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It's really hard to communicate to Europeans just how manipulated their perspective on America really is because their news sources are typically worse, at least with respect to American news, than the worst of American media. I admit my experience is rather limited to a couple years in a few Western European counties, but their media is like if a person with MSNBC proclivities and bias only watched MSNBC for all their news and then crafted it for a European audience. Many of the worst things about American society is imported to Europe through this process. Perhaps that is unfair for the rest of Europe. My friends and their experience are also confined to those places. For e.g.,
Without looking it up, how many people do you think are shot by police in the US, a country of 330,000,000?
Without looking it up, how many times do you think police engage in "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building"?
For Europeans I've had this discussion with, they vastly overestimate this by multiple magnitudes. Americans also vastly overestimate these things, but not as badly. Both are the result of the journalist class who are simply awful, but Americans have real life experience which serves as an anchor to prevent believing more ridiculous things. Or at least that's how I've rationalized the difference.
I don't think there is much for either of us to convince the other w/re policing; my experience with European police is rather limited and my experience with American police is extensive. In general, I find American police to be more friendly and less aggressive, but that may be the perspective of a foreigner/native in both situations.
As you said, Europeans and Americans have very different perspectives. Americans would characterize this as state ownership of children and very authoritarian. Individuals being prohibited the ability to act on the world and forcing them to outsource it to the state is authoritarian. Addressing every societal ill from the perspective of the bureaucratic state is authoritarian, but it a common European perspective.
When Europeans call America authoritarian, it comes off as preposterous to us. Putting people in jail for mild social criticism is nuts and authoritarian and has nothing to do with "libel and slander." It's a fundamental antipathy for individuals' ability to speak their thoughts into the world. Americans react in disgust to state censorship, Europeans broadly agree with it. There is a long list of ways Europeans act far more authoritarian than Americans and expect obedience as part of their culture.
Beyond these differing perspectives, we can see which society is "authoritarian" based on how they respond and enable state policy. Covid gave us a frontrow seat:
Having lived in the worst places in the US and their covid hysteria at least part of the time, it was still never as bad as places like the UK, Spain, Germany, or Italy, and not as long either. Neither side made a good showing, but Europe was worse and more authoritarian in pretty much every aspect with the lone country of Sweden being significantly different and getting ridiculed for being right the entire time.
It's hard for me to swallow the "Europeans aren't authoritarian like the US argument, look at how their police behave" when we saw how Europe behaved when significant portions of their populations didn't obey. Authoritarian cults don't look authoritarian when all their members go along with their dictates, the authoritarianism only becomes evident when people don't.
Unfortunately looked this up already in the context of the argument earlier, I think it was 600.
I would guess significantly more - if we make it something well-defined like SWAT dispatches, perhaps on the order of 100k? Is that data collected anywhere or is it another thing where you could only find local data and not everywhere due to how fragmented the police force is?
I think there's a general theme that relative to Europeans, Americans are more concerned with impositions by the state but much less concerned with impositions by non-state actors, even though from the perspective of an average citizen the two might not be readily distinguishable as lofty authorities. As a caricature, we figure that an American would get very upset by the government banning him from soapboxing for some political position, but would see nothing wrong with it if a corporation bought up all roads and public squares in his city and instituted a ban against voicing the same position on company property (along with a host of other house rules). Moreover, if someone then proposed to force the company to surrender roads or parks to the public hand, or circumscribed its right to enforce rules of its choosing on it, the American might be up in arms about that being an intrusion upon the company's free speech.
Right, and putting people in jail for 25 years to life for all sorts of one-off transgressions comes off as nuts and authoritarian to us, as to million-dollar fines and jail terms for software piracy (...).
I'm unsure where Radley Balko got his data and I'm not sure where my copy is, but my memory of his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, claims the figure in 2013 to be around 50,000 annually, although whether or not each of these raids where SWAT teams are used can be correctly characterized as "police coming in like an infantry platoon clearing an enemy building" is another question.
it turns out this has happened, or something akin to it, and the public was broadly against it and resulted in multiple SCOTUS decisions prohibiting that activity; the first examples were "company towns" (Marsh v. Alabama) and another more recent example was malls (Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robinson)
the state didn't propose to force the companies to surrender property to the public hand, they forced the companies to be restricted in similar ways to the state when it comes to first amendment protections; I am unsure about the public's response to the SCOTUS decisions
unless you're talking about "one-off transgressions" like premeditated or felony murder, this doesn't really happen
million dollar fines and jail terms for piracy, like when the Pirate Bay founders were imprisoned for a year and had to pay $1m fines? or the kino.to guy who got like a 4 year sentence? I agree the US gives stiffer prison terms and fines for piracy, but let's not go overboard here.
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