I think it’s common sense that concerns about police incompetence do not distract from concerns about police corruption. After all, why would they?
I kinda think they might do, in some circumstances.
I don’t personally pay much attention to concerns about police. I’m aware that people have them, and I could say a handful things on “both sides” of the issue, but I don’t have a strongly held opinion and—importantly—I’m not carefully tracking a lot of evidence that eventually I can examine and integrate in order to come up with a strongly held opinion. I read things and then I mostly forget them.
I don’t think the following is a super accurate characterization of how I form my (weakly held) opinion on the police. But I think it’s more accurate than I’d prefer:
When I see someone talking about concerns with the police, I decide basically on the spot whether those concerns seem to me to be valid or overblown. Then if they seem valid, I move my “concerns with the police” needle towards “valid”; if they seem overblown, I move it towards “overblown”.
and I can imagine that there are people out there, perhaps in large numbers, for whom this actually is pretty accurate.
Notably, this doesn’t have separate buckets for “police misconduct” and “police incompetence”.
And so if I see someone talking about police incompetence in a way that seems overblown to me, that disposes me to take police misconduct less seriously going forwards. I do think that’s just kinda true for me, and my main defense against it is that I’m aware that I’m not tracking evidence in anything like a reasonable way and so I avoid holding or expressing strong opinions.
(Does police misconduct interact with climate change in the same way? For me personally, I don’t think so. But supposing someone’s bucket were instead labeled “woke concerns”… yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me.)
So suppose that someone thinks concerns about police misconduct are valid, but concerns about police incompetence are overblown. (Or perhaps replace valid/overblown with convincing/unconvincing.) If they said that “talking about police incompetence distracts from talking about police misconduct”, that seems to me like it might actually just be true, conditional on them having accurately evaluated those two things.
I kinda think they might do, in some circumstances.
I don’t personally pay much attention to concerns about police. I’m aware that people have them, and I could say a handful things on “both sides” of the issue, but I don’t have a strongly held opinion and—importantly—I’m not carefully tracking a lot of evidence that eventually I can examine and integrate in order to come up with a strongly held opinion. I read things and then I mostly forget them.
I don’t think the following is a super accurate characterization of how I form my (weakly held) opinion on the police. But I think it’s more accurate than I’d prefer:
and I can imagine that there are people out there, perhaps in large numbers, for whom this actually is pretty accurate.
Notably, this doesn’t have separate buckets for “police misconduct” and “police incompetence”.
And so if I see someone talking about police incompetence in a way that seems overblown to me, that disposes me to take police misconduct less seriously going forwards. I do think that’s just kinda true for me, and my main defense against it is that I’m aware that I’m not tracking evidence in anything like a reasonable way and so I avoid holding or expressing strong opinions.
(Does police misconduct interact with climate change in the same way? For me personally, I don’t think so. But supposing someone’s bucket were instead labeled “woke concerns”… yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me.)
So suppose that someone thinks concerns about police misconduct are valid, but concerns about police incompetence are overblown. (Or perhaps replace valid/overblown with convincing/unconvincing.) If they said that “talking about police incompetence distracts from talking about police misconduct”, that seems to me like it might actually just be true, conditional on them having accurately evaluated those two things.