this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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Our definition of ‘cops’ is broad, and includes prison guards, probation officers, shitty DAs and judges, etc — anyone who has the authority to fuck over people’s lives, with minimal or no oversight.
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ALLIES
• r/ACAB
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INFO
• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Killings by law enforcement in Canada
• Killings by law enforcement in the United Kingdom
• Killings by law enforcement in the United States
• Know your rights: Filming the police
• Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of 'I can’t breathe' (as of 2020)
• Police aren't primarily about helping you or solving crimes.
• Police lie under oath, a lot
• Police spin: An object lesson in Copspeak
• Police unions and arbitrators keep abusive cops on the street
• Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States
• When the police knock on your door
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ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
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Too bad the shooter wasn't black. The cops weren't trained for this.
This is a cop problem, not a gun problem. All the guns were working, including the shooter's. The cops saw fit to take their lunch hour instead of working.
Just saw a video. Hahaha, I'm gonna stop being capitalist cattle and switch to crime.
If your Mafia family is organized as a worker co-op, is it praxis?
But I'm not Italian!
Why not?
They won't let me be Italian.
This. Specifically it's a "police do not have a duty to protect" problem, that stems from a series of court cases going back to at least the 80s.
I think it's a problem that cops are just hired employees rather than anything more significant than that.
I mean, if it were up to me they would be paid better, required to insure both individually and at a department level against damages to civilian persons and property, and subject to much stricter civilian scrutiny.
They would keep qualified immunity, but with much tighter reigns on the "qualified" part. Immunity only when necessary, with civilian oversight as to when that is. We would toss out the thing where police are not liable for damages done by them, they would be responsible for and expected to insure against it.
The insurance thing is two tiered for a.similar reason - if the damage is deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes by civilian oversight then it would be on the city and the city's insurance to pay for it, if not then on the officer and the officer's insurance. This eventually prices bad (but not quite criminally bad) officers out of the job.
Are you a doctor?
No, but malpractice insurance was exactly what I was thinking about as a model.
Really enraging to have all those Punisher logos juxtaposed with their cowering and pants pissing.
Uvalde is majority-minority. If cops went in, more kids probably would've died.
That's tongue-in-cheek gallows humor but sadly not too far off from reality.
I get what you're alluding to, but actually the cops yelled out that they were there and for any children hiding to come out (obviously well before they'd neutralized the shooter) and the kids who responded and came out of their hiding places were shot dead because the cops were too cowardly (or busy checking their Facebook feed based on video evidence) to actually protect these innocent 5-10 year olds. I have a child in that age range and my blood starts boiling even discussing this topic.
Let us not forget that these wannabe police even arrested parents who were willing to rush into danger to protect their children. That's all they were good for on this day.
The guy that was checking his phone...his wife was one of the teachers in the school that died.
I think if anything, that cop deserves a little slack.
I don't really get what you're saying.
That most people there are minorities, and cops don't do well around them.
I'm not sure any of them are more interested in being crucified than shot.
If we're playing "what if", my made up story is that they rushed in with 300 cops and nobody died.
But the reality is they did NOTHING.