"Third Reich" is the nazi reference.

If you insist on the original article being very precise and very exhaustive, you should too: “wrong kind of meme” is very vague. A meme of a swastika will indeed land you in trouble in multiple countries, to pick a lightweight example. What kind of meme do you mean?

I just read about a kid being arrested for $2 bill because the cops didn't know such bills exist. Not the first time it happens too. Some of them aren't exactly brilliant, unfortunately. And there are almost never any consequences for doing stupid while in the uniform.

> But then the authors don't write what 'violent disorder' is.

"Violent Disorder" is a specific offence listed in the Public Order Act.

> Then they try to further confuse the matter by talking about a completely unrealted 11 year old boy that was arrested for suspicion of arson

The way it reads doesn't seem like it's "completely unrelated" at all.

I don’t mind it being illegal.

But I think a lot of it needs to be treated as a significant mental health issue

> And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters. It's all very strange.

As Musk said: state sponsored propaganda(1).

I don't like the guy, but this one he had it right. (1) NGOs, i know.

[dead]

>And this isn't some weird online political rag, it's Reuters

What makes you think they aren't? All news media is inherently biased if they want or not. Not to mention "fact checker" are a prime candidate for corruption.

Is this an obvious reference? Do people often know the text of this, or of bits of it?

I agree those are problems in many places (and to some extent will be with anywhere), but would not describe them as militarisation.

Plenty of countries are benefiting from U.S. mistakes and ‘badness’…

Someone subjected to a non-lethal beating can complain, and be a witness to what happened. They can be medically examined to determine what happened. Its far harder to cover up.

I am pretty happy with the police hardly ever killing anyone, and that almost always someone who is a real danger to others. I am happy fewer people being killed by police so far this decade (and that includes road accidents involving police!), than have been killed by police in the US so far this month.

Does playing dress up make any difference to how much murdering they do? I don't think that outcomes would be any different if they were sent in in their regular uniforms with their regular weaponry.

> the concept of the modern police, at least in the US, was largely based on the Peelian model created in London in the 1820s.

There are some pretty big differences between the UK policing model and the one used in the US.

The UK model was set up against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars (the French police's role included monitoring dissent, suppressing political opposition [1] and even censoring books) and the Peterloo Massacre [2] (where cavalry were set on a peaceful protest campaigning for more than 2% of people to be allowed to vote)

The Peelian model [3] is one of 'policing by consent' where the police focus their efforts on the sorts of crimes the average citizen wants solved - rather than on suppressing political dissent, or censoring books, or launching cavalry charges against protests. Peel's police aren't a military force, which is why very few of them have guns.

If the American police are based on Peelian principles, then an awful lot of the principles have gotten lost in translation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fouch%C3%A9#In_Napoleon... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles#The_nine_pr...

While some night watches were public safety distributed among community members, they were often there to protect the goods of merchants rather than protect the ordinary citizens of an area from petty crime. As merchants grew, and their goods became more valuable targets, the merchants would hire on guards, but saw the opportunity to turn the existing night watch systems in place to their favor, essentially insisting on distributing the cost of guarding their goods across the community.

I'm not saying the night watches didn't evolve into police departments, I'm saying the night watches were co-opted prior to them becoming uniformed departments.

And slave patrols led directly into being police departments in some parts of the US. I do not claim that's in the history of all depts, but across the south there are many cases of patrols becoming formalized into police departments.

Can you tell me more or more about where I should look? What did people do about crimes like robberies etc?

Police forces have roots in protecting capital, for example warehouse guards or for another slave patrols.

They still exist for that purpose in the US.

They do not exist to protect people. They are a tool of the state and capital.

The years post slavery still were used to enforce Jim Crow laws, segregation, and violence against minorities. They still used dogs to attack peaceful protestors. SWAT teams are a continuation of an ethos of being warriors, willing to do violence at the behest of the government and capital at the expense of the people.

Specifically, SWAT teams didn’t exist until the 1960s. I’d wager their escalated use against civilians in their homes likely coincided with the War on Drugs in the 1980s.

It's guilt by association and that narrow nationalistic perspective that the US is the entirety of the world. Turns out, most of the planet managed to form similarly-operating police forces without first having slave patrols.

The and was not meant to be exclusive. It should maybe be read as or. It's not meant to imply all police forces were slave patrols. Plenty evolved to protect other capital interests.

It would be fair to say that early US police were mostly about protecting the interests of the powerful. Over time that diminished and police protected an increasing number of less powerful groups.

