this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
1563 points (98.5% liked)
THE POLICE PROBLEM
2462 readers
18 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.
♦ ♦ ♦
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.
♦ ♦ ♦
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.
♦ ♦ ♦
ALLIES
• r/ACAB
♦ ♦ ♦
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
♦ ♦ ♦
ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I find that title to be wholly innaccurate.
There were also women on the force, so it was 376 boys and girls in blue sat around and let 19 kids and 2 teachers die.
Well, 375. There was that one asshole who shouted "Do you need our help?" to which a hiding child responded "Yes we need help!" and was subsequently shot by the gunman
That person actively caused a child to die.
Don't forget the one cop that wanted to help but was held back and prevented from entering (I think his wife was a teacher or something)
Oh, and that other cop who was going to try to open the unlocked classroom door but was then told to go patrol the rest of the school
The only reason they even started evacuating was because one of them opened a classroom and saw it was full
The guy with a Punisher lock screen? Yeah.
A: Marvel saw fit to publish a comic book in which Frank Castle tells cops to stop using his logo. B: now that the guy with a Punisher lock screen has experienced loss, he may step up his war-on-crime game.
You give cops, let alone the general public too much credit in the Media Literacy department.
You couldn't have picked a worse, cop apologist article to quote from.
I didn't bother reading it. It's an old story that most of us have heard and just needed a reminder of.
edit: also, i feel so confident in the truth of the story that a Pro Cop bias story will still make the cops look shitty because the hard facts are
This guy choose to follow orders over "duty."
This guy choose to follow orders over saving innocent lives.
This guy choose to follow orders over saving his wife's life.
Ah yeah, that guy.
He should've disobeyed orders and gone in and saved them.
Before anyone says that it's easy to say they would have done while behind a keyboard, cops were preventing bystanders from going in to recuse the kids.
Their pronouns are cop/cops (or pig/pigs), so their gender should be irrelevant in this case.
"do you need help?"
"Nah we're good, call back next week maybe"
What kind of idiotic ass fucking question was that?
Also that one guy was busy drinking water from the fountain
How about we clarify that as: little boys and little girls in blue.
Altho TBF, women in blue are typically at the bottom of the chain, and almost certainly deserve the least amount of critique here, whilst the highest ranking dudes unquestionably deserve all the shit in the world for directly ordering their forces not to make any meaningful attempt.
Right on.
Now this is just personal anecdote-- but one thing I've always been pretty surprised by (as a person with fairly severe health issues, haha not sure how that totally influences thigns) is how, when there's a local emergency, the adrenaline just hits me and I spring in to action (as much as I can) to help out.
Par example, three times now I've survived bad fires that way, and after comparing notes with an old friend over Uvalde, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that both of us felt the same way-- that we wouldn't have been able to look ourselves in the mirror if we hadn't made our best attempt to save the kids.
Seriously, how do these BLUE people look at themselves in the mirror for either not doing their best that day, or on a national scale, for enabling this awful betrayal of public trust?