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Yeah, but in the UK it's systemic and on a national scale.It would be less obnoxious if they were really good at fighting regular crime, but they are atrocious at that.

So yes, we might not be so dreadful compared to Hicksville, US or some craphole country like India,but that's a very low bar for the police of a G5 nation.

Absolutely go ahead and make sweeping generalisations about the state of the police in the UK. It's all true (except if anyone claims they are systemically racist, or some other clickbaity nonsense).

 help



What exactly are you saying is systemic and on a national scale? I certainly don't think the specific news story we're talking about is typical. That's why it was widely reported and why the Police had to admit their error.

Basically every week there's another story that makes it onto the news about yet another outrageous apprehension. 60,000 arrests or so over the last couple of years IIRC. What's disgraceful is that for years the police whined that they didn't have enough resources because of Tory budget cuts, something which I can personally attest, and then you get this...

100% of the time I would pick the UK police system over the US's.

Would you?

In the UK, they can't force you to speak, but not answering questions can be interpreted as evasion / "adverse interference".

They do not need a warrant to search your phone. Not providing them with a PIN can be a separate charge, with up to 2 years imprisonment.

They can hold you up to 36 hrs if the police decide so. Up to 14 days without charge under modern broad "anti terrorism" laws.


You're talking about UK laws rather than UK police.

Cool, now compare how many people die to police violence in the UK vs the US.

Also note the absence of large scale destructive anti-police riots in the UK over the past decade.


There are fewer anti police riots in UK, because UK is much more effective at catching and prosecuting rioters than US. In US, rioters enjoy extreme leniency. Only a tiny fraction of 2020 rioters have faced any justice at all.

As for police killings, you are comparing an event that’s extremely unlikely to happen with an event that’s multiple orders of magnitude more likely. Speech offense prosecutions in UK are more common today than political prosecutions were in post Kruschev Soviet Union. The only reason UK has fewer political prisoners than Soviet Union had is that the sentences are shorter and typically non-custodial.


I could find one news story a week about an outrageous arrest in the US, or in many other countries. You don't give a citation for the 60k figure, but I imagine it's the same one that has to be laboriously debunked every time someone brings social media talking points about the UK to one of these threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830776



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