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
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I'm in the U.S. The problem is that violence is almost literally the cornerstone of our culture. The entire prehistory and history of the U.S. starts with violence. Displacing a people, warring with them for centuries to carve out a place in a land that keeps killing settlers. More violence and death as cities are established and more natives are killed. Every other super power at the time killing each other over this land, finally the descendents of the settlers revolting against foreign rule, more war, and a country established on stolen, blood soaked land. Built, fed, and clothed by slaves.
All the whole fighting neighboring descendents of settlers in bloody wars, over stolen land, driven unceasingly by "Manifest Destiny".
More war as the descendents of settlers, now natives to their barely 100 year old country, proceed to kill each other over the right to enslave others, creating a cultural schism that still exists over 150 years later.
Fast forward through two global wars barely 50 years later, and hardly a generation apart, we have global Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine casting a shadow over every single human life for every day since 1962.
An oft forgotten underground sea of violence lies between the fragile crust of civility that supports U.S. society. Even the government itself is adversarial, pitting branch against branch, state against federal, local against state to maintain a balance checked by the threat of violence and anarchy.
Oh, and through it all, an ever present an undercurrent of racism, a miasma permeating the fabric of everything this country was built on and with.
Historically, when it wasn't guns, it was mobs, lynching, firebombing entire towns and neighborhoods, knives, fists, terrorism, crosses set on fire, sundown towns, racist rallies, segregation, cultural warfare, propaganda, economic terrorism and oppression through targeted laws, the prison system, low wages, and the violence inherent in capitalism in general.
Violence has driven, and continues to drive, the vast majority of decisions made in this country.
tl;dr analogy: The guns are the polar bear sitting on the melting iceberg. The violence inherent in U.S. culture is the ever rising global average temperature, and we're not even pretending to address the violence.