this post was submitted on 24 May 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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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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Victim reports his father missing. Police instead interrogated him for 17 hours, said they killed his dog, and withheld his meds from the victim. Victim tried to commit suicide in the room. (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world to c/thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world
209 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.

Finally, after curling up with the dog on the floor, Perez broke down and confessed. He said he had stabbed his father multiple times with a pair of scissors during an altercation in which his father hit Perez over the head with a beer bottle.

Perez’s father wasn’t dead — or even missing. Thomas Sr. was at Los Angeles International Airport waiting for a flight to see his daughter in Northern California. But police didn’t immediately tell Perez.

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[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 5 months ago

Not sure who you’re listening to but no one has suggested using tax dollars for the insurance.

remind me again who pays the cops salary?

They like their profit, so they drop the cops that lose them money. Cops can’t get a job as a cop if they can’t be insured.

or they just don't pay out claims, because not paying out claims, and raising premiums is an even better way of making money.

Lawsuits against cops punishes the community since they are the ones paying out, not the cop. And typically cops see little to no repurcussions. If there are it’s just off to the next town over and get hired there. You can’t fix bad behavior with no consequences.

i fail to see how this punishes the community any more than paying cops tax dollars, to pay insurance companies, who would then have to deal with problems, which not only adds more bureaucracy to the problem, but less efficient cash flow.

We should be creating a legal solution to this problem, rather than a private sector solution to this problem. Cop does something reprehensible? Bar them from working law enforcement for life. Pay out with tax dollars, because it's going to be more accessible, and much more efficient than traveling through an entire insurance and claims system. I don't really mind paying tax money if it means people who were wronged by previously spent tax dollarly doos. I have a problem with a dysfunctional system that does nothing to remove the dysfunction.

Putting insurance in the mix here does nothing to remove the problem, it just disincentivizes it, while making the whole system vastly more bloated and bureaucratic.

Lawsuits against cops punishes the community since they are the ones paying out, not the cop. And typically cops see little to no repurcussions. If there are it’s just off to the next town over and get hired there. You can’t fix bad behavior with no consequences.

genuine question, how is this any different from forcing cops to pay for insurance, which is paid out of pocket. Why is a for profit industry, which then leads to less state money getting to the people who need it. If we actually punish cops while benefiting the offended party, this would solve the problem.