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Texas cops arrest 11-year-old honors student and put him in solitary confinement for three days
(www.texasobserver.org)
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
691 points (98.6% liked)
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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• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Killings by law enforcement in Canada
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• Know your rights: Filming the police
• Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of 'I can’t breathe' (as of 2020)
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• Police spin: An object lesson in Copspeak
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• Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States
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How are we still letting cops just turn off body cams? It defeats the entire fucking purpose.
The shouldn't be able to ever turn them off while they are working and if they do. Immediate suspension, second time formal inquiry, 3rd time he's out in his ass.
I feel like you guys can't even control your own police
Um. No. We absolutely cannot
You can tell...by the way that it is.
Fwiw the biggest issue with bodycams is that they're expensive as hell. Milwaukee wanted to get better equipped with them a few years back and nobody wanted to pay. People want to defund police but it throws so much off. Even when they want to defund, Republicans refuse to push legislation to get more Crisis workers who can help and fund mental health care.
Most voters barely want to fund schools, let alone the police and poor/addicted/troubled lol.
https://www.jsonline.com/story/communities/west/news/wauwatosa/2021/04/12/cost-body-cameras-setback-milwaukee-area-departments/6966971002/
The cost of a body cam doesn’t have anything to do with policies on whether or not they can be turned off.
The cost isn't the cam itself, it's the servers and their software and IT administrators to maintain them, the personnel to audit the videos, and the personnel to respond to records requests by being able to locate archived files and redeact private information of the people the police interact with in the requested videos. Spinning up and maintaining multiple departments that just didn't exist before a body cam program was implemented is a significant resource draw.
If the auditing personnel aren't hired in sufficient numbers, or the IT personnel to keep the video archives actually usable, then turning off of bodycams won't ever be caught.
But what does that have to do with a bodycam being turned off during an incident? We see them clearly disable them or cover them on their own. I’m not saying they need to be turned on 24/7, that’s obviously not feasible.
Besides the fact that it effects even having one to turn off you mean?
Privacy. Can't go to the bathroom. They use it and abuse it.
The ability to turn the cam off while you shit could easily have come with a rule that states that if you turn your cam off while doing cop stuff you're fired, but it didnt. Privacy in the bathroom is the excuse, not the reason. The reason is that cameras exonerate the innocent and impugn the guilty without regard to status or favor, and cops want to continue to break the law and hurt people who haven't broken the law. They're a street gang. There is no cop who enforces the law without fear or favor, there are only criminals and cops that ignore crime committed by people they like.
Easy. If you turn off your cam, you're not a cop anymore, you lose your legal powers.
Take a shit while turning off your cam? No problem, you don't need to be a cop for that.
Shoot someone after "accidentally" turning your cam off? You just killed someone likely while trespassing with no qualified immunity. Enjoy prison.
Too bad. Make it part of what you sign up for when you become a cop. "You wanna be a cop? Well a few people may end up seeing you pee, just so you know that."
There are people who have to piss into cups in front of people constantly. Surely that's not an onerous demand to ensure the integrity of all bodycam footage. Who would ever see the raw uncut (lol) footage anyway? A jury maybe? in which case, blur out the dong. Easy.
I don't know... I'm just not convinced by the "privacy" angle.
Edit: I guess other people's privacy could be a concern. Though I bet AI is good enough that, if we really wanted to be honest about it (lol), we could figure out a way to filter other people out completely in a way that can be verified etc. etc. But that'll never happen.
They don't work for us anymore; they're not "public servants." They're a (militarized) force that serves the interests of capital. They don't defend people, they defend private property. That's where the root of the problem lies. These people aren't becoming cops to make the neighborhood they live in a safer place, most of the time they don't even live in the neighborhood they serve. No, these people become cops because it lets them hurt people.
They're just a gang of thugs that happens to serve the interests of those with the most money and power.
I don't know. I hear the anger and I think there are some bad cops. But I think they are good ones out there. And they are people too. I can't punish someone's rights because of some assholes.
I hear what you are saying and there should be a way to handle it. I'm just not convinced that running them full time is the solution. Maybe limiting the turning off and if it's done too many times in a row there is lockout and automatic reviews.
People always seem to forget the second half of the old saying about "bad apples." The full phrase is, "a bad apple spoils the bunch."
In other words, all it takes is one rotten person to bring an entire group down.