I hope you'll never wake up next to your partner for the last 6 years to find out they were acting under orders to get close to you, that their government issue passport was a fake.

That's a pretty bad thing to do to another person but that subtlety may be lost on you.

> On the scale of Bad Things Cops Have Done In The Last Six Years, pretending to be someone's boyfriend seems pretty insignificant.

That's the subject of this thread, it's not as simple as pretending to be someone's boyfriend, it is pretending to be someone's boyfriend for 6 whole years. That is not something trivial, that is a very bad abuse of government power if the person you do this to is not engaging in a crime proportionate to that measure. Note that without government assistance he would not have been able to pull this off.

> Cops in America will shoot a black teenager just for walking down the street (literally).

Yes, and it is an extremely bad thing that this should happen. And I think that there is a lot wrong with American society that such excesses are not dealt with swiftly and very forcefully because the general message appears to be that this is ok. See also: driving while black and a whole pile of evidence that seem to indicate that America, while on the outside seen as inclusive and a place where everybody is equal is underneath that veneer a terribly racist society where being born black is equal to a much higher percentage chance of being murdered by the police or jailed for a significant portion of your life. But that is not the subject of this thread.

> In fact, police frequently kill innocent people of all races due to misunderstandings or with stray bullets. It is unfortunate, but we all understand that it happens.

It is not just 'unfortunate', it is an extremely bad thing and the lack of police restraint in the USA is something that has never ceased to amaze me and I'm really happy I don't live there. Police should be respected, not feared and the color of your skin should not be a major factor in whether or not you're going to end up with a police bullet in your back (or 16 of them, to refer to one recently in the news case).

> It is possible that you would be equally eloquent in your deridement of police procedures if those stories were on the homepage of hackernews. But I doubt it.

That's your problem, not mine. If you followed my comment threads over the years you'd know that I'm a pretty outspoken fellow when it comes to issues like these. If such a thread were to gain enough votes on HN (even though strictly speaking not HN material) and if I were to notice it (I really don't read every thread and the homepage scrolls by pretty quickly) then I'm sure you'd find me just about as incensed as I'm now if not a whole lot worse.

Your projections of what I would or would not do are entirely your own.

Your comment reminds me of those comments that we shouldn't do 'x' because there is still world hunger. Yes, all those things you listed are bad and we should do something about them. But we should also do something about this particular case because it is bad all by itself and we don't have to limit our attempts to improve to the world to the very worst things.