During my childhood, it was common for police to defer to husbands regarding domestic abuse. And kids all over knew to not go to the police - for any kind of abuse from authority figures.

> Are we still spouting this nonsense? They do come from the mid 1800s. Modeled after the London Metro Police

All of the above is true. In the US, slavery enforcement evolved into police forces and police forces were modeled after UK police.

Many police forces, many origin stores.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...

> Whatever that means

Look, if you're not even willing to understand the argument, your refutation of it is toothless at best, worthless at worst.

Not to mention, your own claim is vague and without evidence. In point of fact, there's plenty of evidence to the counter. There are ample studies to choose from, but from just this year: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/police-budget-crime-...

> This is a vague claim made by the anti policing activists

Probably a conclusion people come to when they compare US police looking more like the US military every day, while their local police doesn't go in that direction at all. At least that's true for me as a person living in Spain but sometimes seeing the really crazy equipment US police seems to have.

I don't pay nearly enough attention or care about police quality outcomes to comment on whether trends have been a disaster, but critiques of militarization are definitely not something that arose out of BLM. A huge amount was coming from Radley Balko and reason.com over 15 years ago. It was a major libertarian talking point for a long time. As soon as Iraq surplus donation programs started giving free MRAPs and full plate personal armor to police, it was making people uneasy. Early justification for beefing up police armament largely came out of the North Hollywood bank robbery shootout in what? 1998? We didn't want police being outgunned by common criminals, but it's never been clear they need to deal with paramilitary insurgencies that exist in active theaters of combat. Nobody was ever putting IEDs in the streets to blow up squad cars in the United States as far as I can remember.

The number you’re citing is much higher than the number of firearm-related homicides on your linked page; I believe that’s because it includes suicides, which are not relevant to this conversation.

So you want police to deal with 10k+ gun related homicides using only batons and pepper spray?

If there are guns, there is death. Frankly, if there are no guns, there's still death.

You pulling an argumentative sleight of hand here conflating your run of the mill gun violence with terrorist attacks or mass shootings isn't cool.

It doesn't matter how the police is equipped, they can't stop a guy from walking up to his neighbor and shooting him in the face unless they're already there pointing guns at him. Although, maybe some sort of remote mind control chip is the answer there?

Also, I'm certain every shooting ends up on local news.

This. There are valid reasons to have the big guns, though I still think we’ve overreached. It is terrifying that a damn teenager managed to trick the cops into whipping out the big guns hundreds of times.

Despite that the teenager will likely be going to jail, the most damning indictment is of the police forces that were repeatedly co-opted by the teenager. It should really take something much more clever to trigger this kind of systemic response repeatedly.

What's the alternative? Waiting for New York Times to verify a home invasion has indeed taken place before sending over cops?

>USA has 1-2 mass shootings everyday on average.

2+ victims is a mass shooting per the FBI definition so while what you say is technically true it's also a particularly evil way to mislead the reader as the typical mass shooting of the FBI definition consists of 2-4 people shot over the course of an otherwise normal crime wheres the colloquial definition of "mass shooting" is more along the lines of a crazy suicidal person killing as many others as they can.

Mass shootings as defined to inflate statistics by groups like the Gun Violence Archive aren’t what people usually think of when they think of mass shootings. Those figures include anything with four victims including gang violence, robberies, etc. The more accurate measure is from the Mother Jones database, which lists just two this year.

> The "military model" goes so much further than that.

Claiming that police are being militarized is a very broad statement. Depending on your perspective it can be positive or negative.

You could argue that consistency and having a common operating model with accountability is a good thing. Unfortunately many would argue the adopted model is very flawed and that the level accountability is tied to public outrage or scrutiny.

I think everyone would agree that adequate training is essential but we would disagree on what type of training is appropriate. Some argue that sensitivity and deescalation training are where the focus should be, while others are arguing for the warrior training.

The true conservative would say that we can't do it right so we shouldn't attempt because doing it badly will be more harmful than not having done it at all.

What's the baseline for 100s of attempted murders?

So 98%... https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major...

This is really off topic, but you are confusing real-time strategy with turn-based strategy.

It seems like he was a child when he made most of these calls.

Regardless, this is unlikely to be much of a deterrent. The police need to be held accountable at some point.

Perhaps, but 20 years is a significan portion of someone's life.

The courts wanting to make an example of those that have embarrassed the government is a different issue entirely.

Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months not 30 years.

