THE POLICE PROBLEM
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.
♦ ♦ ♦
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.
♦ ♦ ♦
RULES
① Real-life decorum is expected. Please don't say things only a child or a jackass would say in person.
② If you're here to support the police, you're trolling. Please exercise your right to remain silent.
③ Saying ~~cops~~ ANYONE should be killed lowers the IQ in any conversation. They're about killing people; we're not.
④ Please don't dox or post calls for harassment, vigilantism, tar & feather attacks, etc.
Please also abide by the instance rules.
It you've been banned but don't know why, check the moderator's log. If you feel you didn't deserve it, hey, I'm new at this and maybe you're right. Send a cordial PM, for a second chance.
♦ ♦ ♦
ALLIES
• r/ACAB
♦ ♦ ♦
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
♦ ♦ ♦
ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
view the rest of the comments
I know you need for me to hold the position that he deserved to die but I just don’t. You’re welcome to continue trying to put words in my mouth though.
I’m not particularly broken up about a gun thief dying, no. But I think we can all stop pretending like the guy didn’t have agency and drove himself into a truck all by himself.
I kind of stopped giving a fuck about stupid people dying around the time a bunch of dipshits refused a life saving vaccine during a pandemic.
This is just a different flavor of that.
If you're being chased, then no, you didn't drive yourself into something all by yourself. There was an extremely significant external factor.
That guy chose to gamble - running and maybe escaping (but also maybe getting seriously injured/die) instead of doing 5-10 for possession of a stolen firearm.
Attempting to evade the police can't be allowed to be a blank cheque to get away with crime.
That's the thing, you throw out 5-10 like it's nothing. Not to mention what going to jail and having a felony on your record do to your life. That's a significant amount of your life, which you don't get back. We can only speculate what led to him being in that position, but once there, consequences that steep strongly incentivize evasion. I have a similar thought experiment that tends to piss some people off: You're guilty of something (imagine) and you're evading and a law enforcement dog is chasing you. You're far enough away from the actual officers and the only way you're getting connected to the crime is that dog. It catches up to you, you have a weapon (baseball bat). Do you surrender to it knowing you're facing charges of 5-10 years?
In this imaginative situation, and assuming I were (beyond any doubt) certain that the dog were the only thing, I'd probably kill the dog with the bat. That doesn't mean it would be the right thing to do.
In reality however, I'd avoid making the choices to get into that situation in the first place (and there are a lot of other options).
Completely agree, I can't hardly imagine a series of choices I would actually make that could lead me to such a situation. And it definitely wouldn't be the right thing to do, just the subjectively imperative choice given circumstances. Just a what if, that naturally gets under the skin of many, especially (in my experience) those that equate animal life with human life, but that's a different rabbit hole.