From: silva@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Holly Silva)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Crime rates in Britain compared
Date: 22 Nov 1992 04:50:49 GMT
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
NNTP-Posting-Host: pangea.stanford.edu

mossop@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Antony Mossop) writes:
>cthorne@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Charles E Thorne) writes:
>>
>>Another factor, which I didn't dwell on, is that the U.S. has an official
>>aversion to outlawing weapons or giving police forces unlimited authority
>>to counter crime.  We have a basic concept (although not always realized
>>in a form everyone to agree to) that we believe in a fairly laissez-faire
>>community (both politically and socially) and the police forces can counter
>>this only with substantial proof that they're correct when they interfere.

>Huhh? Where does this idea about the severely shackled US police forces
>come from. No European countries have anywhere near the number of 
>shootings of suspects by the police as in the US.

	This is because neither the police _nor_ the populace of most
western European countries is as heavily armed as their counterparts
here in the US. With too many guns about in the hands of _everyone_ 
even trivial altercations can escalate into deadly violence. But this
violence level alone is not indicative of the power of the police in
the States. The police in the US may not be particularly 'shackled' in
comparison to the police in Britain (outside of Northern Ireland, where
they're _very_ free to do whatsoever the hell they please), but in
comparison to the power the police have in most of Europe, American
cops are comparatively restricted with what they can _succeed_
in doing in the course of their work. They do not have the ability to
abuse illegal immigrants to the extent that police on the European
continent do. If a police force in a major city in the US were to
engage in targeting of non-whites for ID carding the way they do in
Paris there would be an uproar, and they would eventually be forced
to back down. The cops in Paris are notorious for this kind of abuse
of power, but you hear virtually no complaint from the French people
over this behavior. Likewise the cops in Milan are very free with 
their batons when 'dealing with' Arab and Balkans immigrants, but you
don't find out much about it in the Italian press.

>Though similarly on
>both sides of the Atlantic, very little is done when the most glaring
>evidence shows outright assault by law officers. In the US the police
>in practice are no more limited than in the UK and they're given guns
>as well (one of the things that is commonly misunderstood is that there
>are strong elements in the UK forces that want to have guns, it's the
>public that don't trust them to carry them). In fact recent reports on
>the abuse of forfeiture procedures (in fact the forfeiture procedures 
>themselves) in the US would suggest that the US police aren't even
>limited by their supposedly all encompassing constitution.
>
>
	The police in this country regularly overstep the bounds of 
legal and morally acceptable behavior, but the operative words in your
statement above are 'recent reports'. The cops here constantly complain
about how they can't do their jobs, because of watchdog groups and 
legal restrictions on their actions in the line of duty. I don't mean
to include Britons in what I'm about to say because your society is 
a good bit more respecting of 'fair play' than most. But by and large,
most of the Europeans I've met are quite unaware of, and blase about 
the fairly aggressive behavior of their police vis a vis the
unenfrachised, the illegal immigrants and the lowest classes of 
their societies. The level of public attention toward this sort of
misbehavior on the part of security forces really does seem to be 
higher in the US, as does the general willingness of our population
to give some credence to the complaints of the oppressed. In contrast,
the middle class in Europe seems to be very well informed about 
patterns of power abuse in the US, and simultaneously very unaware
of the same goings on in their own back streets.

	I would have discussed this with you at Friday Beer Tony, but
I've been out of town. The view many Europeans have of comparative
levels of power abuse among the police and security forces of Europe
and the US really troubles me. It highlights a pattern of 
blindness toward European social pathologies, and an accompanying
over-awareness of the moral shortcomings of American society
that is too common among the educated classes in Europe. 

--
======================================================================
|| Holly Silva			I have nothing terribly clever to say||
|| Applied Earth Sciences	today.  You're in luck.		     ||
|| Stanford University						     ||
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british