Quote:
Originally Posted by The Batlord
Again, 300 million people. Whether it's actually under reported doesn't necessarily mean that it's a runaway crisis that shows that our police forces are seriously in need of reform.
Well there's a certain allowable percentage of bug parts in food or defects in manufactured products, not because bugs in our food is okay, but because there's just gonna be bugs in our food no matter what we do. The thing is to make sure it's at a manageable level. Police are going to abuse their authority no matter how much we crack down, but if it's not at whatever level we might deem "out of control" then it should be treated in perspective rather than as a crisis. It's kind of a hard thing to quantify, so comparing rates of police brutality in this country with that of others makes sense to me.
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The problem with this line of thinking is that you have just as little to say as the person you're claiming an advantage over.
How about either of you provide any kind of figures or actual rationale as to why police brutality is at or not at a higher level than would be reasonable to expect given population and social constraints?
FWIW, I expect that police brutality and racism is a significant issue primarily in highly urbanised areas, and that national statistics will be of very little use. I expect figures in cities like Detroit and New York to be astonishingly high and incidences of unjust police treatment to be evident in daily life, not as isolated incidences.
I posit also that this will be heavily influenced by america's problems re: social equality. The poorest neighborhoods in urban america are overwhelmingly black, and also have the lowest literacy and highest crime rates, because those neighborhoods are where the poor are forced to exist, rather than having options to live elsewhere, and because urban racism keeps ethnic minorities poor while offering greater opportunity to white people.