(December 15, 2014 at 10:19 pm)psychoslice Wrote: all we can do is have faith that the system is working.I think that the point of the articles that Min links to is to show that the system is not working. By making the small number of bad cops effectively immune to being punished for their actions (up to and including injuring or even killing unarmed and sometimes harmless citizens) you increase the odds that cops will cross that line under duress, instead of remembering to take the more cautious route. I don't like the idea that dealing with a cop might be like a game of russian roulette that I did not agree to take part in.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould