this post was submitted on 21 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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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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[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What kind of deterrent could we implement that would stop this kind of thing from happening? The 'convict at all costs' mentality is so destructive to our justice system. And I really mean deterrent, not punishment. Yes, the bad actors need punishment, but I don't think the common response of 'make them serve the same time the victim did' is appropriate because that's just eye-for-and-eye thinking. That only serves to make the others stop doing their job at all, or get better at hiding their malfeasance.

[–] DougHolland@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When people call for an eye for an eye, it's evidence of frustration piled high. The frustration gets higher with every injustice.

The deterrent I'd suggest is, prosecute bad cops. What these cops did is illegal. If they're still alive, they should be prosecuted. And they did their crimes as employees of a public agency; that agency ought to be liable to be sued, and pay huge penalties. That would be a deterrent — if it happened regularly and loudly.

[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I agree prosecution is one step, but we've seen with death penalty crimes that even the ultimate punishment is not enough of a deterrent in a lot of cases. I don't like the solution being to sue the municipality because that only results in citizens paying the fine and/or losing services when funding decreases. I sometimes like the oft-floated idea of hitting the police pensions to pay the fines, but that's group punishment for individual transgressions. Having lived through that sort of thing in the military I can tell you it's not terribly motivating for the people who are actually doing their jobs properly. It typically just turns the rank-and-file against each other. Also, if we want good people to become and stay on as police officers then jeopardizing their livelihoods and retirements for things they had nothing directly to do with is not a great strategy to attract those people. I also don't agree with the argument that the 'good' officers that don't harshly deal with the bad officers are complicit and therefore also bad. We already have countless examples of good police officers being driven out due to raising ethical concerns or reporting issues. How do we protect them without ending up in the same situation we already have where it's almost impossible to fire ANY police officer?

Removing the scorecard mentality of district attorneys would be one huge step in the right direction but I don't understand the process well enough to recommend a concrete approach. Do detectives get measured the same way and that's why they do these things? Or do they just think they are infallible? I don't know. The complexity of solving these problems keeps me up at night.

[–] DougHolland@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

My dream is that someone somewhere will do something to address the problem. Show me any good faith serious attempt, and I'll be on board. :)

[–] reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doing away with a punitive justice system would be a start.

[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my mind that's the end state, not the first step to getting there. We all know what it should look like when it's cleaned up, but how do we get there? I'm honestly asking for opinions because the more I've thought about it the more impossible it seems given the social and political realities we face. And yet we can't just throw up our hands and say it's impossible because the current system is intolerable.

I'm not sure it can be reformed. Maybe replaced but not reformed. It's built on a rotten foundation. I don't really have answers but I know what doesn't work. Have a good day !