As far as harm goes Manning's leaks exposed the identities of a lot of people who cooperated with the US or the Afghanistan government against the Taliban. When the Taliban found out about such people they would go after them.

We probably will never know how many, if any, people got killed from being exposed in the leaks because there is no way to know if the Taliban found them out through the leaks or through some other source. The odds are pretty good that it was more than one, probably a lot more.

The swatting teen on the other hand is known to have not actually gotten anyone killed.

A crucial difference is that when the teen sent someone to your house they were not there to kill you. They were there to do something that sometimes goes wrong and does kill, but most of the time that doesn't happen.

Someone coming to your house because the Manning leaks identified you as cooperating against the Taliban was there to kill you.

Crimes against the state or that that thumb their nose at the authority of the state always carry disproportionate punishments because the state is who's writing the rules, running the systems, creating the sentencing guidelines, etc.

Not to mention the opportunity cost: victims of real violent/urgent situations who couldn't access timely protection, as well as the cost to society of perpetrators who marginally escaped while law enforcement were occupied tending to fake call outs.

There are at least 30 countries that would apply the death sentence for that.

It's only attempted murder because American SWAT is trigger happy, equipped literally like an army and shoots before asking questions or establishing context, that's hardly his fault.

Sometimes they even drop bombs from them -- on to residential blocks with families no less.

> While the acab is kind of rough

> If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.

To be clear, your 2nd statement is why ACAB. The police are the people fighting against the open & honest accountability you are asking for. When accountability comes up, they refuse to do their jobs[1], inflate crime numbers & incident severity[2], harass the few cops trying to improve accountability until they quit[3], and actively campaign against accountability[4].

If some cops are bastards, and people who shield those bastards from accountability are also bastards, then all cops are bastards. ACAB is not rough, it exactly describes the situation.

[1] https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...

[2] https://minnesotareformer.com/2020/12/15/the-bad-cops-how-mi...

[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/only-minneapolis-...

[4] https://apnews.com/article/elections-police-minneapolis-a1ce...

> The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time.

In the US, police officer does not even rise to top 10 most dangerous jobs. Groundskeeper is a more dangerous job than being a cop.

The lack of training and toxic culture of policing is far more dangerous to cops than criminals are. The average US citizen simply does not, and should not, trust the average cop.

> Training only goes so far

Compared to other countries American cops aren't really trained at all.

In Germany the training period for a police officer is 2 to 3 years, in the US it's usually less then 6 months.

>The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time.

Police mostly act as professional witnesses taking reports and engage in revenue generating law enforcement.

The most high pressure situations they deal with with any regularity involve mediating domestic disputes or wrestling angry drunks.

Police absolutely are not dealing with violent criminals on the daily. And when they do go out of their way to deal with people who many become violent they show up with the kind numerical advantage that would make Stalin proud.

Your average beat cop probably un-holsters their handgun once a month to once a year depending on where and when they patrol. These high stress high stakes split second judgement call situations are not a daily or weekly thing.

>I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.

They do accept this and did for decades. The only reason it's no longer being blanked accepted is because the modern media landscape makes it much harder to hide the fact that a huge fraction of these "honest mistakes" were in fact not so honest and not so mistaken.

Basically nobody has a problem with honest mistakes by themselves. What people have a problem with is thug behavior. Spending decades classifying various degrees of thug behavior as honest mistakes is why nobody wants to tolerate honest mistakes.

Before the people that make this possible and carry out the raids in an unsafe manner and without due dilligence? Before the ones protecting the police from any accountability?

The kid should be punished, yes, but a quarter of his lifespan is not exactly a light sentence.

> Have you spoken with SWAT team members?

Not only do I have zero interest in speaking with SWAT team members, I have very real reasons why I choose wherever possible to not talk to any cops at all.

https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE

The fact that you "know a few" SWAT team members immediately makes me strongly suspicious that you are part of the problem, perhaps not directly corrupt yourself, but very likely to be complicit in hiding the misbehaviour of police you know who are corrupt.

ACAB

> I guarantee these officers are horrified that the man was innocent and frustrated that they were put in this situation.

How many cops do you know? They might say they're horrified to the media, but that's not how they operate when no one's watching. There's a reason these SWATting events keep happening: cops enjoy them just as much as the SWATters do. They get to bust out their fun military surplus toys and do their SEAL Team 6 cosplay. If they wanted to stop these SWATting events, they would have found a solution by now.

Check out these highlights (lowlights?) from the Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department:

https://racketmn.com/human-rights-report-mpd-needs-major-ove...

