deter stealing in society. If I were to be serious I'd say the biggest source of the issue is horribly imbalanced wealth and power, but really it's a tough problem to solve. I definitely believe that Law/Justice is important though!
If the punishment is equal to the crime such as eye for an eye,or apply for an apple, then given the <1 probability of punishment, it is always rational to commit the crime because the expected value is profit. This is true regardless of whether there is police.
When you add police then the utility of everyone goes down, i.e the police may randomly shoot you for doing nothing whatsoever.
In the middle ages ( > 100 years ago) the english tried making the punishments more severe than the crime, e.g hanging or transportation for stealing a loaf, but that didn't result in decrease in crime, even if it made the crimes unprofitable.
If the punishment is random and unfair, as it will be, Then the deterrent effect is negligible because the probability that you will get away with it increases more than the severity of punishment.
Humans mostly avoid crime not because it is unprofitable, but because humans are mostly nice. Adding police to society decreases the probability that they will be nice. SO in most police states police and police penalties on society are heavy yet nobody wants to live in a police state.
There's another angle to this too, which is the difference between the service of policing (basically, physical protection and enforcement of many laws), and the institutions that offer it. You seem to be referring to the service itself, which can theoretically be performed by the government but also by individuals, private security guards, the Mafia, etc.
Right, at a certain point it comes down to the officer's life versus the life of the civilian. This is a tough situation because you essentially saying "I am going to kill you before you kill me" - which is definitely not how police should operate.
Unless the civilian is armed I see no reason why the police should even arrive at the scene with a gun, unless the situation is violent to begin with, or after being called in as backup.
There is a difference between the two situations though. A train isn't going to adapt based on the your policies though a person might. If your only thinking about short term suffering you might in effect increase the overall suffering by decreasing the deterrent effect of policing.
I think you make the concept of crisis management sound more complicated than it really is. I suspect there is almost always a calculation of risk versus cost. A certain amount of resources will be spent to prevent disasters of certain magnitudes and certain likelihoods.
You really believe this? I think the reddit / HN echo chamber combined with the current media cycle blowing the situation in Ferguson out of proportion in their 24 hour coverage is working.
There are thousands of good things being done every single day by cops all over the country. You don't hear about it because it isn't exciting.
If you think overall there are more corrupt / racist / evil cops than good, you most likely need to stop only getting your news from such biased sources.
"If you think overall there are more corrupt / racist / evil cops than good..."
There is a simple test to see if the above is true: How often do cops step forward to denounce brutality and corruption? What happens to the ones who do step forward?
Unfortunately for us, the real answer is not very pretty, and not the one most people wish were true.
Terrible metric. If you want to measure that the "police generally are a net good", then you should be measuring how many crimes are committed on a daily basis by the cops vs. good deeds.
The outcome is not what you think, if you are just consuming your police news via /r/politics, HN (and MSNBC the last two weeks).
> then you should be measuring how many crimes are committed on a daily basis by the cops vs. good deeds.
I don't think that's a very good metric. You wouldn't measure "how good of a person" a murderer is by counting how many minutes of his life he spent murdering versus how many minutes he spent not murdering. And you wouldn't measure "how good of a disease" cancer is by counting how many people it kills versus how many people it does not kill.
That's ignoring the very fact of their existence - it provides a civilizing effect on cities and communities. If crime ran rampant and unopposed, it would be a very different world.
Don't imagine for a millisecond that we could somehow do without police.
That couldn't possibly be because bad news makes headlines a lot more than good news does, could it? Mundane things don't make the news so why would a cop not killing someone make the news?
Well, for instance we heard about Charles Ramsey finding those three missing women. Also, today on the local news I saw a report about truckers saving a woman and child from a burning car on the freeway.
The things that police are used for are things like 'the war on drugs' etc... not necessarily positive, helpful, community level things.
But aren't you overlooking all the thousands of everyday things that policemen do, things that aren't newsworthy? Little things like giving people directions, explaining why your Metro card isn't working, or simply being someone to call and talk to and file a report with when someone steals your stuff; along with bigger things like stopping an abusive spouse or arresting assaulters, rapists and murderers; all of these are things that policemen do every day, which of course makes them non-newsworthy. IMHO the silent majority of cops are good people doing good things most of the time, but there's nothing to report there, so instead our perceptions of the police force are completely skewed by the reporting of rare, horrific actions.
I would never ask a cop for directions or ask why my metro card isn't working. For all I know I could look at some roided-up armored highschool graduate funny and end up with a hole in my face.
Police are horrible to rape and domestic assault survivors. They resent doing the paperwork for cases and often are totally unsympathetic. Police aren't trained well at all in how to relate to trauma survivors, so they end up causing vastly worse outcomes. This is why things like rape crisis centers exist, precisely because the police were not helping. In domestic violence cases, police will frequently side with the abuser and in states without mandatory arrest laws, often leave the survivor with the abuser, which obviously isn't a good thing to do.
I think the majority of cops are people doing a job. They see themselves as good people, but they're part of a system that hurts and kills people. Regardless of the above, the primary job of police in the united states is to fight the drug war, which is really just a modern variant of jim crow.
As an NYC resident, I see cops helping people with directions and MTA cards all the time, often unasked. RE: being "horrible" to abuse survivors, again, I think your perceptions have been skewed by all the stories you've heard about this happening, and all the stories you haven't heard about it not happening, because it's not newsworthy when it doesn't happen. Do you have any evidence this is occurring in a majority, or even a large minority of cases?
My opinion about cops being horrible to rape and DV survivors comes from my work in the communities.
I live in Washington DC and would never in a million years ask a metro cop for help. Nor do I typically see people doing so. The only thing I see metro cops doing are "randomly" searching black people or punk-looking kids' bags.
Things that are routine are by definition not usually published as news. "Cop drives patrol car all day without incident" is not a useful headline, and not only because it won't generate clicks (unless it's The Onion perhaps).
Local news in the US is highly dependent on police sources, and therefore VERY reluctant to be critical of police. There is far more pro-police bias in reporting than the reverse.
It isn't their job to help people. They're bureaucrats, it's their job to show up after and take notes, give interviews and file paperwork. There is no reason to give these people guns, tanks, helicopters, or bombs -- giving them cars is a stretch (we have mass transit, after all).
The US Postal Service has a better justification for being armed and having bombs and guns than the police do -- they at least have a positive mandate to defend the mail in their custody from robbery.
So you won't complain if your family are killed in front of you and the police don't do anything? GG dude this is why everyone thinks anarchists and the like are fucking dumb.
I don't get it. What's the rush with situations like this? They're not going anywhere. Surround the area, stay well protected, and think, negotiate, anything seems better than this.
>A 90-minute shootout this morning came after a week of growing tension between the city and the group, known as Move. Residents in the western Philadelphia neighborhood had complained about the group for years.
I swear I saw this before, or a similar thing. Also I swear I saw something similar in Independence, MO; but I cannot find a thing about it. Perhaps I was conflating it with this event.
