The more that police specialize in (and glorify) violent combat scenarios, the less useful and valuable they are to the public. We need trained responders.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 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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• Police spin: An object lesson in Copspeak
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• Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States
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I blame the backlash from 9/11. Before 2001, most cops saw themselves as police officers, Afterwards they all became anti-terrorism warriors.
A 2022 study on Denver’s STAR team found a 34% drop in low-level crime in neighborhoods where the team was operating, compared to neighborhoods where it had not yet been rolled out.
This program is the difference between helping people, and jailing them. Fantastic, send my tax dollars to these programs, please!
Macias from Atlanta noted that without increasing other social services, like housing and mental health care, the teams risk being merely a Band-Aid for people in crisis. “There’s a lot of pressure put on these response agencies without the local government building up the destination and infrastructure that people need,” she said. “Sure, expand these response teams 24/7, but make sure that at 11 p.m. on a Sunday there’s actually a place to bring somebody to get their needs met. Otherwise you’re just making yourself feel better. But the problem’s not being solved.”
A very salient point, these programs need funding! Let's divert half the police budget to them, maybe then that money will actually help our communities, instead of being used to terrorize them.
HEART is Durham NC's program and they have seen positive results. For some reason not sending uneducated dips shits with guns is dangerous.
It's almost absurd how often America decides the answer to a problem is "asshole with a gun." Drug overdose? Asshole with a gun. Find out someone broke into your car? Asshole with a gun. Someone trying kill themselves? Asshole with a gun. Your grandma hasn't been heard from in a few days on the other side of the country? Believe it or not, asshole with a gun
How else will they protect themselves from falling acorns or boil pots of water? #copslivesarealwaysindanger
In Portland it's called "Portland Street Response" and so far, the #1 thing holding them back is they are prevented from being able to commit someone.
So, say I call 911 because someone is passed out on the sidewalk outside my house, that's the ideal thing for PSR.
They determine it's not an OD or other medical emergency, not much else they can do.
" In Multnomah County, 258 people may perform involuntary holds. Portland Street Response workers can’t.
That’s because county officials won’t let them.
For two years, PSR leaders have wanted that authority. The county still refuses—and it’s not entirely clear why."
You think people should be involuntarily committed for sleeping on the sidewalk?
Passed out != sleeping, and yeah, anyone in a mental health crisis should be involuntarily committed.
dang how about we just take them to a place they can sleep it off, if they're not in a medical emergency? have you ever been committed? it's kind of terrible? and not helpful?
No, not everyone in crisis needs to be involuntarily commited.
Passed out but not ODing or other medical emergency sounds like sleeping to me for all intents and purposes (like, passing out drunk isn't the same as actual sleep for the person's brain, but for society there's no real difference)
I'm of the opinion that unless someone is an imminent threat to themselves or someone else we can't be doing involuntary commitments, because a) involuntary commitments are almost always super traumatizing and set the person's journey to mental health backwards a few steps (maybe they get the resources they need from being committed and they leave the facility a few steps ahead, but most often they're just held and medicated for 72 hours and back out on to the street, and either way they're entering the facility worse than they had been if they're being forced into it), b) we just don't have enough beds at these facilities (let alone staff and other rehabilitative resources)
Or, given my town, fentanyl addiction, not sleeping.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/fentanyl-fold-drug-user-19561190.php
So people should be involuntarily committed to a mental instituiton for passing out after using drugs? That's insane.
Yup. They are self medicating a mental illness and not very well, they need professional help and won't seek it out voluntarily.
If they were capable of making decisions for themselves they wouldn't be in that state.
So what are you doing as a mod here then if you are pro-authoritarianism to the point that you think police and other non-medical government employees should be locking these people away in institutions and medicating them against their will because you all consider them a nuisance?
"Self medicating a mental illness and not very well" describes probably half the population of the country these days.
They shouldn't be treated because they are nuisances, they should be treated because they are actively harming themselves and are incapable of getting treatment on their own.
Anyone who overeats because of emotional problems & refuses tharipy is doing the same. Should they be forcefully institutionalized?
Being addicted to drugs is not a crime (although I should probably shut up before Thomas and Alito and the rest remember this ruling exists), and I can't believe we'd have weaker civil rights protections for people who are not accused of crimes but just have a health issue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_v._California?wprov=sfla1
Moreover, throwing an addict into detox is just a waste - unless they want to be there they're just going to use again as soon as they get out (and since they lost whatever tolerance they were used to having it's more likely to lead to an OD)
Being addicted to drugs is a mental illness that needs treatment, treatment the addicts will not seek on their own.
If they don't want treatment then treatment won't work. There isn't a magic pill to make someone not addicted.
Maybe because involuntary commitment does more harm than good? It was all the rage in the 19th century.
19th century people had all kinds of problems, but that's an excuse to learn from it and correct it, not get rid of it.
We need to fix what Reagan did to mental health care. That's where our current problems started.
What we learned from that is that involuntary commitment doesn't work. And we corrected it by not doing it anymore.
Involuntary commitment, with modern facilities and techiques, absolutely can work.
Lol
This guy thinks we've somehow evolved as a species from 50-100 years ago, so we should definitely go all in on it again. Government workers should totally be allowed to snatch people up off the streets or even in their own homes and send them to a facility where they're tied to a bed and pumped full of drugs based on little more than their own discretion. This would never be abused by some officer who thinks that anyone who doesn't kowtow to their ego is obviously crazy and needs to be put in a facility where they're considered crazy until they can somehow prove that they aren't to a bunch of strangers.
Come to think of it, these comments sound a little bit unhinged. Perhaps we need to call the authorities and have someone 5150ed...