this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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US Authoritarianism
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Fun fact: The 40% figure is based on one single study that was a self-report study from the early 1990s, asking police whether a disagreement with their spouse had ever gotten “physical.” A follow-up study found a rate of 24%, also from the 1990s. It’s actually hard to find numbers since then (partly because it’s just inherently a hard topic to study), but assuming that every one of those self-reports was a wife beater, and that nothing has changed since 1992 (0% change in the culture of policing or the handling of domestic violence) seems unlikely.
TL;DR I don’t know what percent of police officers are wife beaters but it isn’t 40%, and claiming that it is is gleefully misrepresenting the truth; using the very outlandishness of it to claim that the cops are outlandishly and cartoonishly evil
More on this
I realize that this information will be unwelcome, and I eagerly anticipate your downvotes. Why are you booing me I’m right
OP shows 2 cops dragging a student by her hair for protesting a genocide.
In what world are these people not outlandishly and cartoonishly evil?
Like even if you ignore that they uphold an unjust system designed to protect capital and oppress the working class, as we're seeing in 4K on campuses across the country, and we saw in 2020, individually, "outlandishly and cartoonishly evil" is an apt descriptor for people who respond to protests against state violence by beating the shit out of teenagers.
That's actually a really good question
I think generally it boils down to an "enemy" mentality. If you're a cop, a decent fraction of your job is getting violent with people who are resisting what you're doing because they don't want to go to jail. I think once someone slots into that "enemy" category, then it immediately becomes comfortable to do something horrendous to them; even if, like this woman, they didn't do a damn thing wrong. So the end result is lending strength to state oppression.
I don't think the solution to that is to get rid of all the cops. What are you going to do if someone tries to murder you? Any city in American that wanted to get its city council together and just disband the police force is able to do that; I don't think it's a unanimous capitalistic plot that they don't; it's that they genuinely fulfill an important function.
I also don't think the solution is to have cops, but make them the enemy and be hostile to them all the time and defund them to punish them and decide that they're a part of your city's infrastructure that's just always the enemy all the time. That's part of what I don't like about this meme -- it's like, who cares if it's true, I just know these are always shitty people so any shitty thing I want to believe about them becomes a good thing to feel and so let's get busy on hating them.
I do think strong oversight of the police is a good thing. I think bodycams and the culture of charging police with a crime (sometimes 😕) when they commit a crime changed policing in a massive way that isn't really recognized. There are still big problems for sure. I also think sending people who aren't police to e.g. mental health calls, places where the "let's catch the bad people" model isn't going to be what is needed, is a really good thing.
But I think in general, exactly the same mentality that leads this cop to drag this woman around by her hair ("well fuck it, she's a suspect, she's coming with me and who cares whether it gets done in a humane fashion, because that type of person is always the enemy") actually roots back at the core to a very similar mentality to that that says "I'm going to bitch at the cop on this traffic stop and be antagonistic for no reason" or "all bad statistics about cops are true, all good statistics about cops are false" or etc etc, you know that type of person is always the enemy, you get the idea.
I have no part in this, because I don't live in the US, but basing your argument on a picture of two (one?) cop being a dick, does not make all cops dicks. They may be, but this picture shouldn't be proof of it as you imply on this comment. No pictures are being taken of cops doing the job properly, let alone being shared online. Besides that, one bad cop does not make all cops bad. This may be turning into a Bear/Man discussion so I will leave it at this
My point is, yeah they might be dicks, but I think that it is fair to point out false facts and arguments even though they support a notion that is true
1 bad cop, protected by 9 "good" cops is 10 bad cops. It doesn't matter which one in particular has you in a choke-hold, all of them are necessary for that one to do what he is doing.
As mentioned i have no part in this or any knowledge of what you are reffering to. Just pointing out that the initial argument based on one pictures of one cop is not proof enough to make all cops bad. But i guess i am in the wrong sub to argue stuff like this
One thing I like to do is ask people for examples of police misconduct, and then point out that the overwhelming majority of the examples they cited involved the cops getting arrested or prosecuted by their fellow officers for what they were doing. Not all, obviously.
The person elsewhere in this thread who cited domestic violence among police conformed exactly to that pattern - they cited a 2015 study that went over a bunch of different examples of domestic abuse by cops, and in pretty much every one the cop was being prosecuted for what they'd done.
You don't have to agree with me of course, but I think this is part of the big change that's gone unnoticed in the culture of policing even in the short time since Eric Garner and that era -- it used to be that cops would protect each other even for very major crimes; I think that that's becoming a lot less true now.
