We have a systemic problem in this country when it comes to policing, and it’s not about racism - it’s far worse than that, if there even is such a thing. It’s called “qualified immunity” and it’s NOT in our country’s constitution. It’s a fabrication, a lie, a horrifying farce that allows our cops and DAs to operate with near total impunity for any malicious activity they choose to engage in. Our “system” is hopelessly broken and we have an obligation to rectify it. I don’t want us to engage in more “dialogue” with law enforcement, I don’t want more “transparency”, I don’t want more “synergy” with “the community”, I just want this shit to STOP. There is no excuse and I’m sick of it.
I always wonder why Democrats, while in power, don't something about this and other problems that African Americans face? It is okay to accuse Republicans for blocking some reforms. Why can't Democrats address systemic injustices when they had numbers? Leaving everything to the Supreme Court does not help, as it takes 100 years for SCOTUS to make a change, as Justices take baby steps. Politicians can take a faster route, yet they don't. For instance, the State of Minnesota can get rid of "qualified immunity", and that state is not in the hands of Republicans.
The first step to understanding would be to question your implicit framing. Is it really true that Democrats are uniformly trying to help black people and Republicans uniformly want to prevent that?
They have half of Congress at the moment, holding a majority in the House by the way. They could pass a bill right now addressing anything (pick your favorite issue that is broadly supported by the Democrat voter base) and send it to the Senate to be debated. Yet they don't. People need to wrap their head around the possibility that Democrat party leadership doesn't actually agree with their "base" on the issues, they just pretend to. The evidence is there in the record.
> They could pass a bill right now addressing anything (pick your favorite issue that is broadly supported by the Democrat voter base) and send it to the Senate to be debated.
The word you are looking for is “ignored without hearings, debate, or votes”, not “debated”.
> People need to wrap their head around the possibility that Democrat party leadership doesn't actually agree with their "base" on the issues, they just pretend to.
The Democratic Party leadership agrees almost entirely with the base of the faction that has dominated the Party for the past ~25 years, the center-right neoliberal faction whose powerbase was in the conservative (compared to the party mainstream) Democratic Leadership Council — openly founded in the 1980s to reverse the progressive direction of the Democratic Party — before it took over the party apparatus rendering the DLC itself superfluous.
It's not a secret to anyone in the party, whether in the progressive or neoliberal faction, that those two factions have a deep and abiding conflict of values and are only, when their relationship is at its strongest, in an uneasy alliance of necessity against the Republican Party and the far right.
> I always wonder why Democrats, while in power, don't something about this and other problems that African Americans face?
They have, especially when the progressive wing of the Party was more dominant, but even some since. The Obama DoJ was no slouch on police accountability, something Trump and incoming AG Sessions were positively giddy about ending in 2017.
It's a long list of problems, though, and the US system is deliberately designed with a large number of veto points to prevent lasting radical course corrections from being easy to implement even with a transitory majority.
Executive discretion doesn't work, as another administration comes along and changes rules. Legislative fix works better than executive fixes in the long run.
I think to a large part this is a consequence of the racist policies the country had for a long time creating a permanent underclass. This will probably take some more generations to heal.
I also think that the US in general celebrates violence much more than other developed countries (on TV nudity->bad, violence->good). I am always horrified when even very liberal people seem to be OK with people being raped in prisons "because they deserve it". And I think a lot of people are totally OK with rough treatment by police.
The US still has racist policies, they just usually can't be overtly racist now.
> This will probably take some more generations to heal.
Will it ever heal without affirmative action? Even if racism and racist structures magically disappear tomorrow, there will still be segregation and significant wealth and power gaps that capitalism has no interest in alleviating.
I think that's reasonable. I strongly recommend Kendi's booked "Stamped from the Beginning", which is basically a history of racist ideas. One of the things that's really striking about it is the extent to which the ideas commonly in circulation are ones useful to the powerful.