These are not people known for nuance or remorse.

Link to the full investigation report:

https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation%20into%20the%20City...

man who do you think joins swat teams

Do you know why ACAB? Is not because they are rude, it's not cause they mean. It's because they participate in a societal role that requires them to do bastardly things.

They have to enforce unjust laws and unjust outcomes, and statistically do so more heavily across minority populations.

The institution requires them to be bastards, ACAB is a statement about the institution of police and the people who elect to join that institution.

A service where four counts of this offence can be committed before any action is taken?

And the First should only cover religions, forms of speech, printing technologies, venues of public assembly, and petitioning grievances that existed before it was "created"?

That's actually a bad solution. Weapons weren't much less brutal then, mostly just less precise. You'd have people accidentally shooting bystanders in armed conflicts.

Old problem: AR-15 behind door. New (old) problem: 18 pounder loaded with grapeshot behind the door.

I'd take the AR.

Ban mechanical printing presses too then.

No, you have history on its head. It was not seen as an absolute until the , and 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, then strengthened in 2010 in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Prior to that reasonable regulations were allowed (and what is reasonable was hotly debated) were permitted, so long as there were legitimate government interests.

The main point of the Second Amendment from the framers perspective was to prevent the need (or even the existence) of a standing army. Of course from a modern perspective this is near-ridiculous.

What happens in Germany when someone plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Over here (in Greece), police officers will knock on your door, say they had a report and need to check, and then walk in and look around.

I've heard of reports of domestic violence, child molestation, things like that, and it's always the same. They rush to the place, knock on the door, look around, and arrest the people they need to arrest. What they don't do is start shooting.

I'm pretty sure that the US is unique in it's propensity for SWAT teams to shoot first ask questions later.

Same way as the US is the only nation in the world where it's impossible to prevent weekly school mass shootings.

'there's no way to stop this' says the government of the only country where this happens regularly.

source: the onion [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

It still works, as evidenced by the very active prank calls my neighbor's son plays on my wife and I.

He is very sweet and sheltered, so it's a good outlet. He literally tried the Prince Albert in a can one. That hasn't been relevant for like what, 50 years?

By the time Caller ID became ubiquitous, we were past the time when we found that prank really funny.

Also, *67 also caused a lot of people to simply not answer calls that were blocked this way.

9/11 policy panic, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan producing surplus equipment, 400 million privately owned firearms in the US, US history of police standoffs, DoD investment in military PR including Navy Seals worship, and much more have ALL contributed to the Swatting phenomenon.

I don’t think we could have intentionally created an incentive structure for swatting more if we had tried.

And it’s going to continue because guess what was one of the major issues in this election? Domestic security!

Maybe not swatting, but bomb threats were probably the equivalent. My junior high had at least 2 that I can remember where we were all cleared out for hours as the school was searched. Swatting had the internet to fuel it's rise, local news programs didn't use things like reporting on every fake bomb threat to generate views or "engagement" and in turn did not spread the idea to a massive amount of people. But they still happened, quite a bit. Like many things fueled from the internet it rewards the more extremes, bomb threats are childs play now--but at one time they weren't

The earliest it could have started is when SS7 links and the internet were bridged by dodgy / nefarious owners of said SS7 links. That started to take off around the mid 90's to spam phones with spoofed numbers. I wanted to get the SS7 links terminated but my boss in the wireless industry, tied heavily to SS7 would not let me because they were paying their bill. It would have been one phone call to terminate many of them.

I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.

Swatting is something new (popularized by the Internet, made possible by military surpluss gear sold police wanting to larp in tacticool shit) but stupid pranks with deadly consequences are not.

It became really easy and cheap to use a VPN and VOIP number.

Oh, that could be quite likely, copy cat crimes are a thing after all. I simply mean that people weren't harmlessly interacting before that is all, swatting didn't supplant relatively harmless pranks.

> Its almost as if the police isn't really there to protect normal people.

Well, it's not. Even here, the function of the police is to enforce the will of the state, not to protect people. The protection is a side-effect of the enforcement, but enforcement can also be things like terrorizing minorities.

That song was released in 1988 by NWA, a hip hop group from Compton, California.

I don’t think it’s too far fetched to think that song was colored by their experiences with the notoriously corrupt LAPD of the 1980s.

> I'm pretty sure there are a number of people in the US who don't support the police in any way at all.

