

Police Drop Bomb on Radicals' Home in Philadelphia (1985) - learc83
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/14/us/police-drop-bomb-on-radicals-home-in-philadelphia.html

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quaffapint
I was a kid living in the Philly area when it happened. It got lots of local
TV coverage of course and it honestly did feel quite crazy having a military
like action against a house in Philly, but it never seemed to go much beyond
that after it was all over. IIRC it was Mayor Goode who called the action, and
being african-american, maybe that helped keep racial tensions down. I can
only surmise if it was today that there would be much longer lasting coverage
and repercussions.

~~~
pmorici
I think when you get down to it isn't quite as much about race as the news
would have us believe. It is more about the plight of the poor vs. authority
trying to keep them in their place but by highlighting incidences with racial
components like this they can polarize the various groups that would otherwise
have common interests.

The Tea Party and the Occupy Wall St. movement is another example of two
groups that basically want the same thing (hold big banks accountable no more
corporate bailouts etc...) but they are often portrayed as polar opposites and
played against each other in the news and politics.

~~~
vidarh
I've made the point elsewhere that a lot of activists in the US are shooting
themselves badly in the foot by playing up the race aspect over and over in
these cases.

They are missing that while there certainly _is_ racism in the US, these
problems correlate much stronger with poverty than race: The vast majority of
differences in violence along racial lines disappear when you start adjusting
for social equality.

By tying it to race, these activists are pushing away large groups of people -
both poor people of other ethnic backgrounds, and other people who don't find
the race issue comfortable for various reasons (including not so savoury
reasons).

And by focusing on the police, rather than the underlying social inequalities,
they are likewise pushing away groups that see the police as fundamentally
protecting them against a lot of the people that are demonstrating.

At the same time, address the poverty issue, and 1) it has a much more
significant impact, 2) it leaves the remaining race issues in much starker
relief (it is far easier for racist cops to justify their behaviour when the
victim is black _and_ live in a poor area where it is easy for people in the
community to accept that a black kid in that area can be scary)

It is heart wrenching to see how off the mark these things end up going.

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glenda
I would love to read something about how the police didn't kill someone. It
seems like most of the people that help other people are "strangers" \- are
there any kinds of statistics on how often the police actually help? I'd
imagine that situations like domestic abuse are cases when they're really
successful but other than that it often seems like the police cause real
problems that tear people apart.

~~~
ganeumann
Police don't kill people almost all the time. Police generally are a net good.

I read this book once called Crisis Management. The main idea was to minimize
the consequences of rare actions. So, even though train cars carrying lethal
chemicals rarely derail, you build the train tracks so if one were to derail,
say on a sharp curve, it derails far from populated areas. Or, even though
nuclear reactors rarely release deadly radiocative gases, you don't allow
people to build shanties nearby, where they would get lethal doses of
radiation if there were an accident.

You can't get rid of adverse cases completely in most real-world situations.
But you can work to minimize the consequences when the adverse case shows up.
There are times when improving the worst case is pretty cheap, if you think
ahead.

Policing is like this. The police very rarely need to use force ('rarely' in
the sense of force used/interaction with civilian.) But when they do it makes
sense to reduce the worst case: that the force will cause mortal injury. In
the MOVE case, just wait them out. There is definitely increased cost, but it
improves the expected value of the worst case by much more than the cost. Or,
as I saw someone ask, speculatively I have to assume, on Twitter 'what would
you do if some 6'4" guy was running at you threateningly?' The rational answer
might be 'close your car window and call for backup.' It's never 'get out of
the car and shoot him in the head.'

~~~
Russell91
Police are not supposed to be a net good. They are a classic solution to a
game theoretic prisoner's dilemma. If there were no enforcement of laws by
police, it would be in everyone's best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of
whether other people steal, you'd be better off doing it. So as a classic
solution to the prisoners dilemma, you introduce a force that strictly
decreases everyone's utility function. How can this be a good thing? Well,
because it changes everyone's optimal strategy from stealing to not stealing,
reaching a global optimum. Now you'll notice that this strategy only improves
things if it actually changes people's behavior. If people continue stealing
anyway at the same rates, then things have only gotten worse (unless you
subscribe to punitive, rather than deterrent punishment). So the primary
purpose of police is deterrence through the threat of negative reinforcement,
not "helping people". Further, whenever police actually have to enforce laws,
its a sign that something has gone wildly wrong. The deterrent didn't work,
and things are worse off than if there were no police at all. Of course, in
reality criminal behavior has a lot of motivators and it's not possible to
change everyone's optimal strategy just by raising punishments, so you're
going to have police enforcing laws. But there is no police department that is
more successful than one where the police just sit around and do nothing.

~~~
colanderman
_If there were no enforcement of laws by police, it would be in everyone 's
best interest to e.g. steal. Regardless of whether other people steal, you'd
be better off doing it._

This makes no sense if you've ever interacted with other humans. There are
several logical societal deterrents to stealing beside police. (Ostracism,
retribution, foresight, modeling…)

~~~
Russell91
You're missing the forest for the trees. The fact that some people's utility
function supports not stealing by default is irrelevant to the structure of
the game. It's still a prisoners dilemma and the existence of the police is
justified in its efforts to modify the game's structure.

~~~
tedks
It's _not_ a prisoner's dilemma.

A prisoner's dilemma is a _wholly fictional_ and _game-theoretic_ construct
involving _single, isolated interactions_ among _perfectly rational agents._

None of that has anything to do with humans. Humans never play the prisoner's
dilemma because they're never any of the above concepts. Humans are certainly
not perfectly rational, and almost always interact with the same set of
people. You can't apply such an abstraction to public policy.

~~~
Russell91
Yea, right... You can't apply math to public policy - only stories and soft
science. Math is absolutely useless because it's abstract and ... "fictional".

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Killobyte
For those interested I highly recommend the documentary "Let the Fire Burn".

[http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2119463/)

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newobj
"Let the Fire Burn" documentary -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9eCA0bIezA)

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trhway
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege)
\- another fascinating read (beside everything else, the fire decomposing tear
gas into chemical weapon grade gases)

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rwhitman
One of the houses on Osage Avenue that was burned down was my dad's childhood
home.

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Gracana
I don't get it. What's the rush with situations like this? They're not going
anywhere. Surround the area, stay well protected, and think, negotiate,
anything seems better than this.

~~~
dfxm12
There was no rush.

>A 90-minute shootout this morning came _after a week of growing tension
between the city and the group_ , known as Move. _Residents in the western
Philadelphia neighborhood had complained about the group for years._

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will_work4tears
I swear I saw this before, or a similar thing. Also I swear I saw something
similar in Independence, MO; but I cannot find a thing about it. Perhaps I was
conflating it with this event.

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MarioSpeedwagon
If it happened today: "OMG WE HAVE GOTTEN SO VIOLENT." Nope. We just have the
Internet.

Interesting story.

~~~
sk5t
Here's another story you seldom hear about; it's from 1927 and had a worse
outcome than recent school shootings.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster)

