alt Hacker NewsACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.
If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
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The fact that 6 people replied to my comment in order to "correct me" on something that is less deadly than hunting accidents, is the most evidence I can offer for my point.
In the signal of things that are damaging society, negatively impacting individuals, police-brutality-self-investigation-no-harm-found is so far down in the noise floor, it should be about as worrying as people who live on busy street intersections not trimming back their hedges for safe driving visibility.
But somehow, here are 6 people deep in random HN comments telling me all about the importance of trimming hedges. Err, reforming police.
>If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.
This line of thinking will either be totally unable to ever build a large organization, or else will pathologically explain-away wrong-doing due to black and white thinking.
Suppose you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and 500000 actors are “good except that they protect that one guy”, and then the one guy dies of a freak heart attack, and then all but one of the 500000 are replaced with “good actors” except that they defend the guy who remains from the 500000.
Are they bad actors?