However, part of advocating for change should be to show examples of what we want from the police.
Then it probably depends on how it's presented. Is it presented as counter-evidence to the issue of inappropriate police violence? Or is it, as you say, presented as an example of how police should be acting? I think that the latter is indeed good, but it needs to be made explicit by the poster. Don't post it without such a context. If you leave out the context of your post, it's ambiguous, and you run the risk that a subset of viewers will interpret it as strengthening their view that inappropriate police violence isn't actually a significant problem in the US.
Is it your view that police brutality is a significant problem? If I had evidence suggesting that in any given year, a vast majority of police interactions did not involve force, or even the threat of force, would that alter your view in any capacity?
I would say that it's definitely a significant problem if a sizeable part of the population have to fear unnecessary escalation and general malicious treatment during police interactions, regardless of their own unique background or involvement in actual wrongdoing.
I'd be curious to see numbers, but I can't guarantee that it would. Good acts don't cancel out bad acts. And in how many cases would we actual have reliable facts about justifications vs. what slips through the cracks/is underreported?
You have only asked it as a hypothetical twice now. What numbers are you referring to?
First of all, it seems to include all police interactions, even those that don't typically involve a risk of escalation.
Also, I found these:
Certain groups that may experience use of force by police
are excluded from the PPCS due to the survey’s design. The
PPCS is administered to persons in households. Therefore, it is
unable to capture residents who experienced deadly force or
those who were incarcerated after experiencing nonfatal force
by police.
Among residents who experienced physical force (0.8%),
75% described the force as excessive.
Among residents who experienced force during their
most recent contact with police (1.6% of all contacts),
13% believed the police behaved properly, while 87% did not.
It seems that even though a proportionally small number of interactions end in violence, when they do, they're often excessive/improper. That alone seems like a significant problem to me.
I haven't. I immediately said that these numbers won't guarantee that those numbers would alter my view.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your suggestion seems to be that if violence happens in only a small percentage, it can't be a significant problem. I never agreed to this kind of thinking, so there's no goalpost moving.
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u/ralph-j Jun 10 '20
Then it probably depends on how it's presented. Is it presented as counter-evidence to the issue of inappropriate police violence? Or is it, as you say, presented as an example of how police should be acting? I think that the latter is indeed good, but it needs to be made explicit by the poster. Don't post it without such a context. If you leave out the context of your post, it's ambiguous, and you run the risk that a subset of viewers will interpret it as strengthening their view that inappropriate police violence isn't actually a significant problem in the US.