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Please don't attribute your views to all / most Europeans. There's nothing wrong with their prison system, and the last time I interacted with them, their police force was way friendlier and more professional than any I saw in Europe.
Huh, where are you from? My very first impressions of US police (when I came for the first time as a tourist) consisted of a border guard interrogating me for half an hour because he wasn't convinced I would not illegally enroll to study without authorisation on my one-week trip to visit a friend at MIT, and two NYC cops getting into a fighting posture when I asked them for directions before settling down and merely staring at me like I am insane, and finally barking a useless answer. I have never been to a place in Europe where you couldn't ask police for directions and get a helpful and detailed answer.
I'm sure there are exceptions to the view I described, but I stand by most. It also is to be expected that exceptions would be highly overrepresented on a right-leaning American politics forum.
I won't get specific, but I'm from Eastern Europe, and currently living in the west.
Ok, I didn't like the border guys either, but it's easy to not have a bad impression of their European counterparts when you're essentially out of their jurisdiction in the overwhelming majority of the continent.
New Jersey cops would make small talk, and I'd shoot the shit with them every once in a while. Once I wanted to go for a walk on the beach and it looked like they were blocking the entrance, it turned out they weren't it's just a spot they picked to stand around on patrol, and when I asked if I can cross they were almost apologetic. I was in NYC too, and might have interacted with cops there too, but I don't really remember.
Police in Europe tends to be cold and distant, and gives off a strong "don't question my authoritah" vibe. If you argue with them they'll fuck with you just to prove who's boss, though that may be a universal thing in any country. One time when I had a minor car accident and the other guy decided to call the cops, I was put through some bizarre shakedown at the hands of a sargent trying to impress 2 new trainees for absolutely no reason, since I freely admitted my culpability. Another time my car had an oil leak that I dutifully reported the moment it happened, and the cops decided to pay me a visit at 6AM on a weekend morning to interrogate me, trying to pin on me a completely different leak that happened a few streets away.
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So, you’ve had a grand total of two interactions with American police - at least one of which seems like you just getting unlucky with two local beat cops whom you may have caught off-guard or who may have been occupied by something else when you approached them - and you’ve used these two interactions to form, and double down on, a perception of American policing which even you seem to acknowledge diverges wildly from the available statistical data?
No, I never said those were the only two...? Those were just on my first visit to the US. I later came back to spend several years there, which involved a few more interactions of my own that were mostly not any better, and many stories from people I knew personally that were significantly worse.
Huh? Germany continues having <20 people killed annually by police. That's <1/30 the killings, at ~1/4 the population. I'm not going to try to dig up statistics to compare every single detailed scenario, because where comparable statistics are easy to find it clearly backs up my narrative - for just about any possible hostile/violent action by police, US police do it at a higher rate than European police. I'm completely sympathetic to explanations along the lines of this being inevitable/justified because the population being policed is much more dangerous and unruly, but this does not mean you have to deny the basic discrepancy of symptoms
This was your original narrative. Now you have retreated to a much more defensible and empirically-supported “American police use deadly force more often than European police” narrative, which no serious person denies, but which bears almost no resemblance to your cartoonish original statement.
Are you? That wasn’t the thrust of your initial post, in which you implied that American police use deadly force just because they feel like it, and that their application of deadly force is arbitrary and capricious. If, for example, the high rates of deadly force in federal searches are due to the fact that the feds generally only get involved when an individual is suspected of being involved in particularly serious crime, and therefore is almost by definition a particularly dangerous (and desperate) individual, that reality looks nothing like the narrative that the feds are shooting people because they’re having a bad day.
No serious observer of American policing denies that American police use violence more often than Euro police do. It’s just that every honest analysis must inevitably conclude that this is due at least in large part to the very different populations, and very different levels of access to firearms, that American police are forced to contend with.
You assert that every comparison makes American police “look worse”, but why should I think it makes police look bad when they kill people who deserve it? Why should that be considered a worse outcome than not using deadly force? Why should I wish for dangerous criminals to be suffered to live, when the opportunity arises to eliminate them from the population? You seem to want American police to put the cart before the horse; you want them to act as though the populace they’re policing is already at a level of human capital comparable to the populations of Europe, when that is obviously not the current reality they’re facing.
