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
① Real-life decorum is expected. Please don't say things only a child or a jackass would say in person.
② If you're here to support the police, you're trolling. Please exercise your right to remain silent.
③ Saying ~~cops~~ ANYONE should be killed lowers the IQ in any conversation. They're about killing people; we're not.
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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
• r/ACAB
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INFO
• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• 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
• When the police knock on your door
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ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
geez, the way people talk about the US you'd think they did genocide, chattel slavery, concentration camps, apartheid, lynchings and mass incarceration of certain groups of people. fortunately the country was always harmonious until this one guy got elected despite everyone being not bigoted at all. twice. just a little glitch in the matrix.
Yea, I don't like the view point that so many people seem to hold that Trump and just fascism in general popped up out of nowhere. Like a lot of this was been a long time in the making and Trump is just one of the ways it's come out.
If we just go back to when all the cars were lead fueled boats and one hard working man* could support a whole household by working a fairly paid job…then it’ll all be great again
*terms conditional upon skin color and ethnicity of surname of said man. Anyone black queer or other need not apply
GREAT!
But that was all okay because the guy had committed some crime.
At least that was the narrative I recall.from back in that day. Was fox News a thing already? I think so, because it was all "Everyone is poor Rodney, but they completely forget he was a criminal!!!"
So what? Maybe he was, and that excuses that police Beat the stuffing out of him?
At least that was the narrative I recall.from back in that day. Was fox News a thing already?
The heavy right-wing stuff was cordoned off in AM Talk radio. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Michael Medved being some of the more popular shows. But I believe both future VP Mike Pence and Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick got in on the act in their early years.
So what? Maybe he was, and that excuses that police Beat the stuffing out of him?
The systematic beating was both the cause of and result of Rodney King's police chase. King feared the wrath of the LAPD/LASD and the police believed repeatedly beating suspects would make them less likely to complicate arrests by fleeing in the future.
Sort of a vicious cycle of violence used to justify the next round of violence.
Oh yeah, "criminal" is conservative dehumanization 101 and has been for a long time. That and the whole race/class thing. Combine the two and the horrors you will overlook are endless!
I remember watching the LA Riots on TV when I was a kid and my guardians saying awful racist shit about the participants. It confused me because I had friends in neighborhood who weren't white and they never said no when I asked to have them over or to hang out with them.
Fuck the LAPD.
Y’all tried to genocide my people, you’ve always been monsters
There is basically no way to determine your nationality from this comment and I hate that.
I hate being defined by the country I was born in
I have a list of white supremacist cops in California I'm working on. There's a LOT.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
At least 18 separate gangs in the sheriffs alone. Just list the ones who aren’t and you’ll be done wayyyy faster
Don't forget all the online comments (after more recent stuff like Floyd) about how "he was probably a drug addict or a criminal and that he deserved it for resisting the cops"
People said that in the open.They never liked the follow up which was how was that relevant to his murder when his arrest was for a fake $20.
For those who Don’t know the story, his name was Rodney King.
I grew up with a (very racist) dad who claimed the video cut out "the part where Rodney was attacking the officers and they couldn't get him under control".
I also remember upon seeing American History X where the main guy in a flashback repeated the same lie my dad did damn near verbatim.
America has always been racist and the racists have always used the same unoriginal playbook time and time again.
I've always wondered about the Venn Diagram between Racists, Fascists and Narcissists. …
Because everything they do is summed up perfectly in the poem
"the narcissist's prayer"
by Dayna EM Craig
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did
You deserved it.
I remember Rush Limbaugh saying, in his book, that the video played on the news was looped...
Even if that was true (I don't know if it is), the cops were still hitting a guy who was already on the ground, with batons...
It would have been swept under the rug if someone hadn't videotaped it.
A guy who was cuffed and on the ground as I recall.
I forget that I'm old where I watched it on TV as a kid and then got grown ass adults tell me, a literal kid, how this is fair treatment if you misbehave.
Honestly having grown up in the 80s I feel that racism is tolerated a lot less today. Most places will fire openly racist people now, but I worked with guys in the 90s who would have flat out racist conversations in the break room and the only black guy there couldn't say shit or he would get fired, after all they did tell him "you're one of the good ones" so why would he be mad?
I worked with guys in the 90s who would have flat out racist conversations in the break room
I work with people today who have flat out racist conversations in the break room -- and I'm a fucking school bus driver in a fucking very liberal school district (Harris signs outnumbered trump signs by about 30:1 last year). They just use the word "native" instead of a worse n-word, although I had one coworker who used the worse n-word repeatedly. Another guy uses the g-word whenever somebody mentions that they like Chinese food. I enjoy watching his head melt when I say I'm going to get Korean or Ethiopian food. I almost got him to try Liberian food until he found out where Liberia is lol.
On the plus side, these are all older people in their 60s or 70s. The kids themselves are far more egalitarian. I also grew up in the '80s and although us kids were not really overtly racist, you still had kids segregating themselves racially as far as social groupings were concerned. Today I see lots of groups of mixed kids.
Wait, what's the "g word"?
As the Discworld Librarian would say, "ook".
And NEVER call him a monkey!
Wow. Read a god damn book. How could anyone ask the question, and not immediately slap themselves in the forehead? Slavery? Jim Crow? MLK? Rosa Parks? You've heard of none of these?
This must be what Christian right home schooling produces.
Or just public school in the south.
I'm from Texas and work in public education. Can someone read your comment to me so I can decide if I should be offended?
He said DOWN YONDER YA AIN'T GETTIN A LICK SENSE OUTTA DEM DERE SCHOOLIN BOOKS
Hitler based his treatment of German Jews as lesser people in the ‘30s on the way the US treated its black population. That’s why he thought he’d get away with it. After all, the Americans got away with it.
I’m an old millennial, I’m 40. My mom went to a segregated school. When my mom was a kid, black people were considered so vile they couldn’t be in the same room or drink from the same fountain. America has been this hateful for a long time.
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