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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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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Holy shit, I thought it was double digits. How did they get 376 to show up without any of them roid raging their way into doing something other than dicking around?
Some of them tried and were actively prevented from doing it by other Officers. The whole situation is actually worse than most people realize.
There's no way that'd ever be justifiable, but what's their excuse?
Probably something about free school lunches or litter boxes.
The fucking litter boxes. Was that meme planted so we could identify which of our friends and neighbors went off the deep end?
It seriously stresses me out how many people in my community have taken that seriously. In my own family, even. It is indeed one of the many possible indications of someone to whom I don't want to give my time.
Nooooo my cousin's friend in Memphis told her it was true!
I’m no conspiracist, but… If I were a malicious—perhaps foreign—power and I saw how well that kind of fake news spread and how much staying power it had, despite it being totally far-fetched, and yet easily-verifiable, I’d be absolutely fucking giddy.
It would be the surest sign that I could now spread any bit of disinformation, particularly anything not easily-verifiable, and absolutely tear the country apart.
It really speaks to the issue of how many people get their news: secondhand from their family members who read a story (or listened to fox "news"), misunderstood some of it, then injected further biases while getting some of the facts wrong (purposefully or accidentally).
From one report, they didn't know who was in charge because there were State and local units. So they did nothing while some in charge waited to hear who should be giving the orders. At least that's how I remember it.
Right because that can all be excused away with "policy issues" that leave nobody actually accountable and spits in the face of common sense. "I didn't try to take down the shooter because I didn't have anyone to tell me that's why we were there in the first place"
I'm not saying that it was a good excuse, just that it was used.
IIRC, they even had a shooter drill prior to the massacre, but that obviously didn't help.
Sounds to me like the shooter was in charge.
100%, all the cops did was prevent parents from rescuing their children and give the shooter time to kill
It would have made the coward cops look bad
Because it's a group of narcissists. They were too worried about themselves. None of them had the courage to say "I'm willing to not go home tonight so these kids can."
Actually I'd bet that a bunch said that, but didn't actually do anything about it.
This is what pisses me off the most. 376, and you can't storm the room? 376? And you refuse to trade one for any of those children who needed protecting? These are supposedly the hard calculations they have to make and they all unilaterally chose themselves? Enforcers will always be useless to anybody but the property owners. They aren't actually here to protect anybody. They should have made the call, and traded 20 of themselves so those kids didn't have to die. Thats the hard call we expect these "hard asses" to make.
I can't remember the study but basically the bystander effect is a thing. The more people there are in a group, the more likely it is that no one will do anything because everyone will assume that someone else will do something.
This isn't to excuse officers because they are specifically trained that they are that someone. The fact that they were held back from entering is willful, malicious, and negligent.
The fact that the officers actually complied instead of disobeying orders especially when seconds turned to minutes, is cowardice.
And a reminder that I believe the police chief and mayor of the town was reelected by the town.
They analyzed the trolley problem, they chose to sacrifice the few for the many.
A coward is not the same thing as a narcissist.
One can be both, however.
Non-peaceful demonstrators