I'm happy that your experiences with police while homeless were mostly uneventful. However using this anecdotal story as evidence that the police are adequately equipped to play the "social worker" role is exceptionally dangerous.
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".
It never ceases to surprise and amaze me how badly my point can and will consistently be mangled by some internet stranger. I'm not at all making the point you think I am.
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.
Doreen, I usually read your comments with great interest because they are always insightful.
I think in this case you're mistaken though, your personal experience notwithstanding. Are you from the US? The police in many countries is inherently incapable of treating the defenseless well. This sometimes has to do with the local political leadership, but often times it's simply intrinsic to the force. I live in Argentina and the political leadership is desperately trying to get the cops to enforce the lockdown in a gentle manner, yet there are cases everywhere of them simply abusing people in poverty-stricken areas. The police over here prey on the weak because it makes them feel powerful (and yes, usually because there are little consequences -- and that's political). But the point here is that the police and the politicians are at odds in this case.
I think the causes for police misbehavior are multiple and indeed systemic: giving guns and power to people unqualified for it and who get a kick out of having power over people; police forces with undemocratic traditions (as in Chile and Argentina, where the force was shaped by our dictatorships; this doesn't apply to the US) don't understand how to behave in a democracy; over here the police often comes from the same low-wage background as the people they harass, and harassment becomes a form of differentiation ("I'm not like them, they dress funny, and are dumb and violent"); discrimination based on perceived skin tone of course, and this is probably a lot like in the US.
Not sure if in the US it's exactly the same, but from what I read, in many cases it's pretty similar.
I wrote you a longer reply and then deleted it. I've simply been up too many hours at this point and I feel like we're probably talking at cross purposes.
I need to either finally get to sleep or just shut up. No good will come of me continuing to post in this state.
Your lowest quality posts are far far higher quality than the average on HN, even when people read uncharitably and reply aggressively and your frustration rises. Thank you for all you share.
I seriously doubt it was intended to say anything about you.
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 :)
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.
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.
Wait- Argentina was a dictatorship for many years and the police were thugs enforcing the will of the ruling elite. To extrapolate from their behavior that all police everywhere are just waiting to put the boot in at every opportunity seems myopic at best.
I mentioned that, but note at this point it's not just that. Democracy here returned in '83. While there is a structural problem of the police force still employing people from the dictatorship era, it's mostly fresh blood now.
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.
The difference comes in the meaning behind words like 'harassing'- when the police here harass the homeless it's shining a light on them and telling them to get moving, not usually a kick or a poke in the ribs.
Of course there are other issues in the US, mostly centered around race, where we don't look that good...
Oh, I agree it's not exactly the same situation. Though I believe the power difference between someone in uniform wielding a stick and a gun and a homeless/poor person is more universal and tends to lead to abuse. (In some cases, not even a poor person, just an unarmed one, can lead to police excessive use of force. We have seen this many times, even in the US).
> using this anecdotal story as evidence that the police are adequately equipped to play the "social worker" role is exceptionally dangerous
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.
Actually, I disagree. It might surprise you but the extremely violent behavior of American policemen is primarily influenced by external factors (such as the number of criminals equipped with guns). No matter what you do, you can't solve the problem by improving the police force.
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".