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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 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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• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
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This is a really hard one in my opinion. On the one hand, no one should ever have to suffer that and anyone who does it should be removed from their position immediately and prosecuted fully. On the other hand, the ones claiming to be sexually assaulted are hardly the best people themselves, so you have to take their stories with a fair amount of salt.
The obvious solution is security and body cameras everywhere monitored by an independent 3rd party, along with additional protections so that guards and prisoners of different sexes aren't (or rarely) together, but we all know that's never gonna happen 😑
You take all 22 women's stories with a fair amount of salt? How many imprisoned women's stories equate to one male prison guard's story? What's the precise equivalency in your view? 🤮
The male prison guard also confessed...so does @mrbubblesort also not believe him? Unless the guard being a confessed serial assaulter means his confession also needs to be "taken with a grain of salt"? I'm so confused by this guy's take on this...
His take? "They are criminals in prison, so they must suffer"
And I guess since they are in jail they are untrustworthy liars. Fuck the pigs
Having known a couple of people who became prison guards, I would implicitly trust the prisoners over those people.
I thought it was obvious I was speaking of the overall general problem, not to this case specifically. So the be clear, in the general sense when a report is made, neither side is particularly trustworthy. It's a criminal's word vs the member of a corrupt gang, so it's hard to know who to believe. So ideally we should have a system with checks to ensure this isn't even a possibility.
Where you are fucking up is assuming someone in jail is less trustworthy than the pigs who put them there and watch over them. This is not the case. I’ve been to jail and the prisoners are the most human thing about it. The system and the guards are what is disgusting and it is them who can not be trusted.
I specifically didn't say that. On one side we have murderers, rapists, child molesters, liars, and everything else, and on the other we have people convicted for committing murder, rape, child molestation, lying, and everything else. If it's all one big shit show, why are they put together at all?
Want to reevaluate your opinion?
“No way to fix this” says lemmy user where this happens regularly