this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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911 users here now
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
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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I prefer LARPers with guns, myself. Coward is too good for these roleplayers who couldn't be bothered to use their 6-weeks of training in how to beat black citizens and plant evidence, to take out an active shooter in an elementary school.
We are a people with sociopaths in positions of power, with a license to kill, who feel no empathy toward others enough to ask why they weren't acting to save these kids and teachers. Then to hear that parents were threatened with arrest (maybe actually arrested the mother who jumped a fence and managed to save her son when the cops would do nothing) if they tried to enter and do anything to help those inside.
As a new parent to a kid that will be 5 this year, this shit is my nightmare. When the footage came out showing those scummy wannabes standing around hearing round after round of shots, knowing they were coming from classrooms of children and teachers, who likely were dying with every pop, made me so angry I was practically shaking and weeping. I've never felt that much utter contempt for police in my life. They'd have had to shoot me to keep me out of that school. I can't imagine a more dystopian world than one where the parents were threatened while a gunman mowed down their children for over an hour.
I'm so sorry for the families. They had to bury their children or loved one and live with the image of indifferent cops standing around in the school doing nothing. I would be left wondering which order my kid was shot and could they have been saved with the initial responding officers, or any other fucking one of the 300 and something on scene, doing their job, regardless of who the fuck was in charge. I guess at training these cops all skipped the class about active shooters are bad and can be legally shot.
Not to pick any side in a world conflict, or make anything about this post anymore political, but this is why I have a hard time knowing about the civilian and children lost in Gaza. How the losses make up a disproportionally high number of women and children. I don't give a flying fuck the color of a child's skin or what religion their parents practice, THEY ARE FUCKING CHILDREN, FOR FUCKS SAKE!!
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