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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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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
founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
Good thing cops are not legally required to help you in the US, even if you're about to be killed by a criminal.
Neat how they always choose to protect nazi protestors.
It was super apparent with j6. After months of watching protesters get beaten, teargassed, and arrested en masse (among other things) it was absolutely mind blowing to watch the police do the (almost) bare minimum to stop y’all-qeada even when they killed a cop. You would think they were trying to break up a bar fight and not an armed mob.
I expected them to at least treat this violent mob (chanting death threats to the *vice president) attacking the capitol the same as they had every single BLM protest the previous summer, and realistically take that event as more of an attack on our nation and respond in kind.
All summer we saw police around the country absolutely fuck people up, mass arrests, immediate crowd control, but on j6 all of the sudden they weren’t an all powerful, super coordinated crowd stopping machine.
It was infuriating
The ones there fought like hell, and were severely outnumbered. Their backup was delayed for hours.
You are completely right, I just think that if it was BLM storming the capital way more than one person would have been shot.
Only 14 people were taken into custody on the day of the j6 insurrection, and only one person was shot.
They were already using rubber bullets, they very well could have escalated in kind with live ammunition, we are talking about government officials here, not retail store windows.
I understand that there is nuance to this situation, but I just had a visceral reaction to seeing this group get the kids gloves treatment after months of seeing the standard police response to protests that they didn’t agree with.
Understood, and agreed.
Came here to say this. The SCOTUS has ruled multiple times that police officers and other agents of the government are only legally obligated to capture criminals, not prevent laws from being broken. A cop can legally watch someone execute someone and as long as they arrest the perpetrator afterwards, they are legally in the clear. Never believe a cop who says they are here to protect you. In a world where the laws are written to protect business interests and cops only have to uphold the law, the cops are nothing more than tax funded corporate enforcers.