this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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20 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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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.
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ALLIES
• !abolition@slrpnk.net
• !acab@lemmygrad.ml
• r/ACAB
• r/BadCopNoDonut/
• Randy Balko
• The Civil Rights Lawyer
• The Honest Courtesan
• Identity Project
• MirandaWarning.org
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INFO
• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Adultification
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Don't talk to the police.
• 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
• So you wanna be a cop?
• When the police knock on your door
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ORGANIZATIONS
• Black Lives Matter
• Campaign Zero
• Innocence Project
• The Marshall Project
• Movement Law Lab
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Say Their Names
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Funny how people from the USA hate the idea of CCTV and tHe SuVeIlAnCe sTaTe but public videos are the only proof of abuse of power.
The problem with mass surveillance is that, for it to be impossible to abuse, it both must be and can't be publicly transparent.
If access is only provided to a small group and they are corrupt, it will be used against the out-group while denying the out-group any hope of using it for justice against the in-group. This is the current state of affairs right now with big tech, digital surveillance, and government CCTV.
If all the data was publicly available without safeguards—which is the only way to prevent the above problem—the problem shifts to it being used by bad actors for harassment and blackmail. No matter who you are, if you're always watched by a camera, you will be eventually be recorded accidentally or intentionally breaking a law or some moral code. For digital surveillance, something could easily be taken out of context and used to irrecoverably damage your reputation before you get the chance to defend yourself.
When the solution to either situation is the same problem causing the other, there is no middle ground or way to reconcile them. The only way to prevent both is to just not have mass surveillance, and instead provide a framework allowing the public to create recordings that can only be used to protect themselves.
It's in public: no expectation of privacy exists. This could in principle already be done.
-Cardinal Richelieu
Be very careful with that desire of yours to be able to watch all people all the time the second they step out into public. Even in a magical world where all laws are sensible and just—which is, notably, not the situation in the real world—it is still possible to do a lot of harm with that kind of information.