this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
1374 points (99.1% liked)

News

23301 readers
3303 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Any human with a job should have a living wage and proper training imo. Cops are no different.

I don't think that training (of which they have a lot, most of it to my knowledge teaches them that they are at war with citizens and always in danger) is the entire answer.

We need to figure out what we want cops to do.

To my knowledge:

  • Cops have no duty to protect citizens
  • Cops can steal our property (in traffic stops)
  • Cops can murder us with minimal justification and expect minimal consequences. Indeed even lawsuits are paid by the city and not the police budget
  • Cops are immune to prosecution in most cases.

So, why do we have them? They seem to be an armed gang that waits for us to commit a traffic infraction and then write us a ticket and possibly kill us or steal our property. They have no duty to protect us from criminals or disasters and if they get scared and kill us, at worse they transfer to a new department.

I think we need law enforcement and police, but the current system is irrecoverably broken imo. They have had decades to reform themselves and haven't done so unless under duress from a court. We need to rethink why we have them and what their job is. Indeed if we want them to have a dangerous job where they protect us from "things" and put themselves in harms way they need to be compensated properly, but I don't think we can fix the current system.

I got off on a tangent, my apologies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

So, why do we have them?

I think it's a pretty common narrative that police agencies came about as a result of slave catchers and strikebreakers, thought I'm not sure to what extent that's true, and to what extent that's been the case with, say, police in the UK, or other countries, who obviously still have police forces with different reputations than those in the US.

In any case, even if the narrative might not necessarily be accurate, it's still somewhat reflective, to me, at least, of what police are supposed to do in the modern day. They have no duty to protect citizens, they steal our property, they can kill us, and they're immune to the law. They are the law, is basically what it is. They are an armed gang, they're an armed gang that the city pays in order to manage all other forms of violence which might happen in the city, even systemic violence which the city might create from, intentional or otherwise, resource mismanagement. They deal with the homeless, and mentally ill, and push them into a prison system where for-profit and public prisons can use them for free labor and generally lock them away into chaotic, meaningless, and authoritarian microcosms of society.

We also need homelessness to be rampant as a kind of threat, which we can levy against labor, since a population which can quit their jobs and go and still have a house obviously has more leverage against their employers, a higher capacity to unionize and strike. Homelessness also means housing is in more demand which helps drive up housing prices as long as you are trafficking the homeless away from the housing, when, otherwise, homelessness would generally decrease the value of the housing in a neighborhood since they would just kinda stick around, being, even formerly, embedded and tied to a community. Drugs need to be illegal as a form of protection on intellectual property laws, enforced at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who want to monopolize particular sectors of the market, and sell to our extremely privatized hospitals at an absurdly high premium. The police serve these interests, and more. That's their purpose. They just exist as an extension of society and serve it's whims. They exist, basically, to maintain status quo, good, or, in this case, bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Currently the police nationwide live up to the saying 'police exist to protect home prices, not lives'