One clear example from the book is the various theories of natural inferiority. During long periods when white slavery of Africans was common, Europeans claimed that Africans were naturally inferior because of the much hotter climate. But earlier, Greeks thought that northern peoples like the Slavs (from whom we get the term "slave") were inferior because they were from a cold climate.
The US had a lot of that going on, with different ideas about religion, culture, biology, and society shifting to be what was convenient for the rich. Given how much US wealth came from chattel slavery and after that labor exploitation, it's not a stretch to suspect that police, whose basic job is using violence to enforce the status quo, would have a lot of ideas and habits that match.
Did you bother to actually, you know, READ the article you shared?
"It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States" vs. ". The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704"
Slave patrols predate municipal police departments by 100+ years.
And for additional clarity, let's draw the link:
" Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system."
You're right in that northern police forces were more interested in protecting mercantile interests. And that's where we get the core functions of our police system: Protect the interests of the moneyed class (north) and suppress minorities (south)
But citing this article as evidence that US police isn't rooted in slave patrols is... bold choice, Cotton.
Yes, especially the part where it states that private police organizations were formed in multiple Northeastern colonies in the 1630s...or more than 70 years before the first slave patrols. (See also https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ which does a better job with its terminology.)
Unlike slave patrols, the Northeastern police organizations were the model for the formal police organizations formed in the 1800s.
If you're going to make an argument about timing, you need to get a better grasp on how time flows. (Hint: 1704 is a bigger number than 1630, so it comes later in the progression of time.)
If you think the North's lack of slavery means a lack of officially supported anti-black violence, you should think again. Loewen's Sundown Towns documents widespread ethnic cleansing across the US in the 1890-1920 period. Prominent examples include the Tulsa Race Massacre, but in smaller places than Tulsa they had an easier time of it.
Then as white flight took hold in the 1950s, there are plenty of examples of anti-black state violence. Especially when newly-created all-white suburbs and towns were eager to kick out any black people who might want to move in.
Way to create a strawman there pal. My point was that informal police organizations were the basis for the formal police organizations that followed, not the slave patrols.
The North also had slave patrols for several decades and was almost as racist as the South during the post-Civil War era. They just did a better job of hiding it. (By the way, Oklahoma was below the Mason-Dixon line and would have been considered a slave state if it had been a state at the start of the Civil War. As it was, Oklahoma was then known as the Indian Territory and most of the tribes owned slaves and fought on behalf of the Confederacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Territory_in_the_Americ...)
> The history of the US police is firmly rooted in slave patrols,
American professional police forces actually have their more direct origins in ethnic gangs given state sanction to control other ethnic gangs in the urban north, as that's what the first official local police forces were, though southern slave patrols were around earlier, evolved into police forces in the south, and played a significant role in the further development of national policing norms.
Of course, both the northern and southern influences contribute to why both racism and warrior (as opposed to guardian) mindset are deeply entrenched in American policing.
The following enters into the OP's link somewhat sideways, but in an important way I think.
There's an old 60's analogy attributed to Fritz Pearls: you can touch the menu; you can read the menu; you can lick the menu; you can eat the menu. But you didn't each the meal. That is, let's not confuse the model of experience with experience.
Extending that analogy I cannot argue that my life experience is similar, equivalent, or exchangeable with African Americans because I haven't lived their experience under, say, American police. Still I am concerned that if this analogy is taken too far, there will arise an insuperable gap that will work against binding each party into the whole we seek or ought to be seeking.
Our -- or THE - American Constitution sets forth equality among us all regardless of creed, color, sex, or religion, but when some of us go to the restaurant we aren't served or, worse, there's no food and no kitchen for us. America is not living up to the goal despite having fine goals. I recall Cornel West saying civil rights was due not because the Blacks wanted a piece of the pie -- a backhanded reference to government handouts for undeserving people -- but because preferential treatment based on color was never part of the deal. There's no white guilt at play here anymore than there's handouts going on.
