FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
3mo ago
But one who remains level-headed - who points the gun and without flinching, delivers the "you're under arrest. I don't want to hurt you, I will if I have to" spiel
But, once again, a police officer who can point his gun at someone and say "I don't want to shoot you, but I will if I have to" is already at least a standard deviation more scary and intimidating than the average person. The "I will if I have to" part of the threat must seem credible - it must be spoken by someone who seems like the kind of person who actually will do what they say if their conditions aren't met. And while a law-abiding citizen might be more easily fooled - if the threat doesn't come off as credible to a hardened criminal who is himself no stranger to violence (and hence is intimately familiar with the difference between people who are actually willing to do violence and those who aren't), then it's useless. If hardened criminals don't consider police officers a credible threat, you might as well not bother having a police force at all.
All of this means that, once again, even a police officer who is polite and courteous and who clearly views violence as a matter of last resort must be found intimidating by hardened criminals to have any hope of doing his job properly. If a police officer says "I don't want to shoot you, but I will if I have to", and a hardened criminal doesn't believe that he'll follow through on the threat, the hardened criminal will ignore the instructions. If hardened criminals, collectively, don't believe that police officers will collectively follow through on their threats, hardened criminals will ignore the police and act with impunity. I'm sorry, but this trade-off is unavoidable.
But the fact that police officers fight crime simply means that police officers have to be effective at fighting crime. Intimidation doesn't have to come into it.
No, sorry, it does.
Imagine you're a criminal who's just stabbed someone. A police officer shows up, levels his gun at you and tells you to drop the knife and put your hands on your head, or he'll shoot you. In order for this threat to be effective, you must believe that the police officer will do as he says - if you don't, you'll try to make a run for it, or even try and stab the police officer yourself. In order for the threat to be effective, the police officer must seem like the kind of person who would fulfil his threat, which means he must be at least scary and intimidating enough that a hardened criminal who's just stabbed someone will believe that he will act on his threat. (In game-theoretic terms, the police officer must pre-commit to a certain course of action if certain conditions are met.) This is true even if the police officer has never discharged his weapon in the line of duty, would greatly prefer not to, and actually would hesitate to fire if you decided to make a run for it.
All of this is equally true even for unarmed police forces: the police officer must seem like the kind of person who actually would Tase you, mace you, or smack you with a nightstick. If he doesn't seem like the kind of person who would follow through on his threat, no criminal will pay any attention to his instructions.
Imagine the alternate scenario, where you've just stabbed someone, a police officer shows up, and his response is to say "well, golly gosh, you've gotten yourself into a right pickle haven't you? Why don't you drop the weapon and come down with me to the station and we'll talk about this? But if you don't want to, that's alright with me too." All without so much as unholstering his weapon. Does that sound like a police officer who would be effective at fighting crime?
Even if you insist on viewing deterrence as a major role of the police, the promise of swift and reliable response to wrongdoing - leading to arrest and sentencing - could provide that all on its own, without the cops needing to individually come across as scary mofos who'll beat you to a pulp at their own discretion.
This has precisely nothing to do with deterrence. As argued above, if someone has committed a crime and is facing arrest, they would most likely prefer not to be arrested if they can help it. The worst-case scenario is getting shot dead by the police; the second-worst case scenario is getting arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced; the best-case scenario is getting away with it scot-free. In order to come quietly, the criminal must believe that if he doesn't, the police will shoot him dead - if he doesn't believe that, he'll ignore them and make a run for it. In order for the criminal to believe that the police will shoot him dead if he doesn't come quietly, the arresting officer does unfortunately have to be scarier and more intimidating than the average person.
The ideal police force, IMO, should aspire to work like a magic spell that teleports you before a judge as soon as you commit a crime... If you know he's indestructible and omniscient, Superman can deter crime just as well as Batman.
