this post was submitted on 23 Sep 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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RULES

Real-life decorum is expected. Please don't say things only a child or a jackass would say in person.

If you're here to support the police, you're trolling. Please exercise your right to remain silent.

Saying ~~cops~~ ANYONE should be killed lowers the IQ in any conversation. They're about killing people; we're not.

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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's because cop "unions" aren't real unions.

Real unions protect the employment of all their members while fighting for better wages and working conditions.

Cop "unions" defend criminal cops from the consequences of their actions, fight for impunity for all cop killers (killers who are cops) and lobby the government to fund those heinous activities.

[–] DoomBot5@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Perhaps killer cops would have been a better phrase.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Both work. A cop killer can be killer of cops or a killer who happens to also be a cop. I like it over killer cop for two reasons

  1. it implies that the killer part is the essence and the cop part is external to that

  2. it replaces a term meant to set apart a category of killers for being worse because they kill cops (as if "blue lives matter" more than all others) with the many times more common killer that's worse for being a cop.

[–] TopShelfVanilla@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's nice that you like your way and all, but the phrase 'cop killer' has a long standing accepted meaning in the English language. You are simply wrong here.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Standard isn't automatically the only correct usage of a word or phrase. As long as it makes sense and is understandable, it's correct enough. Live a little.

[–] TopShelfVanilla@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Except that what you said was not understood as you intended. Entertaining willful ignorance is not 'living a little '. Be better.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I explained concisely but thoroughly what I meant and the logic made sense. Regardless, ignorance doesn't enter into a deliberate subversion of conventions.

You're just being a crotchety prescriptivist and/or doubling down because you don't want to admit you're wrong. YOU be better.

[–] TopShelfVanilla@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While word salad is a lovely side dish to serve with total bullshit none of us is eating what you're serving up. Your writing smells like a 14 year old's attempt at intellectual edgy. Chat GPT come up with that for you? Your generation was supposed to be creative and interesting. You are proving yourself to be lazy and boring. Trying to impress strangers on the Internet. How lame can you get?

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Dude, chill already. I'm just using language creatively and calmly explaining my reasons for doing so and how it's a perfectly normal thing to do rather than categorically wrong and an assault on the language itself. Nothing "edgy" about that.

Btw, your assumptions are not only extremely ageist, they're also flat out wrong on every count: I'm 40, not 14, you're the one being intellectually lazy and boring by stubbornly sticking to an ultra-strict interpretation of etymology, and I've never used ChatGPT for anything, let alone for explaining to a blowhard like you how language can be flexible 😂

Seems you're right about being vanilla, but top shelf? Not so much 🙄

[–] TopShelfVanilla@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Language is flexible, but it's not a contortionist. You ran into the room claiming red was now blue because you said so and that's not how anything works. At forty you should know better. Instead, you choose to obfuscate and avoid and hide behind isms and stay wrong. That's cool.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

😴 I can see that I'm not going to get anything but overdramatic mischaracterizarion and unearned condescension out of you, so let's just stop here. Have the day you deserve.