So, let's be clear: violating civil rights is morally, ethically wrong. And all the more when it's perpetrated by sections of society that have greater power, money, and institutional agency. And all the more when cops are supposed to hold the line on justice. Justice is the good line: if you're on the wrong side, you should have to pay in the criminal or civil penalty. And if you're on the right side then all to the good. Either way, then, there's no room to take offense.
As I understand it the cop with the knee on the throat of a handcuffed black man was finally charged. Well, big deal: it took them long enough to get to the stunningly obvious. I am hoping the FED charges will follow. And then civil charges. There's also the issue of the other officers on the scene and whatever games were played by the DA and its affiliates.
Hackernews is primarily about technology, tech corporations, and business. However, let's over master the lesson so that we realize the ultimate money lesson with plenty of banked savings to boot: money is not the measurement of all things. We can and must insist there's equality under the law for each and everyone of us. Let's all work to make sure there's enforceable norms which is also, beyond income, an important piece of security for us and our families.
I have kids; I know why their skin color is like mine. They had no choice in the matter. And for those parents, sisters, or brothers of African Americans who fell into this society, we cannot be using and abusing and violating their rights. Standing by in a dismissive stance --- a Canadian guy who works as a FTE at my/our American company said we Americans need to get our ____ together like it wasn't his problem too --- is not help.
Maybe I cannot eat the menu. But I am not helpless, nor am I apart from this problem. I also have agency. Let's not lost in silos here.
You've been flaming up a storm on HN. That's against the rules and I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I'm not an American, but there does seem to be some value in a contrarian opinion here.
Namely, it isn't just police brutality that's the problem, but the whole cycle of violence. Yes, the officer who killed George Floyd needs to be prosecuted. Yes, the officer who wantonly pepper-sprayed protesters while driving past needs to be fired and charged. However, the riots and burning of police precincts have reinforced an "Us vs Them" mentality in the police and primed officers for the next round of brutality. Imagine that a mob of people of mostly the same ethnicity came to your place of work, threatened you with violence, and burned the place down after you and your co-workers fled. No matter how justified the mob's anger may be, this is how you create racist cops.
The riots in Minneapolis are rooted in mutual suspicion and lack of respect between the black community and police. Both sides can point to awful things the other side has done, but both sides need to be better in order to break the cycle.
I totally agree that the looters are hurting the cause and I wish some of the leaders would step up and tell the looters to stop. But considering that one side is doing this professionally and has the right to use lethal violence I think we should apply higher standards to them. Government has to break the cycle.
From what I have read police training is severely lacking and they also let get bad cops away with a lot. Instead of cleaning up from inside they circle the wagons and defend bad guys.
no, i don't agree with this take. it's just chicken/egg then and figuring out who started it first.
i don't condone the riots or excuse the people obviously trying to take advantage of the situation sow chaos/loot stuff, but the spirit of riots are a manifestation of a failure of a system. people don't just riot as the default response to injustice.
imo, cops that are "racist" didn't become that way because of mobs like this. they joined the force because, like other positions of power, it allows them that arena to act out their beliefs. you remove these people by removing the structures that allow them to proliferate.
i feel like no matter what black people do to protest there is always someone critical of how they protest. had this been an open letter from the community nobody would pay attention. look at the repeated times this has happened in the country and what eventually happened to the perpetrators, even after going thru the formal legal process. look at the ire drawn toward kaepernik for kneeling.
in the end it is a complex issue and it's not like we can just put everyone onto a "side" and make it one-dimensional. and i agree that there has to be a mutual respect among the community. but, i'm of the belief that if you're in an elevated position like a cop you need to be held to a higher standard than the average citizen.
We have a systemic problem in this country when it comes to policing, and it’s not about racism - it’s far worse than that, if there even is such a thing. It’s called “qualified immunity” and it’s NOT in our country’s constitution. It’s a fabrication, a lie, a horrifying farce that allows our cops and DAs to operate with near total impunity for any malicious activity they choose to engage in. Our “system” is hopelessly broken and we have an obligation to rectify it. I don’t want us to engage in more “dialogue” with law enforcement, I don’t want more “transparency”, I don’t want more “synergy” with “the community”, I just want this shit to STOP. There is no excuse and I’m sick of it.
