this post was submitted on 02 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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• [email protected]

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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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672

Bodycam shows Ohio cops were in no danger as they killed black pregnant woman for alleged shoplifting (www.bbc.com)

submitted 1 year ago by DougHolland to c/thepoliceproblem

71 comments fedilink hide all child comments

One officer is seen standing at her door and repeatedly telling her to "get out of the car".
"For what?" she responds twice, adding: "I'm not going to do that."
One officer seen in front of the car has his left hand on the hood, his gun drawn in the other hand.
"Are you going to shoot me?" she says moments before a single shot is fired and the officer quickly moves out of the car's path.

The cop who killed her was in no danger, and has time to casually stroll out of the way of the vehicle.

What he doesn't have is a name or a face — as often happens, the police haven't been named, and their faces have been blurred in the video.

Why?

If they weren't cops — if they were just a pair of random dudes killing a black pregnant woman, and there was video footage — would their names remain secret, their faces blurred?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are still those mugshot websites that post all the booking photos from the sheriff's departments daily. They always have the disclaimer "for entertainment purposes only, all suspects are innocent until blah blah" but you have to fight with them to get them taken down because it's public information. You can go to your local jail or prison's website and look up someone's name to see if they're in custody, regardless of whether they've had their day in court. Some of them have inmate rosters so you end up seeing everyone's names alphabetically.

It just makes it even more gross when they extend this privilege to cops but not the average person, especially innocent people whose cases go on to be dismissed, but they had their mug shots posted online. Yes, criminal privacy laws would make sense, but in the US everyone is guilty until proven otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah those sites should be illegal. Entertainment purposes my ass, these are humans, human lives you are destroying. Fuck all of that.