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It’s Horrific and Unjust Every Time
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 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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RULES
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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
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ACAB. All those people saying “one bad apple does not spoil the whole bunch” would feel Differently if someone made them an apple pie and one or two of the apples used were either completely rotten and moldy or one had been contaminated with industrial or radioactive waste or poisoned. Knowing that the majority of the apples were good apples and the existence of one or two bad apples mixed in shouldn't ruin the pie itself im pretty certain those arguing this aphorism would refuse to eat a poisoned or tainted pie despite trying to force the rest of society to bend the knee to the rotting pie of modern policing
The saying is exactly the opposite, one bad apple spolis the whole bunch. But in a time when you have alternative facts, why not alternative sayings.
You're right! But so many times i hear the wrong phrasing used to protect the institution of modern policing. Language matters. Which is why I believe “defund the police” was chosen after the george floyd and brianna taylor(and all the other mostly brown casualties of police brutality) inspired protests. It was chosen because it was destined to fail even though the police do need to be defunded and demilitarized however the proper language should have focused around ending drug prohibition which is the main factor allowing racist attitudes to continue permeating police culture and a majority of police tax payer funding goes to the enforcement of draconian drug laws that have blatantly failed their stated purpose. (Althiugh I personally believe the stated purpose of drug prohibition was never the true purpose and the true purpose was actually to increase the black market price of narcotics and funnel poor and mostly minority people into for-profit prisons despite the fact that affluent wealthy white people are the largest consuming and distributing demographic of narcotics.
Either way you are correct. one bad apple does indeed spoil the entire bunch and there are far more than one bad apple within all the collective bunches we have that comprise our modern militarized policing apparatus
Yes the real meaning is that a few bad apples WILL spoil the whole barrel if they don't get removed. I don't know where the other meaning came from but if you leave rotting apples with good apples then they will all go rotten quite quickly.