I always wonder why Democrats, while in power, don't something about this and other problems that African Americans face? It is okay to accuse Republicans for blocking some reforms. Why can't Democrats address systemic injustices when they had numbers? Leaving everything to the Supreme Court does not help, as it takes 100 years for SCOTUS to make a change, as Justices take baby steps. Politicians can take a faster route, yet they don't. For instance, the State of Minnesota can get rid of "qualified immunity", and that state is not in the hands of Republicans.
Police Unions
If you’re not part of the solution there’s good money in prolonging the problem.
They do...
Some things are hard to change, even when you control all the branches of government.
The first step to understanding would be to question your implicit framing. Is it really true that Democrats are uniformly trying to help black people and Republicans uniformly want to prevent that?
They have half of Congress at the moment, holding a majority in the House by the way. They could pass a bill right now addressing anything (pick your favorite issue that is broadly supported by the Democrat voter base) and send it to the Senate to be debated. Yet they don't. People need to wrap their head around the possibility that Democrat party leadership doesn't actually agree with their "base" on the issues, they just pretend to. The evidence is there in the record.
> They could pass a bill right now addressing anything (pick your favorite issue that is broadly supported by the Democrat voter base) and send it to the Senate to be debated.
The word you are looking for is “ignored without hearings, debate, or votes”, not “debated”.
> People need to wrap their head around the possibility that Democrat party leadership doesn't actually agree with their "base" on the issues, they just pretend to.
The Democratic Party leadership agrees almost entirely with the base of the faction that has dominated the Party for the past ~25 years, the center-right neoliberal faction whose powerbase was in the conservative (compared to the party mainstream) Democratic Leadership Council — openly founded in the 1980s to reverse the progressive direction of the Democratic Party — before it took over the party apparatus rendering the DLC itself superfluous.
It's not a secret to anyone in the party, whether in the progressive or neoliberal faction, that those two factions have a deep and abiding conflict of values and are only, when their relationship is at its strongest, in an uneasy alliance of necessity against the Republican Party and the far right.
> I always wonder why Democrats, while in power, don't something about this and other problems that African Americans face?
They have, especially when the progressive wing of the Party was more dominant, but even some since. The Obama DoJ was no slouch on police accountability, something Trump and incoming AG Sessions were positively giddy about ending in 2017.
It's a long list of problems, though, and the US system is deliberately designed with a large number of veto points to prevent lasting radical course corrections from being easy to implement even with a transitory majority.
Executive discretion doesn't work, as another administration comes along and changes rules. Legislative fix works better than executive fixes in the long run.
I think to a large part this is a consequence of the racist policies the country had for a long time creating a permanent underclass. This will probably take some more generations to heal.
I also think that the US in general celebrates violence much more than other developed countries (on TV nudity->bad, violence->good). I am always horrified when even very liberal people seem to be OK with people being raped in prisons "because they deserve it". And I think a lot of people are totally OK with rough treatment by police.
> racist policies the country had for a long time
The US still has racist policies, they just usually can't be overtly racist now.
> This will probably take some more generations to heal.
Will it ever heal without affirmative action? Even if racism and racist structures magically disappear tomorrow, there will still be segregation and significant wealth and power gaps that capitalism has no interest in alleviating.
I think that's reasonable. I strongly recommend Kendi's booked "Stamped from the Beginning", which is basically a history of racist ideas. One of the things that's really striking about it is the extent to which the ideas commonly in circulation are ones useful to the powerful.
One clear example from the book is the various theories of natural inferiority. During long periods when white slavery of Africans was common, Europeans claimed that Africans were naturally inferior because of the much hotter climate. But earlier, Greeks thought that northern peoples like the Slavs (from whom we get the term "slave") were inferior because they were from a cold climate.
