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This is the exact type of microscrutiny of a single incident that I don't wish to engage in. Were cops in the wrong here? I don't know since I didn't watch the video. Also, I don't care. Worse things happen every day.
Instead of focusing on a single incident, we should aggregate the statistics and present those. When we do, we see that the problem is vanishingly small. But we will never get to zero in a country of over 330 million with 20,000 homicides per year. And yet that is what Kamala Harris is demanding.
I'm just done with caring. My only opinion now is that people who bring up police violence are either bad thinkers or have bad motives.
And yet police violence could almost certainly be reduced dramatically by levelling up competence. Peter Moksos (who did 2 years as a beat cop in the rough bits of Baltimore as participant-observation research for his PhD) has collated statistics on the massive unjustified differences in police shooting rates between jurisdictions. Why are cops on the west coast more trigger-happy than on the east coast? If all big-city American police had the trigger discipline of the NYPD, then killer cops wouldn't be a political issue.
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Reminds me of similar "Vision Zero" initiatives for traffic deaths to be reduced to exactly zero. Those weren't successful, either.
Some are surely inevitable for baseline physics / kinetics reasons, but near-enough zero is possible with self-driving cars tied to ubiquitous traffic monitoring systems.
We don't actually know that. We're far from cracking meaningful autonomy, and we have no idea what would be the impact of widespread adoption.
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Zero is just a dumb target for almost anything. Instead of taking interventions that improve QALY's the most, we do stupid shit because "even one person dying of X is too many".
That's assuming that interventions are even positive at all. Post 2020 interventions to reduce police shootings very quickly and obviously made the world a much worse place for almost everyone.
The only way we get to zero is by eliminating the police entirely and just letting gangs run society.
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While Kamala has bad motives probably, I'm not convinced that the aggregate statistics show what you say they do. Like, biased source, but here we see that we're getting 1 million people on the receiving end of force per year, 250,000 injuries including 85,000 of those requiring hospitalization. I'm not including deaths here because I agree those are inherently tricky to generalize from, though the source does emphasize that in some areas. More interesting to me is the second chart here which showed (caution y-axis) a very significant upswing from the early 2000s to ~2012 after which we see a decline back to middling levels. Still, those numbers I don't consider "vanishingly small". I think they are large enough to merit examination -- especially in the context of other countries not having quite the same issue with police as we do, speaking broadly. You could argue part of it lies in media attention, but I think most observers agree there are some actual differences, such as if we compare it to let's say the UK.
Also from a philosophical standpoint, high responsibility roles require high trust and high scrutiny. As the only force allowed a virtual monopoly on mostly-legal violence in the country, I think it's weird to just instantly give cops a pass. Personally, I really think that police departments should be given both increased funding as well as increased accountability in a structural way, which sadly most BLM-aligned "reform" groups seem to miss despite being probably the best and most moral solution. Because if you look carefully, it's pretty obvious that the accountability structure is broken. From an economic/incentives perspective, that's something important to fix.
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