Nearly all the data in the US points to the fact that police are the exact opposite of your story -- abjectly incapable of handling this role.

> Cops are human. They aren't a monolith.

Yes and no. Cops are indeed humans, but the institution of policing demonstrates that they behave and act homogeneously. E.g. "the thin blue line" or the "Blue wall of silence".

The article under question isn't about the police being asked to play social worker. It's about them being asked to just leave the homeless the hell alone for the time being.

My real point is that there's a pandemic on and everyone is both under a great deal of stress and simultaneously being asked to do new things. I would bet money that some of this is just habit taking over.

I'm not defending it. I'm not justifying it. I'm just explaining how humans work.

Cops are just cogs in the machine. They play the role we assign them.

We need systemic changes. Maybe the pandemic will help foster some of that.

But vilifying cops in a sweepingly dismissive manner isn't going to help us find a path forward. It's easy to vent your spleen at the nearest target during stressful events. It almost never improves anything and typically makes things worse.

Yes, we need to do better. Trash talking the police is probably not how we get there from here.

I need to either finally get to sleep or just shut up. No good will come of me continuing to post in this state.

Sorry things are so bad where you are.

We must learn to understand that disagreement does not equal fighting.

As for our exchange:

I'm not saying that the police are all paragons of virtue or should never be criticized. I'm just saying that stress tends to push people towards absolutist thinking in a way that actively worsens problems.

In most cases, focusing on "this behavior or outcome is undesirable and needs to stop" will be more productive than framing it as "these people are simply bad people." That second tends to entrench problems and should primarily be used to justify removal of specific people after efforts to remedy the matter by other means have failed.

You are more likely to find effective solutions if you approach it with some understanding for why the police fail to behave at all times like paragons of virtue. Simply branding people as bad people tends to yield no path forward for finding better approaches to the problem.

When upset, people tend to exaggerate and to make more damning claims than they might otherwise and we should be cautious about where that leads, especially during a global crisis. Now more than ever, we need cooler heads to prevail.

Generally speaking, being fair and evenhanded is most needed when it's the hard choice to make. This is part of why police forces behave badly -- because they are asked daily to take the high road while dealing with awful stuff and they get jaded and burned out.

In their case, they are often dealing with the threat of imminent physical harm to themselves and the physiological responses that elicits, a la an adrenaline rush that causes a fight or flight reaction. That's especially hard to overcome.

Public discussion in a forum doesn't involve those same elements. If it gets too harried, we can step away from the keyboard.

Surely, this is a place where we can work at having cooler heads prevail.

Some of the first few comments on this piece were sweepingly dismissive of the police as simply straight up bad people who don't care. You showed up later, so you may have missed that context. By the time you showed up, there was meaty discussion and a variety of views.

But there mostly wasn't when I left my remark urging people to not forget that cops are human.

I think you could have added your observations about police behavior where you live without asserting that I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong, but I also don't think my point really says what you seem to see it as saying.

The discussion here is about police behavior in a specific time and place. It's not wrong to feel that it's appropriate to talk about police behavior across the globe as part of that discussion, but it's also not accurate to act like I was suggesting "Police in Argentina are all paragons of virtue." That's a bit of a stretch and leaves me not knowing how to reply because it seems like such a far fetched interpretation of my remarks.

I was actually homeless in downtown San Diego for six months and in San Diego county for more than two years. I have first-hand experience with engaging with police while homeless in San Diego. My above anecdote comes from a police encounter that occurred while I was homeless and camped in San Diego county. So I think it's directly pertinent to the discussion here.

I've never been to Argentina. I wouldn't presume to say much, if anything, about policing there.

Let me be clear I wasn't in any way implying you were saying things about the police in general or about Argentina in particular. I understand you're very careful in saying only things you've experienced yourself, which is why I -- and many others here, it would seem -- appreciate your comments. I understand you're talking about the police force(s) in the communities you know.

That said, surely you can see the asymmetry here: you don't know much about Argentina, because I presume aside our cyclic economic meltdowns we seldom make the news. But we in Argentina and the rest of the world know a lot about the US. Maybe it's not all accurate and we lack the "local" vision, maybe a lot is exaggerated or fake news or excessively influenced by pop culture, but our news, politics and culture are permeated by everything they say and do in the US. In a very real sense we know more about you than you do about us. I have read books about the police in the US (one such book: "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces"), but I bet few Americans here have read any of the many exposés about corruption in Argentina's police force or their collaboration with our past dictatorship. Knowledge is not symmetrical :)

Absolutely true. The problem is that lends itself to non Americans acting at times as if they know more about America than Americans do and that their opinions about our country outweigh ours.

I've experienced kind of a mini version of this in terms of being an outsider who was exposed to a lot of info about some place via various media. I grew up in Georgia and most American films and the like come of out California and New York.

