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Police Keep Losing Their Jobs For Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People
(www.motherjones.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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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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MODERATORS
I feel like this is good on paper, but who is the arbiter of that? Lost civil court case settlements?
It would be up to the insurance companies to decide which cops are high risk, using any data they can scrape together.
Lost civil court case settlements would be a huge one, of course. Any cop found liable in civil court for abuse of power/violation of civil rights/etc would quickly see their malpractice insurance rates skyrocket ... or have insurance companies start refusing to cover him altogether.
But they'd probably also factor in accusations and complaints, department disciplinary measures (if public), maybe even things like age and gender of the cop (since they change auto insurance rates based on that). They might also have some kind of questionnaire/psychological assessment during their application process. Maybe they'll even browse through the cop's social media for any red flags that are associated with a high likelihood of civil court cases. Oh, and also consider the record of the department they're working in, of course -- since the data shows cops working in problem departments are more likely to end up having civil court case judgements/settlements.
The beautiful part of it is that all of this would be done without spending taxpayer money on it, and the insurance companies would be highly resistant to police corruption/coercion because insuring high-risk officers and paying civil court penalties for them would cut into profits. They have a high profit incentive to make sure they correctly identify high risk cops and don't let any slip through the cracks.