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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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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
You're good at explaining stuff, and I'd like to understand please. What abuse that "doesn’t rise to the level of illegality" gets kids seized by child protective agencies?
OK think of it like this, CPS' duty is to the child. Their goal is to provide the best environment for the child they can. Absent other factors that will always be with the parents. If they see issues with how the child is being raised or their environment they don't immediately take the child away (depending on the severity, obviously). They will provide the parent with education, supplies, etc to fix the problem and get the child back into a healthy environment.
Things can escalate from there if repeated attempts are not yielding positive results. In this case it said she had previous issues with smoking around her other children. That is unhealthy. I doubt that was the only factor in removing them but it is part of the history, so when they saw she had been smoking while pregnant they removed the child.
I would also like to point out from Googling it sounds like that is the procedure in NY, a child can be removed and then the parent can go to court to ask a judge to have the child returned. That is what happened. Then it sounds like the issue with CPS was them not returning the child in a timely manner and using marijuana use it self as a factor determining a child was in a bad environment. Those are obviously issues, but the initial removal (keep in mind we are both armchair quarterbacking) did not seem like an issue to me, it fit standard practices as I have known them.
You failed to provide an example. Feel free to do so along with a source.
An example of what?
What else could it be?
Let's start with the example heavily discussed in this article: smoking drugs while pregnant.