It's so telling that, when illustrating how you think police officers ought to behave, you keep falling back on examples from fictional escapist media aimed at teenagers, rather than, say, examples of real police officers in the real world. (Because the trade-off I'm discussing is equally true everywhere, not just in the US.) But even this example doesn't illustrate the point you're trying to make: comics depicting Superman as an intimidating figure who scares criminals shitless are so common there's a trope about them. You're right in one sense, though: Superman can afford to be polite and courteous to everyone he meets, up to and including violent criminals with sub-machine guns, because he's a superhuman alien who is functionally invulnerable to harm from virtually everyone he meets. This description, you'll note, is not true of police officers, who are only marginally less vulnerable to harm than anyone else (even if you're wearing a bulletproof vest, getting shot in the torso will probably break a rib or two, and getting shot in the head will probably kill you). Because they are vulnerable to harm and would prefer not to expose themselves to unnecessary risks, they must instead rely on threats and intimidation which, once again, means that violent criminals must find them intimidating.
FtttG
3mo ago
I was so conflicted between the two of them that I ended up filling it half full to split the difference
Should've been 5/8ths.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
FtttG
3mo ago
By the nature of the job, police officers interact with dangerous, scary people who don't care about adhering to the laws of the country they live in or about hurting others. In order to do their jobs properly, police officers need to present a credible threat to criminals. If a criminal finds a police officer scary and intimidating, it stands to reason that a law-abiding citizen will too.
There's really no way out of this trade-off. Do you want a police force which is unfailingly polite and courteous to everyone, but impotent as a result and a laughingstock to hardened criminals? Or do you want a police force which hardened criminals find scary and intimidating, but which ordinary decent people also find intimidating as a side effect?
Of course you can dial this trade-off up and down a bit on the margins, depending on the concentration of hardened criminals in the community being policed. A cop in the Hamptons is bound to be significantly more mild-mannered than one in Compton, who in turn won't be anywhere near as scary as a cop in El Salvador. Probably no police officers are more scary and aggressive than the screws in maximum security prisons, in which "the community being policed" is made up entirely of violent criminals. But at the end of the day, there's no way around the trade-off. Police officers fight crime, which means they have to be intimidating to violent criminals, which means it's not reasonable to expect a police force to be as gentle and kind as your local pastor and still do their jobs effectively.
"No no, I'm saying that police officers should be tough and intimidating with actual criminals, but kind and civil to the ordinary people they're arresting."
If they're arresting you, it's because they don't know you're an ordinary, law-abiding citizen. As such they can't afford to give you the benefit of the doubt and must assume that you're a criminal.
FtttG
3mo ago
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs? When the moderates and normies start voting red instead of blue, that increases the average extremism of the modal blue, accelerating the purity spiral?
FtttG
3mo ago
Or if they answer the question "did you lock it?" in the affirmative, the follow-up question will be "how good of a lock did you use?"
I'm sure plenty of cops do ignore "meaningless" non-physical threats of this nature, and end up with bullets in the sternum for their trouble. In Europe, if a person gets pulled over by the police and is informed that they're being placed under arrest, if the arrestee rolls their eyes and says "you're going to regret this", the likelihood that the person in question has a handgun in their glovebox is somewhere around zero. This simply isn't true of the US, in which there are more guns than people and four police officers get shot every five days.
When a police officer pulls you over, he has no idea whether you're a normal level-headed individual or a short-tempered belligerent asshole, and is making a series of judgement calls on a second-to-second basis. There's no way a statement like "you're going to regret this" doesn't push a cop into thinking you're more likely to be the latter, not the former.
Sure, in an ideal world you could bitch and grumble without giving the officer arresting you legitimate cause to worry if he's about to find himself in a life-or-death situation. But we don't live in an ideal world, and that isn't the fault of the cop arresting you: it's not as if he personally ratified the second amendment.
