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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Wherever it originated, it's the US cops that seem the most obvious and appropriate target for ACAB. I hate the acronym because while all police forces in the Western world seem to have some systemic issues, theyre not all as extreme as in the US. Also, it literally isn't all cops, it's the system they work in, so CAB would be both shorter and more accurate
It’s “all cops are bastards” for a few reasons.
First, ACAB because the good ones get rooted out if they don’t both turn a blind eye to their bastard peers misdeeds, or in some cases actively help them covered up. Good cops don’t stay cops for long.
Second, only bastards are attracted to that job. The power, the impunity, the unearned respect. Anyone who wants to be a cop is either already a bastard, or the few that aren't are stupid and misinterpreted the obvious situation, and they get rooted out very quickly. What kind of person looks at policing in America and decides that they want to be a part of that? A bastard, that kind
Third, “the thin blue line”. The true meaning of this is that there is a thin blue line that police are never supposed to cross, that being snitching on other officers.
The police (in the USA) are their own entity, a cohesive group. Time after time we see it on the news, the police abusing their power, killing people, forced confessions, torture, racism, misogyny, theft through civil asset forfeiture, rape. Sure, maybe there is a cop who hasn’t personally done these things, but they are a part of the group that does. They are 100% complicit, even though they would be putting themselves at risk to expose or protest these actions.
I think it has been long accepted that ACAB is in reference to the police of the USA. While police misconduct itself certainly isn’t limited to the yanks, it’s so overwhelming here that there really is no nuance to this situation.
In the USA, policing itself is corrupt. The idea that a member of this corrupt institution could be good is almost a paradox. Here in the US, there is no such thing as a “good cop”. “Good” and “cop” are mutually exclusive.
I noted another poster who.was from Norway complaining that his kids have picked up ACAB despite being from a place with a markedly better police force than the US. I'm in NZ and the same thing has happened with my kids. You may be just talking about the US context but the Internet is borderless