>Here's a number, in 2012 ~53,000 officers were assaulted in the line of duty. Those assaults could have happened from arresting a dangerous gunman to booking a 130 pound 24 year old for B&E.
Here's another number, most of those numbers are BS incidents reported by the police as "assaults" (much like the black guy shot that was said to "hold a gun"), and a lot of those are provoked by the police too.
Ask yourself how Germany (1/5 of the US in population) manages have its police use a total of 85-100 bullets in a whole year (for every city / policeman / incident in aggregate!), whereas a US police team can fire more than 90 in just one incident:
> Here's another number, most of those numbers are BS incidents reported by the police as "assaults"
That's
a) not a number
b) prove it
American police are definitely out of control. No disagreement from me on that matter.
But their job also has risks, and unlike what vdaniuk and other naive people here seem to think the two options for an officer are not "make it through their day having pleasant exchanges with every person they meet" and "die in the most horrible manner possible".
I understand that you don't like the police. Most people, myself included, have trouble with the amount of power the police have assumed and the amount of power the courts have allowed the police to hold on to. But I'm also capable of rational thinking on the matter instead of diving into immediate hyperbole whenever the word "police" are brought up.
I understand that it makes you emotional and brings up all kinds of feelings of injustice. But your arguments just become troll fodder when they start the way you've started your argument. And you've only simulated the appearance of rationality by bringing German police shootings into the matter, something almost completely non-sequitur and demonstrating your lack of rational thought on the issue.
This is why policy shouldn't be made on emotional input like yours. Because then the system would be optimized for petty theft and people that swear on Sundays and have no capacity to handle higher modes of human failure, or it would be the opposite and be completely punitive regardless of the arrest circumstances.
>I understand that it makes you emotional and brings up all kinds of feelings of injustice. But your arguments just become troll fodder when they start the way you've started your argument.
Not sure what's trollish about it. There are lots of instances of police reporting BS assaults just in order to arrest someone. People have spoken about such experiences in HN too. Not to mention the recent thing in Fergusson, were the same kind of incident happened twice in the span of a month.
I'm not in favor of "proving" things with numbers outside of hard sciences. In real life numbers are dirty themselves, tailored, manipulated etc. Either you know about some things from experience and/or can draw conclusions from the limited input that you read and learn about or not. Statistics ain't the answer, official statistics even less so.
>And you've only simulated the appearance of rationality by bringing German police shootings into the matter, something almost completely non-sequitur and demonstrating your lack of rational thought on the issue.
Not sure how it's non sequitur in any way. It was an argument that police forces can and DO operate differently in a modern, advanced, western country.
If you want to argue that the US is not as advanced and civilized and as such it's more dangerous for policemen, I might agree, but that's another point. And it might be one caused by the way the police/justice/prison system itself works here too.
Everything in the end goes down to trust, if you trust official statements then you probably haven't read enough history.
There are anecdotes that are more accurate and trustworthy than "data" on the same subject. For example, would you believe the official "annual report on poverty rates" by the government of South Korea? Or would you believe a person who lived there and is recounting the conditions?
I wouldn't believe official records of police "assaults" that the police has compiled itself either. Like I wouldn't believe official records that show how police was totally "racially blind" in Missouri, etc.
I find this obsession with data on non hard-science issues, especially social issues, idiotic and mechanical. If anything it obstructs with getting to the truth of things.
Here are how some of the official responses (that people esteemed as "data") turned out:
No, actually they aren't. Pretty much the rest of anything you can say on the matter, and anything about how you view the world is invalidated by that simple belief.
You see, the problem is that you've decided to build a world view off of unfalsifiable beliefs, not fact. You pretend to sound like you're questioning the veracity of facts, which is normally a reasonable thing to do, but what you're actually doing is preventing anything from shaking the preconceived notion that you've decided to glom onto. It's simply a ceremony you follow to help reinforce your beliefs.
When you enter into a "debate" like this one, you aren't there to change people's minds, or have your mind changed, your simply shoving the iron bar of your belief system down everybody else's throat and see if you stir up sympathetic ears to help continue to justify what you want to see in the world.
When you can't find support for your notions, you rely on semantically connected, but otherwise nonsequitur references, a classic redirection technique.
The issue that started all this is "was Aaron treated well in police custody", some people were shocked at what the inside of a police station looks like, but Aaron was treated just fine. Meanwhile you're off in Denmark and South Korea talking about poverty and experimental Danish maximum security prisons. They both involve "the man" so they must be relevant to the discussion, no?
If you want proof, do your own sociology homework. I think the burden rests on you, to show most assaults on LEOs are not trumped up bullshit, in this case. Cops lie.
I don't see how you can claim the burden falls on him. They already presented a study saying how many assaults happen on cops per year, if you want to refute that study with evidence then that's your burden - It's not their job to form your arguments for you just because you think you're right.
Here's another number, most of those numbers are BS incidents reported by the police as "assaults" (much like the black guy shot that was said to "hold a gun"), and a lot of those are provoked by the police too.
Ask yourself how Germany (1/5 of the US in population) manages have its police use a total of 85-100 bullets in a whole year (for every city / policeman / incident in aggregate!), whereas a US police team can fire more than 90 in just one incident:
http://www.theweek.co.uk/crime/46907/us-police-fire-more-bul...