There's also the point, while the officer is making a series of split-second judgement calls about whether you're about to ruin his day, he's updating his priors using the posterior evidence of how you interact with him. The priors here are your demographic markers: a comment like "you're going to regret this" will be taken very differently if spoken by an Asian woman in Prada driving a Beamer vs. a black man in a tracksuit driving a beat-up Volvo. Is it "fair" that wealthy white people can bitch and moan while getting arrested without having handguns trained on them, while poor black people can't? Maybe not - but again, it's not the fault of the cop arresting you that certain demographics are overwhelmingly more likely to assault or murder police officers than others. (Hell, black American women are more likely to murder people than Asian-American men, and possibly white American men too.) Cops may not be explicitly trained to let people's passive-aggressive comments slide depending on their melanin content, but a cop in a sufficiently diverse American city will quickly find himself becoming a race realist (and class realist, to a lesser extent) as a matter of practical necessity.
FtttG
3mo ago
If a certain course of action is rational, by definition you can't rationalise your decision to take it.
FtttG
3mo ago
Reminds me of those people complaining that they don't like cops because they're so aggressive, scary and intimidating.
Well, duh. That's not by accident, it's by design. Given the nature of their jobs, cops have to be a credible threat to people who deal drugs and murder people for a living. If they aren't scary to those people, they can't do their jobs properly, which inevitably means they're going to come off as a bit scary to people to whom they don't know whether or not they're violent drug dealers i.e. you when they pull you over in a routine traffic stop.
And of course, the crime rate difference between men and women is gigantic.
This seems like a modus ponens/modus tollens situation. If you ask people this hypothetical:
you're traveling alone in a strange city. The only way you know how to get home is by taking a metro. Would you rather take a metro filled exclusively with:
A) young male people
B) young female people
is there any demographic in the entire world for which the majority wouldn't answer B? Young men, young women, old men, old women, black men, white men, black women, white women, gay men, gay women, straight men, straight women - if traveling by themselves, everyone feels safer in a train full of young female people than a train full of young male people.
Does this imply that 100% of young male people are violent and dangerous, or that no one has ever been stabbed for their wallet by a young female person? No, of course not. But everyone understands the risk calculus, and as far as I understand it, "race realists" are simply arguing that the risk calculus is comparably true of certain other salient identity characteristics besides sex. More than that - they are arguing that everyone (whether liberal or conservative) is already using this risk calculus and adjusting their behaviour accordingly, even if they've been trained to believe it's wrong to do so, even if they claim that's not what they're doing (but their revealed preferences say otherwise).
FtttG
3mo ago
FYI, the person you're replying to identifies as a trans woman, and hence has a lot of skin in this particular game.
FtttG
3mo ago
The fact that certain ethnic groups behave just as badly as black Americans doesn't prove that black Americans don't behave badly.
FtttG
3mo ago
I mean, sure, police officers shouldn't beat you up just because you're being crabby and passive-aggressive. But I just don't see what you stand to gain by being crabby and passive-aggressive in the first place. Best-case scenario, the police officer ignores your griping; worst-case scenario, he interprets it as you resisting arrest and beats you up. Has it ever happened that a police officer has announced his decision to arrest someone, the would-be arrestee made a passive-aggressive comment, and the police officer immediately saw the error of his ways and decided to let the person off with a warning instead? Consider the payoff matrix.
Former moderator @ymeskhout pointed out that, 100% of the time when someone complains about their bike having been stolen, the first question everyone asks is invariably "did you lock it?"
Pointing out that the manner in which the victim of a crime comported themselves may have made them more vulnerable to being the victim of said crime is considered a perfectly legitimate thing to do, except when it comes to a woman being sexually assaulted after getting blackout drunk at a party full of men she doesn't know, or when a black man aggressively resists arrest and the officers attempting to subdue him unsurprisingly assault him - in which cases it becomes "victim-blaming" and beyond the pale. It's a bizarre identitarian carve-out.
It's fascinating that, long before all the stuff about the raping came out, Bill Cosby was considered a traitor to the black community for arguing (in the form of his famous "pound cake" speech) that many of the African-American community's problems are of its own making, and nurturing the politics of racial grievance is doing them no favours. And yet, Chris Rock has consistently made the same point for decades (most notably in "black folks vs. niggas", but this sketch too), but to the best of my knowledge no one considers him a race traitor. It is really as simple as his including the obvious fig leaf of "if you're a black guy driving with a white guy in the passenger seat, the police are less likely to beat you up" that allows him to get away with the fact that most of this sketch boils down to "if you don't break the law and are polite and deferential to police officers, they will have no cause to assault you (ergo, most black Americans who were assaulted by police officers have only themselves to blame)"?
