this post was submitted on 28 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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... and for his targeted attack on an older teen — not the doorkicking perp.

Original link

No charges, apparently, for rounding up a posse of other cops from other jurisdictions to instigate a manhunt for Delaware's Most Wanted doorkicker:

Walters’ girlfriend called him and gave him a description of the boy, police said. Walters, who was on duty, drove to his neighborhood and called other troopers and police departments for help.

I'd like to know more about these other cops, who abandoned their duties to help Walters in his crimes.

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[–] JudCrandall@lemmy.world 45 points 2 years ago (1 children)

As the 15-year-old was put in a police vehicle, Walters confirmed with another trooper that the boy was the juvenile who had kicked his door. Walters then turned off his body-worn camera and walked to the police vehicle.

While the boy was handcuffed in the back of the vehicle, Walters punched him in the face, fracturing his right eye socket. Walters then walked around the vehicle and turned his body camera back on.

He felt comfortable and safe doing this in front of multiple cops from other departments. That's pretty telling.

Maybe next time instead of kicking his door someone will just light it on fire.

[–] be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

He felt comfortable and safe doing this in front of multiple cops from other departments. That’s pretty telling.

Police culture is rotten. It's been empirically proven repeatedly, and even a cursory examination of the history of US policing should make it unsurprising. (And I'm talking about much more than slave patrols)

It would be a literal miracle if the history of US police was what it is and there wasn't still a culture of shit.

There are probably cops who were beating civil rights protestors in the late 60's who only retired in the last decade. If you told me every cop hired since the year 2000 has been a shining beacon of fair thought and upright morals when they were hired, I'd still expect things to be not much less shit as they are now.

Culture in a long-running organization is a slow moving thing. You don't just need the racist bigot dinosaurs to die out, you don't just need to not hire more racist bigots (which surely they have), you need to wait for all the ripples from the impacts those racist bigot dinosaurs had on the folks who came in behind them, and on policy, to die out.

I doubt we're much beyond the very infancy of waiting for that, even if we believed that every department was striving to do better. (And I very much do not believe such a thing.)

Yeah, it takes generations for racism to die out in a family, so we shouldn't expect an instant 180.

[–] Maeve@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Imagine if it were cops at Kent State during Vietnam protests.

[–] Zombiepirate@lemmy.world 27 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Turning off a body cam should be (at the very least) a citation offence against the officer.

If it comes to light that they were covering up something illegal or unethical (which is the entire point of shutting it off), then it should automatically escalate the response to the next level.

[–] DougHolland@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

The devices shouldn't even have an 'off' switch — eight hours of video for every eight-hour shift.

Until that happens, a bodycam that was 'on' but then switched 'off' should amount to a confession of whatever misconduct is alleged.

[–] NovaPrime@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago

If we lived in a sane society it should be cause for immediate termination and black mark on being hired anywhere else. But we don't live in such a society

[–] Maeve@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago

It needs to be a fireable offense with criminal charges.