It seems like the unfortunate reality of having a flag button and just giving everyone the ability to use it is that only the content that least offends people's political sensibilities makes it to the front page. If it makes people uncomfortable (such as the realities of police abuse in America) then it gets flagged off the first page.
I worry that it makes HN a bit of a bubble where the people who are made uncomfortable by certain truths and need to hear them the most are also the least likely to hear them because they will flag them away. You can kind of have an entire alternative reality here where police abuse doesn't exist and the police do face accountability for their actions. I wish there was a way to fix it.
I'm not one of the flaggers, but it's questionable that this falls under the umbrella (per the site guidelines) of "anything that good hackers would find interesting" or "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
I agree that this is an important article in general, but it's reasonable to hold the opinion that it doesn't belong on HN, and flagging is the way to signal that.
Couldn't good 'hackers' potentially find opportunities in the shitstorm that is modern policing? Perhaps there's a business or some other way to 'disrupt' policing, and make it more fair/balanced/honest. Can't do that if we fail to have substantive discussions about what the problems are.
Nationalistic flamebait and personal attacks (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24564806) will get you banned here. Please stop posting like this. The container here is a fragile ecosystem. I'm sure you wouldn't litter in a city park or a mountain lake, or drop lit matches in a dry forest, so can you please not do the equivalent on HN?
Do you live in the West? If so, the US is the one of two super powers which is most closely aligned with western, and most likely your, values. No other western country has the ability to project the soft and hard power required to protect these values, and I for one am indeed very concerned about their internal affairs.
I wish there was a word like "cowardice" except with 10x the magnitude.