this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
772 points (99.7% liked)
THE POLICE PROBLEM
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1133 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
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think the reason you're awash in upvotes for your original comment is because it's simply a known thing for most of us and we don't have anything to add. It just is what we know and what we've been fighting against my entire adult life. Conservatives will push all kinds of propaganda that doesn't map to reality like "obey the law", "just comply", "all lives matter". The police will shoot first and ask questions later, and those questions won't have anything to do with law enforcement.
But there's been a VERY long progression of reducing the amount of inter-generational connectivity and making sure that we barely even speak the same languages or dialects and some of us got caught off gaurd by your use of neotalk that's been coaxed into reality by corporate social media platforms censoring certain forms of speech critical of the systems of torture we exist under. For example, what we today call cPTSD 100 years ago was called shell shock. Then it was called combat fatigue. Then combat stress reaction. Then it was PTSD. After that it was divided into cPTSD. And that's an example of the terminology changing for reasons that we can very much find ways that it actually is positive. Each shift expanded the definition to include more people and more experiences. It's easy to find the justification that while it divides successive combat veterans and how they talk about their own traumatic experiences and how the systems of torture that exist have broken them.
Most of us find it harder to find this silver lining in neotalk from corporate social media platforms. We just see our dialect eroding beneath us. But you don't. And our generation has to do more to reach out to you and listen to you so that you have any reason to listen to us. So while I personally disagree, I refuse to let myself be upset about it, or butthurt as you put it (given that I'm not upset, I'm not even close to butthurt). All I can do is point out that inter-generational connectivity is intentionally broken by our oppressors by manipulating how we use language and hope that someday you'll have this experience ready to help you talk to a younger generation who speaks differently from you. I hope you do so with grace, love, and patience.
That's all I was getting at
It's weird how the chat is assuming this is an age difference issue. That's low key chopped.
chopped as in the AAVE use, or the co-opted TikTok use?
what does chopped mean in this context ?
And more importantly, who gives a fuck?
I do