I'm getting the sense that you switch between taking my words overly literally in some cases and loosely reinterpreting it in a way that is convenient for your argument in others. To rehash:
I think that searches, SWAT calls and other similar "they come to your house because they think there is a threat in it to neutralise" situations in particular are a scenario in which I would feel much less safe around US police than around European police.
Data supports that US police in general are much more likely to injure and kill those they interact with than European police
Personal experiences support that US police are more hostile and less helpful than their European counterparts. This is in their interactions with me as a Caucasian academic with naive good-kid vibes; who knows what they would do if they were responding to a SWAT call or following a lead from someone in the computer security "industry" I know.
I grant that there are reasons they turned out like that, but I see no evidence that they are not like that to everyone, i.e. that the hostility is precisely targeted at the uniquely American problem elements. There are more YouTube bodycam videos of American police roughing up harmless-looking white kids than total incidents of German police doing that.
Okay, I’ll respond only to the explicit claims you are making here:
If you find yourself in this scenario, there is likely a very good reason the feds are after you, and frankly I don’t mind that people in that scenario are not safe. Again, I think that most uses of deadly force by American police are a good thing — not a tragic-but-unavoidable outcome which we should strive to eliminate, but rather something that produces a long-lasting positive good for society at large — so I’m perfectly comfortable with the outcome in which some substantial percentage of the targets of federal raids get smoked in the process.
Yes, but not for the same exact actions, as far as I’m aware. American police do not appear to be significantly more likely to injure or kill blameless, non-violent, unarmed, compliant suspects — a descriptor which describes a much higher percentage of the individuals encountered by European police than by American police. The significant discrepancies are due to the much higher incidence of violent/armed noncompliance in America.
I cannot comment on this, as I have not had any interaction with European police. I’m willing to believe that there might be some average difference, and I can imagine a number of plausible explanatory mechanisms. American police turnover is quite high, and a large part of that is simply that American police officers get worn down into a siege mentality by the absolute scum of the earth with which most of them are forced to interact regularly.
As someone who watches a massive amount of police bodycam content daily, I can only say that you are being exposed to a very different type of bodycam content than I am. I see very little of police “roughing up harmless-looking white kids”, and I contend that this simple is not happening with any great frequency.
By the way, do you do this for any particular reason (analyzing them for the purpose of forming some conclusion, which we might one day get to see as an effort post?), or is it just a hobby?
It’s both! Obviously my consumption of this content profoundly affects my perceptions of American policing, and that shines though in my posting about the topic (and about other topics, such as race) on this site, as well as my appearance on the Motte-adjacent podcast The Bailey.
Ultimately, though, it is a hobby which originated out of a genuine intellectual interest. I was in college when the Trayvon Martin shooting happened, and fresh out of college when the Black Lives Matter movement started gaining steam. I was a dutifully-committed progressive at the time, and I cared deeply about whether or not the conversations I was involved in were grounded in actual verifiable reality. That inspired me to start doing a bunch of research on policing, and to expose myself to the (at the time very limited) police bodycam footage I could get my hands on. Discovering just how wildly the narrative deviated from the reality I encountered was the single biggest contributing factor to my ideological evolution.
If officer Darren Wilson had been equipped with a bodycam at the time he shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, the public could have been exposed to footage of Brown attacking Wilson in his car and attempting to grab his holstered firearm, and subsequently charging at Wilson outside of the car. This could have smothered the nascent BLM abomination in its crib and saved this country ten years of racial fabulism and misery. The ubiquity of bodycams — sold to the public as a way to document widespread police misconduct — has demonstrated to curious Americans the sheer barbarity with which law enforcement deals on a daily basis, and has certainly helped to take the wind out of the sails of the police-abolitionist movement.
As for why I watch it nowadays? It’s mostly a nice way to blow off steam by indulging my schadenfreude toward criminals, but it also allows me to stay abreast of any notable policing incidents and to acquaint myself with the details before the story goes viral and the narrative begins to take over.
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