The US had a lot of that going on, with different ideas about religion, culture, biology, and society shifting to be what was convenient for the rich. Given how much US wealth came from chattel slavery and after that labor exploitation, it's not a stretch to suspect that police, whose basic job is using violence to enforce the status quo, would have a lot of ideas and habits that match.
The history of the US police is firmly rooted in slave patrols, so your suspicion is pretty much spot on.
That is wrong. Police forces originated in North, where slavery was outlawed. Slave patrols were not formed until nearly 70 years later.
https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united...
Did you bother to actually, you know, READ the article you shared?
"It was not until the 1830s that the idea of a centralized municipal police department first emerged in the United States" vs. ". The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704"
Slave patrols predate municipal police departments by 100+ years.
And for additional clarity, let's draw the link:
" Following the Civil War, these vigilante-style organizations evolved in modern Southern police departments primarily as a means of controlling freed slaves who were now laborers working in an agricultural caste system, and enforcing "Jim Crow" segregation laws, designed to deny freed slaves equal rights and access to the political system."
You're right in that northern police forces were more interested in protecting mercantile interests. And that's where we get the core functions of our police system: Protect the interests of the moneyed class (north) and suppress minorities (south)
But citing this article as evidence that US police isn't rooted in slave patrols is... bold choice, Cotton.
Yes, especially the part where it states that private police organizations were formed in multiple Northeastern colonies in the 1630s...or more than 70 years before the first slave patrols. (See also https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ which does a better job with its terminology.)
Unlike slave patrols, the Northeastern police organizations were the model for the formal police organizations formed in the 1800s.
If you're going to make an argument about timing, you need to get a better grasp on how time flows. (Hint: 1704 is a bigger number than 1630, so it comes later in the progression of time.)
If you think the North's lack of slavery means a lack of officially supported anti-black violence, you should think again. Loewen's Sundown Towns documents widespread ethnic cleansing across the US in the 1890-1920 period. Prominent examples include the Tulsa Race Massacre, but in smaller places than Tulsa they had an easier time of it.
Then as white flight took hold in the 1950s, there are plenty of examples of anti-black state violence. Especially when newly-created all-white suburbs and towns were eager to kick out any black people who might want to move in.
Way to create a strawman there pal. My point was that informal police organizations were the basis for the formal police organizations that followed, not the slave patrols.
The North also had slave patrols for several decades and was almost as racist as the South during the post-Civil War era. They just did a better job of hiding it. (By the way, Oklahoma was below the Mason-Dixon line and would have been considered a slave state if it had been a state at the start of the Civil War. As it was, Oklahoma was then known as the Indian Territory and most of the tribes owned slaves and fought on behalf of the Confederacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Territory_in_the_Americ...)
> The history of the US police is firmly rooted in slave patrols,
American professional police forces actually have their more direct origins in ethnic gangs given state sanction to control other ethnic gangs in the urban north, as that's what the first official local police forces were, though southern slave patrols were around earlier, evolved into police forces in the south, and played a significant role in the further development of national policing norms.
Of course, both the northern and southern influences contribute to why both racism and warrior (as opposed to guardian) mindset are deeply entrenched in American policing.
The following enters into the OP's link somewhat sideways, but in an important way I think.
There's an old 60's analogy attributed to Fritz Pearls: you can touch the menu; you can read the menu; you can lick the menu; you can eat the menu. But you didn't each the meal. That is, let's not confuse the model of experience with experience.
Extending that analogy I cannot argue that my life experience is similar, equivalent, or exchangeable with African Americans because I haven't lived their experience under, say, American police. Still I am concerned that if this analogy is taken too far, there will arise an insuperable gap that will work against binding each party into the whole we seek or ought to be seeking.
Our -- or THE - American Constitution sets forth equality among us all regardless of creed, color, sex, or religion, but when some of us go to the restaurant we aren't served or, worse, there's no food and no kitchen for us. America is not living up to the goal despite having fine goals. I recall Cornel West saying civil rights was due not because the Blacks wanted a piece of the pie -- a backhanded reference to government handouts for undeserving people -- but because preferential treatment based on color was never part of the deal. There's no white guilt at play here anymore than there's handouts going on.