Yes, this is so trivially true of any place that it's not worth mentioning, as generalizations are meant as just that: Something that a majority (or at least a large minority) are like. For example, people do say "people in the US speak English", even though there's a number of people that don't. This doesn't make the generalization any less useful than "Americans like baseball" or "Americans wear shoes around the house".

I grew up in a small town and was on the wrong side of law enforcement (sometimes rightfully -- underage drinking, etc., nothing that serious -- but oftentimes not) around 2 dozen times between 16/17 and 21 when I got the fuck out of that town. I haven't so much as spoken to an on-duty cop in over 20 years. To this day I still get nervous when I see a police car. They earned their image problems and they haven't even begun to try to correct it. Even if they started tomorrow, it would still take them decades to fix it. I'm not hopeful that any meaningful change in policing in the US will take place in my lifetime.

And, for anyone who isn't reading between the lines here, without a doubt I'm only so lucky as to avoid their attention today because I made it and have spent the last 2 decades living in nice neighborhoods and driving nice cars.

I live in America and while I have compassion for some individual cops, I hate them as a whole with a burning passion. I know lots of people that feel this way. It’s almost like social media comments sections are not an accurate representation of a population or something.

Cop didn't do everything right. A cop who does everything right leaves the force.

This is a mischaracterization of what actually happens in the us. Using sensationalism doesn't help, instead let's focus on the actual numbers and be constructive on how to decrease them.

In 2023 it's estimated police killed around 1,248 people. Notice I said killed vs Murdered as words matter. Out of that only 104 were unarmed. Now without looking at each case or example here, you can still account for the mass majority of police interactions ending in a death, the civilian was armed at a minimum.

Using the data provided we could say easily that 1,248 people is way too many. Hell, 1 is too many. That doesn't change reality though, if 1,248 deaths were related to individuals engaging in crime, this is a causality that you can lay solely on the civilian victim, as they chose to engage in this action.

We can argue how many were crimes, that's fair and i'm happy to throw out and say let's assume 25% were not crimes and really were just an escalated interaction. The bureau of justice statistics gave numbers for 2022 that estimated that 49.2 million people or 19% of the US had an interaction with the police. If that's true, napkin math would put the police murders at .0025% of the interactions, and assuming 333,287,557 million people in 2022 (census bureau) places it at .00037% of the population died by the hands of police.

Some related statistic. Roughly 500 people die from falling out of bed or off furniture, 300-400 die from drowning in a bath tub, 4,000 die from choking on food, 150 die from coconuts falling on their head, 500-600 die from falling from a ladder.

Looking at the numbers, it's very hard to say that police "Regularly murder people".

As for the "Everyone having guns" that's a separate debate, but I would posit you're correct with regard to criminals performing criminal acts, that are armed, increase the likelihood of a negative out come. Federal arrests for weapons offenses were around 8,000 with states being at close to 12,000. Putting that at 20,000 or so arrests per year. Even with those numbers if you're arrested with a firearm, you're still at around 6% chance of death. Again given the circumstances and propensity for needless escalation, these numbers while bad aren't crazy.

There are multiple problems in the US. We need better training and funding for police departments, we do need to weed out the bad cops (as with any field), but with all that the most common denominator is criminal behavior.

All of that said, If you've got data points or information that may be counter to the above, i'd be very curious to see it. I'm very much open to having my mind changed on the topic and encourage you to post it up for all of us here.

Around 1000 people per year, which I absolutely agree is terrible - but at the same time, the population is over 300,000,000 so it stretches the meaning of the word to call it ‘regular’.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

You should really qualify what you mean by murder because it’s very disingenuous. When a criminal uses deadly force against a police officer they will be shot.

Disagree - community moderated quality floats to the top under such systems, exposing the better posts to more eyes and downregulating low-quality shitposting.

It can certainly lead to echo-chamber mentality, but without it we'd see more low-effort, low quality posts drowning out discourse.

The first thing that came to mind:

https://www.kxan.com/investigations/everything-we-know-about...

I saw countless similar videos of cops violently attacking -- often with permanent, life-altering results -- people who were exercising their constitutional rights or simply minding their own business.

I see news stories like this all the time: https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/caron-nazario-army-lieutenant-...

And if they can't find the person who made the call to charge them for door repairs, then they shouldn't have busted down the door (and should pay for the repairs).

Fear of retribution/not wanting to get involved is a real thing. Also are you proposing that 911 operators confirm people's real identities before accepting their call and dispatching someone?

Even if nobody died, it depends how you want to classify intentionally swatting someone. 50 counts of attempted murder? 50 counts of inciting violence? 50 counts of assault?