FtttG
3mo ago
If you yield, he arrests you. If you resist, he beats you up and possibly kills you. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Sure your pride will take a beating in the former instance, but there are a limited range of circumstances in which I would literally rather be dead than having submitted.
FtttG
3mo ago
I didn't think it warranted a top-level post in the CW thread as I only intended it as an interesting tidbit. Should I delete?
I was in a charity shop a few months ago and found two books I wanted to buy, one of which was a collection of Father Brown stories. They had a buy-two-get-the-third-free deal, so on a whim I bought Nell Zink's Doxology despite knowing nothing about it.
It's set in the early 90s in New York and charts three characters who are close friends, one of whom unexpectedly makes it big as an indie rock star while the other two get married and have a baby. It's extremely knowing, all of the characters are annoying and pretentious (none of them even slightly believable) - and yet for all that, entertaining enough that I'm more than a quarter-way through this large-format 400-pager after starting it on Friday.
On Thursday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which I did enjoy a great deal, although not quite as much as Never Let Me Go. Normally when a novel employs an unreliable narrator, it's to set up an elaborate twist ending: I found it interesting here to be used for the comparatively modest goal of conveying the inner life of a character who is so used to repressing the emotions he experiences that he is effectively in denial about doing so. Arguably a deconstruction of the whole "English stiff upper lip" thing, though as I pointed out to herself, earlier this year I read Theodore Darlymple's book Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, which (as its subtitle unsubtly implies) argues that the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction and now British people are encouraged to engage in flamboyant displays of emotion far more than they should.
FtttG
3mo ago
I don't really have many questions about Oswald. Dysfunctional, bad-tempered, chronically underemployed loser with authority problems decides (quelle surprise) that communism is super rad. Tries to defect to Russia and Cuba in succession, finds out the real thing isn't all it's cracked up to be and he's just as much of a worthless loser in a communist country as he was in a capitalist one. Returns to the states, tries to make a name for himself as a political activist and ends up with nothing to show for it. Decides to go out in a blaze of glory by killing the most high-profile person he can.
I don't know what else needs explaining beyond that. Yeah, he also enlisted in the military and was a crack shot - so what?
Sure, but prior to the Troubles there was a steadily escalating culture war throughout the fifties and early sixties which periodically exploded into rioting, with the Troubles itself not really beginning in earnest until the mid-sixties. Although the IRA existed prior, the Provisional IRA didn't come into existence until the late sixties, as did the UVF (the UDA came later). To me, it feels as though the US is warming up to its Troubles, not a second civil war.
And as I said in one of my previous comments, how threatening and intimidating a police officer needs to be is heavily dependent on the community being policed, the concentration of criminals within that community, what kind of crimes said criminals are committing and how violent said criminals are. It would be overkill for a cop in the Hamptons to walk around with a bulletproof vest and an AR-15, but if some stockbroker shoots his wife in their summer home in a drunken rage, when a police officer shows up, he must be intimidating enough that the stockbroker agrees to come quietly. But when you're dealing with MS-13, a violent gang who feel no qualms about beheading their enemies with machetes, one guy in a squad car with a Beretta isn't going to cut it - yes, you actually do need facemasks, assault rifles and a "generally unpleasant attitude". Nothing else is likely to be effective.
Now, is the nature of the problem ICE is ostensibly addressing closer to the former scenario or the latter? I don't know, probably the former - maybe they really can enforce immigration law with Berettas and a smile. But we were discussing the question of whether cops, in general, need to be at least somewhat scary and intimidating in order to be effective in their jobs, and you were quite explicitly arguing that they don't. That's the point I was addressing, not the question of how intimidating ICE specifically needs to be in order to be effective.
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