ACAB. But i agree if only to not have the wind knocked out of my sales because the 40% are domestic abusers is weak and especially easily countered in an argument on why ACAB. And its a weak argument that is wholly unnecessary to establish ACAB.
Yeah, agreed. There are tons of valid reasons to criticize the police (or, I would say, demand accountability from them in keeping with the amount of power they're granted by the legal system). But just framing something deliberately slanted because you want to make them look as bad as possible doesn't seem like a good addition to that list though.
It is all their cops beating their spouses that in fact make them look bad, not our framing of the beating of spouses by cops.
Yes the 40% number cannot be confirmed, but I think the number is much higher based on literally every interaction I have had with police especially white male police.
Like y’all seriously gonna bet on the number of cops who beat their spouses and family as being under 40%? I am sure they dont consider it abuse, heck as they backhand their spouse as hard as they can for not doing the dishes they are probably always thinking in their head “I mean I slammed the police car door on the head of drugged out homeless person way harder just today and the homeless person didn’t complain like this, this is normal, my spouse is just weak and needs to be punished until they harden up”
We keep hoping it isn't true, and continue to be proven wrong.
it's an old study so we can't say it's 40%
https://www.nsvrc.org/blogs/saam/who-watches-watchers-domestic-violence-and-law-enforcement-leigh-goodmark
If only our police forces weren't so evil we could stop pointing out the terrible terrible thinga they keep doing
There's a lot there but I read the cited 2015 paper. From it:
And then:
Kinda sounds like literally every single example in this paper involves some sort of prosecution of the cops who were involved, i.e. not with impunity. No?
This is part of what I was saying -- I think back in 1992, the culture that if a cop beat up his wife or drove drunk, his co workers would look the other way was almost universal. I know it's definitely not universal now. Is it still common? I honestly don't know. But getting a honest answer to that question seems like a vital step in stopping it from happening in the places where it is still happening. Right? Or no?
There are actually much much worse and more systemic stories than these. I'm just saying that it's good to want to arrive at an actual measurement of how often it happens (because it's way different if it's 40% versus 10% versus 4%), and that it's bad to just pick the highest number you can and say that that's obviously what's going on because cops are terrible people. How do we know they're terrible people? Because 40% of them beat their wives, that's how.
So the actual number was probably higher, you say? Nobody would falsely say that they had hit their wife, but plenty of people would probably shamefully lie and say that they hadn't. Especially the kinds of people who regularly lie about shit they've done to get out of trouble.
Domestic abuse rates across the board dropped 60% from 94-12. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ndv0312.pdf
I'm not one to simp for cops but to infer so much from a probably flawed study from 35 years ago where teachers still snacked your ass even in northern states without a bit more nuance is probably the wrong way to go about it.
You're assuming that domestic abuse rates among cops dropped along with the total. I have seen no reason to believe that. In fact, the study you just linked said that only about half of domestic abuse is reported to the police. If your abuser were a police officer, do you think that would make you more likely or less likely to report it to the police? They protect their own.
A lot may have changed in 35 years, but I have no reason to believe that this did. These are people who have been trained to use physicality to enforce their authority, and their use of force has continued to be grotesquely excessive despite knowing that people (including themselves) now carry HD cameras everywhere. If they can't help themselves when they know that they're being recorded, what do you think goes on behind closed doors at home? I know that I'm also making an assumption here, but I guess the core of our assumptions is that you believe that cops learned how compartmentalize their aggression to only be activated when they clock in and I believe that they're class traitors who generally don't learn basic humanity, let alone psychological techniques to expertly manage their emotions far beyond what average people can and do. But who knows, maybe you're right, maybe they only beat the shit out of strangers who don't deserve it and never their spouse and children who also don't deserve it. It wouldn't be the first time cops were good at discriminating.
ACAB.
Common courtesy dictates you suck your own dick in private, sweetheart.
Theerre's the hostility I was trying to bait into existence 😃
Honestly I apologize tho
Did you get the attention you crave, sweetpea? Enjoy it, it's the last you're getting from me. 😘
Wrong sub bro
Yeah probably so
Totally reasonable. If there’s one thing I like doing, it is undermining a useful message by being condescending about it for no good reason.
(Also I was clearly being unfair, since the wave of opposition I was expecting hasn’t materialized)
Wife beating is also not what I would consider a "traditional American value"