this post was submitted on 04 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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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

[email protected]

[email protected]

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

 

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Prosper, Texas.

Population: 37,746

Crime rate per 1000 residents: 9.54

https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/prosper

Nearby Dallas' crime rate? 46.06 per 1000 residents.

Is it me or is this not exactly justified?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I recently lived in Denton and frequently traveled to Prosper for various reasons.

It's a little rich person town in the middle of nowhere. They definitely don't need this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I suggest anyone interested in the history of police militarization pick up Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop. There are so many tiny little towns with fully kitted out SWAT teams. Cops are taught to view themselves as soldiers in hostile territory. They go to trainings where they’re taught bullshit science to encourage them to kill.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

They are soldiers in hostile territory. They're occupying indigenous land. Killing a cop isn't murder, it's warfare according to the proper rules of engagement.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Very normal for suburbs (particularly white suburbs adjacent to black urban neighborhoods) to act like they're living in a war zone, because they saw a guy in a durag smoking a scary cigarette outside of the gym.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Now check the stats for crimes involving IUDs (or IEDs)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Crime rate just means people who are arrested. They can increase or decrease it if they want to.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Wait...you think that if someone gets murdered, but they don't arrest anyone, this doesn't go into the crime rate?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You man someone had an accident? This is a safe place to live, we've never had anything like that happen here.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Do you think cops who are buying that sort of shit are reluctant to arrest people?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Common for agencies to have internal ticket and arrest quotas for their officers and to promote based on number of arrests by officer.

Consequentially, a change in the quota can result in a "crime wave" as the number of arrests rise. It is not uncommon for surges in arrests to occur during campaign season, as police departments lobby for bigger budgets and more manpower.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

They might prefer other methods of "executing" justice

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It depends through which glasses you look.

For them every black person, LGBTQ person and woman who wants to own their own body by having an abortion is a criminal. And according to right wing extremist propaganda the leftists are extremely dangerous, so I guess that would justify the purchase of military equipment.

Do you have any idea how deadly woke people are? Every time someone shouts "black lives matter" a white Karen's feelings are hurt. The only way to combat this is assault rifles and infantry vehicles.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I get the sentiment but this kind of hyperbole helps nobody

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Those pigs aren't helping anyone either. I'm just being sarcastic because that's basically the only response I can think of when reading things like this. It's a fucking disgrace. It's like people want to live in a dystopian shit show so bad, they don't know how fast to dig their own grave. It's fucking embarrassing. Yeah, awesome, let's go for extremism and get a militarized police state, because that never went wrong. Extremism always solves all our fucking problems.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Not even in Dallas. But hey, at least some small town got to employ people to build this tank, and not call it socialism.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

It's even stupider than that.

It's either military surplus or reconditioned units that are offered for resale to stateside PD's to "pacify" civilian unrest.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The "tank" was gonna be built either way. These items are purchased through a program that allows the military to sell off surplus equipment to law enforcement. So, basically, it's a way of subsidizing the v already insane US military budget with money drawn from municipal and state taxes, while getting military hardware into the hands of cops.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

What makes this even better is the military hated these things. They were forced on them and completely changed the way the military had to operate. Now the police want more of them. The big change? Being able to effectively engage with the local population. Why is our military more concerned with that than the police?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

I think law enforcement is lacking long range potential and will need HIMAS equipment as well.