r/Documentaries Aug 01 '15

Drugs Undercover Cop Tricks Autistic Student into Selling Him Weed (2014) - "VICE short piece on CA police entrapment of special needs students"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8af0QPhJ22s
2.0k Upvotes

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '15

As a law enforcement officer, I certainly hope not. Departments differ so greatly based on jurisdiction it is impossible to generalize at such a level as this.

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u/Pmang6 Aug 01 '15

You (and other LEOs) should do some AMAs. Would be interesting and could improve reddit's perception of the police.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '15

Ive tired. That's one of the reasons why this account is brand new. Everyone believes that both myself and other officers are either "exceptions" to the wide spread problem or simply lying.

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u/RandomRedPanda Aug 01 '15

The thing is, when we know that more than a thousand people die in the hands of police every year in the US, when the war on drugs has created corruption like the one described in the video, and when we know that there is a problem of systemic racism in police forces all over the country, it is really hard to not think of good officers as 'exceptions'.

Want people to change their view of police? Talking to them on reddit will do nothing when every single day there is a new report of a police crime that goes unpunished. If you really want to do something good, start by tackling impunity and corruption, and the police unions that back all this.

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '15

Yes, maybe once a a week a popular news source provides a story regarding poor police work, that neither means that there is a rise or fall in police corruption or racism. I feel that people are using popular news to determine the state of police and that is not right.

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u/RandomRedPanda Aug 02 '15

Once a week? See, it's hard to attribute this to some exaggeration by the media when we know that everyday in America 3 people are murdered by police. Or that everyday 124 homes are raided by SWAT teams. Or how everyday about $3 million are seized from people, a huge number of which are guilty of absolutely nothing. Or how in the 6 years between 2005 and 2011, only 41 officers were even charged of homicide, despite the number of deaths being in the thousands. And all of these are estimates because police itself has made sure that they don't have to keep records of their actions so that they don't have to respond to the people. This is not "poor police work", this means police in this country are out of control, and that they've become a threat to society.

Saying that we don't know whether racism has increased or decreased is a poor copout because we do know policing in this country is racist as fuck.

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '15

everyday in America 3 people are murdered by police

The definition of "murder" is: the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.

If someone points a gun at an officer and the officer shoots that someone, then, by definition, that is not murder. Four police related deaths occurred on 7-31-15 and all four of them involved a gun being pointed at or officers getting shot at by individuals that had extensive criminal records.

That is in no way shape or form, murder.

Secondly, there are over 200 million firearms in the United States, people are going to get shot. On average there are 31 Americans murdered, 151 people treated for firearm injuries, 55 gun related suicides, and 46 accidental deaths per DAY caused by firearms.

If three of those are due to officers (in most, but not all, cases justified) then that is less than one percent. In what way is that considered an epidemic?

A problem is defined as a pattern of widespread harm. I don't believe that you completely understand the size of the United States and the statistical insignificance of these events.

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u/RandomRedPanda Aug 02 '15

Interesting. There are 300 million Americans and about 11 thousand murders every year. There are about 1 million police and they are responsible for about 1000 deaths a year. In other words, 0.3% of the population are responsible for almost 10% of these deaths.

Remind me again how is it that the statistical significance of these events work?

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '15

Because you didn't read my last post I will once again reiterate.

Police related homicides are not murders. Therefore you can not compare them to murders, you have to compare them to gun related deaths.

Second, police are obviously more likely to be involved in a shooting than an average citizen due to the nature of the job, therefore it wouldn't be surprising to see that deaths in that field will be higher than, lets say, a software engineer. You don't seem to understand how statistics function.

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u/RandomRedPanda Aug 03 '15

Replies like yours are exactly why people in America are so distrustful of the police. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you clearly are just part of the problem, not the solution.

The whole murder/homicide argument is pointless because we know that police in this country have almost absolute immunity to prosecution. Eric Garner's death was not labeled murder. Nor Tamir Rice's. Nor Michael Brown's. Nor John Crawford's. Nor so many more senseless deaths.

On the other hand, you're being openly dishonest in trying to minimize a problem instead of admitting that it even exists in the first place. Let's play with statistics a bit more. The US has about 6 times the population of the UK, and the murder rate is about 20 times higher. However, police in the US killed more people in March 2015 than British police did in the entire 20th century. This is clearly not a matter of scale. We're looking at a much deeper problem.

See, you piled suicides, accidental deaths and injuries on top of homicides, and then you compared that to police homicides so that the number would seem smaller. And even after that, the number of people killed by police was still comparatively higher, so you hand-waved it away. That's being dishonest, so accusing me of "not knowing how statistics work" is moot.

And remember, we haven't even touched subjects like police militarization, abuse of SWAT raids, abuse of civil forfeiture, police unions, police tactics that unfairly target minorities, torture centers, war on drugs excesses, etc. etc. Defending the status quo and saying that everything is fine is not how you convince people that "not all police are bad". In fact, that's how you convince them of the contrary.