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Two different topics I am not qualified to talk about but am interested in hearing your opinions on:
NB This was a few days ago and the cops have since dropped the charges after public backlash. This time.
I'm not from the south, but I and most of the rest of non-southern righties decided a long time ago we would just appropriate it. Confederate flags in rural Michigan, etc. To me it has a kind of universality to it. Don't miss the line 'if you're 5 foot 3 and 300 pounds, tax dollars shouldn't pay for your bags of fudge rounds." Interested to hear your thoughts
So, when the US has bad cops caught doing bad things, we get tons of counterexamples of good cops doing their jobs correctly and professionally. When the British police get caught doing bad things, are their any popular counterexamples of the British police doing their jobs correctly and professionally?
Could easily be a bias thing based around my getting most of my good-cop-bad-cop news from themotte. Since American police code as red, and British police code as blue, that kinda makes sense, though even these days, we seem to have enough lefties around to point out when confirmation bias is painting a misleading picture. But I can't recall any instance of someone being positive toward the British police. Where are their defenders?
The Metropolitan Police has one of the highest homicide solve rates of any major western urban police force. In 2019, it solved 98% of London's 143 homicides, for example. San Francisco's homicide solve rate seems to fluctuate between around 65% and 75%, and that is one of the very highest of major US cities. London's homicide rate is vastly below US cities with similar (or indeed better, in SF's case) demographics from an HBD purist's perspective.
Generally I find the police here to be moderately competent. They remove schizo homeless people quickly. When annoying street buskers play near my home, they come in 15 minutes to move them along. I've asked them for directions and they've always been polite. The police don't set hate crime laws, politicians do. Police are usually authoritarian personality types, there are always issues with them enjoying the power they wield over civilians. But they enforce laws that are, ultimately, passed by others.
Is that because they have better police, or because they have killers who are worse at hiding their kills?
I could imagine that, for instance, lone killers might find coverups harder than gang killers.
There's also option C- the same lack of civil liberties that results in autistic 16 year old girls getting hauled off for saying a cop "looks lesbian" gives the police the ability to solve murders far more efficiently and thoroughly than in a country which protects individual rights to do weird or suspicious things.
How does stop-and-frisk help solve murders? By harvesting fingerprints?
I mean to start with stop-and-frisk worked well in NYC until the NYPD stopped it as a civil rights violation. It’s reasonable to assume that it works in London too.
But more to the point, I’d expect that it’s coupled with a lot of additional measures. Upthread there’s a discussion of a gang database- in the US the use of gang databases in serious crime prevention gets floated every once in a while and shot down for civil liberties reasons, because having bad friends and suspicious habits is not illegal. In the UK it presumably isn’t either, but looser probable cause rules related to such things plausibly make evidence collection much easier. And that’s just one example.
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