So, let's be clear: violating civil rights is morally, ethically wrong. And all the more when it's perpetrated by sections of society that have greater power, money, and institutional agency. And all the more when cops are supposed to hold the line on justice. Justice is the good line: if you're on the wrong side, you should have to pay in the criminal or civil penalty. And if you're on the right side then all to the good. Either way, then, there's no room to take offense.
As I understand it the cop with the knee on the throat of a handcuffed black man was finally charged. Well, big deal: it took them long enough to get to the stunningly obvious. I am hoping the FED charges will follow. And then civil charges. There's also the issue of the other officers on the scene and whatever games were played by the DA and its affiliates.
Hackernews is primarily about technology, tech corporations, and business. However, let's over master the lesson so that we realize the ultimate money lesson with plenty of banked savings to boot: money is not the measurement of all things. We can and must insist there's equality under the law for each and everyone of us. Let's all work to make sure there's enforceable norms which is also, beyond income, an important piece of security for us and our families.
I have kids; I know why their skin color is like mine. They had no choice in the matter. And for those parents, sisters, or brothers of African Americans who fell into this society, we cannot be using and abusing and violating their rights. Standing by in a dismissive stance --- a Canadian guy who works as a FTE at my/our American company said we Americans need to get our ____ together like it wasn't his problem too --- is not help.
Maybe I cannot eat the menu. But I am not helpless, nor am I apart from this problem. I also have agency. Let's not lost in silos here.
Where were the riots after white woman Justine Damond was brutally killed by a black police officer in Minneapolis just a few years back?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond
You've been flaming up a storm on HN. That's against the rules and I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not an American, but there does seem to be some value in a contrarian opinion here.
Namely, it isn't just police brutality that's the problem, but the whole cycle of violence. Yes, the officer who killed George Floyd needs to be prosecuted. Yes, the officer who wantonly pepper-sprayed protesters while driving past needs to be fired and charged. However, the riots and burning of police precincts have reinforced an "Us vs Them" mentality in the police and primed officers for the next round of brutality. Imagine that a mob of people of mostly the same ethnicity came to your place of work, threatened you with violence, and burned the place down after you and your co-workers fled. No matter how justified the mob's anger may be, this is how you create racist cops.
The riots in Minneapolis are rooted in mutual suspicion and lack of respect between the black community and police. Both sides can point to awful things the other side has done, but both sides need to be better in order to break the cycle.
I totally agree that the looters are hurting the cause and I wish some of the leaders would step up and tell the looters to stop. But considering that one side is doing this professionally and has the right to use lethal violence I think we should apply higher standards to them. Government has to break the cycle.
From what I have read police training is severely lacking and they also let get bad cops away with a lot. Instead of cleaning up from inside they circle the wagons and defend bad guys.
no, i don't agree with this take. it's just chicken/egg then and figuring out who started it first.
i don't condone the riots or excuse the people obviously trying to take advantage of the situation sow chaos/loot stuff, but the spirit of riots are a manifestation of a failure of a system. people don't just riot as the default response to injustice.
imo, cops that are "racist" didn't become that way because of mobs like this. they joined the force because, like other positions of power, it allows them that arena to act out their beliefs. you remove these people by removing the structures that allow them to proliferate.
i feel like no matter what black people do to protest there is always someone critical of how they protest. had this been an open letter from the community nobody would pay attention. look at the repeated times this has happened in the country and what eventually happened to the perpetrators, even after going thru the formal legal process. look at the ire drawn toward kaepernik for kneeling.
in the end it is a complex issue and it's not like we can just put everyone onto a "side" and make it one-dimensional. and i agree that there has to be a mutual respect among the community. but, i'm of the belief that if you're in an elevated position like a cop you need to be held to a higher standard than the average citizen.
my .02