this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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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

!abolition@slrpnk.net

!acab@lemmygrad.ml

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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[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Did they though? 1860s was slavery, and there was a huge war. Bloodiest war still to this day in American history. With the end result being that slavery ended.

Now, you can say racism didn't end after that, and you'd be right. Racism never ended to this day. But on the scale of atrocities, racism, then slavery, then mass extermination camps.

So, if the extermination camps are farther down the line than slavery, and America DID NOT get away with slavery, then your logic does not hold up.

I'm not defending any of what happened. I'm just saying if Hitler looked at an already failed policy, then he couldn't possibly use it as justification with what he did.

A far better line of logic is saying he used Americas killing of Native Americans as the blueprint for his camps. Which he absolutely did, and which America absolutely did get away with. Still to this day Native American population numbers just might be the lowest of all the races, simply because of how very very close to total extermination they came 200 years ago.

[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

there was a huge war. Bloodiest war still to this day in American history

That the slave states started in order to force other states to allow slavery. And only the bloodiest American war on American soil. The US military has killed a lot more people in subsequent wars.

With the end result being that slavery ended.

Only chattel slavery. While unquestionably less horrible, penal slavery was explicitly allowed by the 13th amendment and is practiced to this day.

There's significantly more people legally enslaved in the US today than there was before chattel slavery was abolished.

Now, you can say racism didn't end after that

If you want to go for the understatement of the year award, yes, you could do that.

But on the scale of atrocities, racism, then slavery, then mass extermination camps.

As I explained above, slavery is still a thriving industry, more so now than ever.

As for extermination camps, it's just a matter of time now that the fascists have taken over and started building the first concentration camps.

America DID NOT get away with slavery

America IS getting away with slavery.

your logic does not hold up

clears throat

I'm just saying if Hitler looked at an already failed policy

He didn't. The Jim Crow laws that inspired him were EXTREMELY successful at oppressing and marginalizing black people and continued to be so until long after Hitler's defeat and death.

[–] SL3wvmnas@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 17 hours ago

Good writeup. An additional thing I would like to add are the "well regulated militias" whose initial purpose was to act as thugs for big plantation owners (the untouchable billionaires of yesteryear), and their continued authoritarian white supremacist heritage…

By most accounts, Hitler wasn't planning the extermination of the Jews in the '30s though. Everything that occurred to them in that era, happened to Black Americans in the South during the same timeframe.