I have long felt it was problematic for those two places to have such an outsized impact on the perception of "life in America" because what they portray is often not accurate for places outside of New York and California.

Both places are far more urban than is typical for the US. I found it actively harmful to be exposed to a lot of ideas about what was "normal for the US" when it was really more like "normal for a very urban and wealthy subset of the US that lives in certain limited areas."

I'm guilty of having opinions these days about what California is doing wrong, but those opinions are informed by having lived there for a good chunk of my life. Like upwards of ten years total. (Maybe twelve-ish?)

Living in California after seeing it depicted in films so regularly helped me makes sense of some things. I got to recontectualize those movies as being "about California" rather than as being "about America" and I got to see some of the landscapes and experience some of weather and culture and what not depicted therein.

Having spent my early years seeing a place depicted and then having moved there, I will suggest that it does tend to give one an inaccurate impression of a place. What gets shown in books and movies remains a very narrow slice that leaves out a lot of pertinent details, never mind how compelling and rich the portrait may feel while viewing it.

It's completely reasonable for non Americans to be interested in what goes on here because America is very influential on the world stage. I don't discourage non Americans from expressing said interest.

I do take some umbrage with being told at times that non Americans know more about my country than I do because they have visited it and read about it. I realize you aren't actually saying that, but I have had roughly that said to me on HN and your comment veers uncomfortably close to repeating the sentiment.

And I don't really want this to turn into a fight. I'm still not sleeping enough and I'm currently running a fever. Feel free to chalk it up to "pet peeve" if you feel I've really gone off on some wild hair here.

Have a great day. I hope to step away from this conversation at this point in time.

Police officers behaving brutally are a thing of new democratic governments here. Democratic neoliberal pro-business governments like our recent former president took a hardliner stance for police enforcement, encouraging a "heavy hand", but even supposedly "liberal" governments have a difficult time with police brutality. These are young officers harassing the poor, the homeless, student organizations, etc.

Other countries like the US also have a history of the police harassing the poor, activists, blacks, etc. I see it in the news and reading about the history of the US. It's not specific to Argentina.

Of course there are other issues in the US, mostly centered around race, where we don't look that good...

From her experience, she is an 'expert' in this subject (with the caveats: in the US, with this particular police force and individuals). It is solid evidence in my book (with caveats, as above).

You are dismissing that because... why? It's almost as if you don't want to believe that people can be good; that everyone must be unrelentingly uncaring.

> Nearly all the data in the US points to the fact that police are the exact opposite of your story

You've not provided evidence of this.

> but the institution of policing demonstrates that they behave and act homogeneously

If they did act homogeneously then they would uniformly treat people well, as per the poster's experience. But you're claiming the opposite. You're contradicting yourself.

I may be reading too much into what you say, though, I suspect you meant something milder than what came across.

What does that even mean? Data on what and what sources?

But mostly, when people say "cops suck" they're talking about the institution. The ingrained nature of how they conduct themselves as an organisation.

Bringing it to a personal level is not really the focus for institutional change or the main criticism people have for police.

Dehumanizing groups of people isn't constructive. Telling someone they suck, chanting "fry them like bacon" at protests, etc then pretending that it isn't personal is disingenuous at best.

Insulting people, pretending it is a criticism of an institution, then replying with a pithy "dont take it personally" is dehumanization. That would be like saying "professors suck" then insisting that no, you aren't insulting professors, you are criticising the academia. It's intellectually dishonest. It is pretending that professors aren't people, they are nothing more than a representation of a synthetic power structure.

However, I note (from your patreon) that you are both white and female. I don't normally like to pull the "demographic card", but in this case I think that will have made a huge difference to your experience. The police's stereotyping of people of colour is well documented. And I don't think most women realise how much suspicion men are treated with by default by a lot of folks.

One experience in particular really drove this home for me: I'd dressed up in "women's clothes" (a skirt, tights, a sequin top, lipstick, etc) for a party, and I had to walk my friend to the train station through a busy shopping centre. Some people gave me weird looks, but most people actually seemed a lot more friendly than normal. Smiling at me kindly, etc. It was eye-opening to me that having a feminine appearance could make people treat you so differently.

The need to have some mechanism to deal with humans behaving badly is universal and lots of people talk like the police and the military are inherently the bad guys.

It's not an argument that gets any sympathy from me.

I would like to have actual solutions available. I run multiple websites to provide useful information for homeless Americans. The local police department gives out flyers listing my websites and I get along well with the local chief of police when I run into him.

I find the local police to be much better allies for my purposes than local homeless services. They aren't subject to The Shirky Principle, so they genuinely would like to see homeless individuals get their act together so they can focus on more serious crimes.

They are much more comfortable with my agenda to empower homeless people to pursue an income and solutions from the street. They aren't at all interested in treating homeless people like a puppy that followed them home.