In the context of US society, with all its socioeconomic and cultural baggage:
- Is it possible to design a system with zero unjustified killings / violence?
- Can you program 100% of policemen to be 100% lawful all the time? If not, what is the expected failure rate of the system, and how far is the US from that number?
Obligatory disclaimer, I am one of those people who think it is justified to use violence against violent criminals, and shoot criminals who imminently endanger anyone. From what I read on social media, this does not seem to be a universally held view.
Incidentally I find that this whole topic is so emotionally charged that people tend to speak in absolutes and frankly that is just not something you can honestly engage with because there is no agreement on first principles, if at all there are any to begin with. Most of the talk I see surrounding the topic seems to be rooted in idealism and moral posturing with very little to offer in terms of solutions.
Here in my country India, the general public often welcomes it when the police beat up criminals. It is common for the criminal to receive their first set of beatings from the mob that captures them, and then another round during interrogation. Police shootings (colloquially referred to as "encounter-killings") happen quite often as well, and are generally assumed to be staged. Apart from a few activists, most of the country does not really care about this issue. It is incredibly privileged for American society to even be having a national conversation about police violence or police reform to begin with. The third world has largely accepted this to be a fact of life for anyone remotely involved in criminal activities, or people who dare to to stand up to corruption.
Also the race angle of police violence seems to be entirely manufactured by the media. I have yet to see a single statistic that shows a disproportionate degree of violence towards a particular race. We are in the middle of a pandemic, and from the videos I am watching online, it looks like a large number of people have removed this from their minds completely because it is not in the "news-cycle" anymore, which to me just reinforces my earlier claim that the race angle is a complete fiction invented by the media to sell advertisements, because the society at large seems to be programmable by what the news tells them.
That being said, I am 100% sure that that the many of the police across countries and cultures are biased against certain ethnicities, because that's how human brains work (pattern recognition) - is this a solvable problem either?
- Is it possible to design a system with zero unjustified killings / violence?
- Can you program 100% of policemen to be 100% lawful all the time? If not, what is the expected failure rate of the system, and how far is the US from that number?
Obligatory disclaimer, I am one of those people who think it is justified to use violence against violent criminals, and shoot criminals who imminently endanger anyone. From what I read on social media, this does not seem to be a universally held view.
Incidentally I find that this whole topic is so emotionally charged that people tend to speak in absolutes and frankly that is just not something you can honestly engage with because there is no agreement on first principles, if at all there are any to begin with. Most of the talk I see surrounding the topic seems to be rooted in idealism and moral posturing with very little to offer in terms of solutions.
Here in my country India, the general public often welcomes it when the police beat up criminals. It is common for the criminal to receive their first set of beatings from the mob that captures them, and then another round during interrogation. Police shootings (colloquially referred to as "encounter-killings") happen quite often as well, and are generally assumed to be staged. Apart from a few activists, most of the country does not really care about this issue. It is incredibly privileged for American society to even be having a national conversation about police violence or police reform to begin with. The third world has largely accepted this to be a fact of life for anyone remotely involved in criminal activities, or people who dare to to stand up to corruption.
Also the race angle of police violence seems to be entirely manufactured by the media. I have yet to see a single statistic that shows a disproportionate degree of violence towards a particular race. We are in the middle of a pandemic, and from the videos I am watching online, it looks like a large number of people have removed this from their minds completely because it is not in the "news-cycle" anymore, which to me just reinforces my earlier claim that the race angle is a complete fiction invented by the media to sell advertisements, because the society at large seems to be programmable by what the news tells them.
That being said, I am 100% sure that that the many of the police across countries and cultures are biased against certain ethnicities, because that's how human brains work (pattern recognition) - is this a solvable problem either?