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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 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
• 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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• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
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The analyst told her friend that the police could access what was thought of as private. That was the crime. Being honest about what the police can do.
The police also say that having the ability to breach privacy is key to keeping people safe but there is no mention of when info secretly scraped from the unsuspecting prevented other unsuspecting people from morbid circumstances.
This whole event looks like the cops are big mad they will now be asked for accountability on another method of investigation. Imagine having to answer for your actions!
To be fair to the plod that's not the only thing she's being charged with.
She's specifically been leaking information about ongoing investigations which for an LEO is a big no-no.
If she'd just told people that EncroChat was insecure then she'd have plausible deniability, but she's clearly pretty involved in trying to assist people in keeping clear of the law (which is pretty cut and dry in the eyes of the law - regardless of what you think of the morality of it all).
A few other dodgy bits here too, again, very much in breach of her terms of employment which, for LEA employees can get sticky pretty rapidly.
All of this is quite apart from whether you think the fuzz should have access to private citizens communications (which I should be clear I don't). But she's not just an innocent person who just told her mates that they shouldn't use a specific service to discuss breaking the law.
Do you suggest police analysts should be fully transparent all the time, as in "Hey bob, the cops know you are going to raid the bank tomorrow, better re-arrange"?
Yes. The police, like any government agency, needs to state both the scope of its work and provide metrics for how taxpayers can expect their money spent. This expenditure should include how it achieve its goals and what progress should look like. Then let the people judge the methods are consistent with public expectations of accountability.
Police have repeatedly shown an incapability to behave, respect, or function as a person who has to be responsible for their actions. They cannot be allowed to operate without oversight.
That would be in the charter as set out by the UK parliament. It doesn't include the requirement that suspects be tipped off about ongoing investigations.
Which is not at all something being suggested.
They should be open about how investigative tools work, and what the current privacy expectations are, yes. In the end they have to present their evidence in court, and that includes things like this.
Should they prevent a crime or watch it happen knowing they could have stopped it just to get an arrest? What will happen in cases of murder?
Allowing the police to make up the rules as they go and then justify them later is not the answer to a civilized society. That's how you end up with a police state. We have privacy laws and basic human rights for a reason. If the cops want to circumvent them, then the laws change first. We are not a society that should accept shooting first and asking questions later.
One of the reasons the Brexiters - who are still in Government - openly stated for Leaving the EU was so that they could leave the European Convention Of Human Rights, since being a signatory of that Convention is a requirement of EU membership.
The British "elites" are very much not believers in the riff-raff having Rights that superceed their mechanisms for controlling the masses if there is an ultimate genuinelly independent enforcer of those Rights (such as the European Court of Human Rights) - the most favored control mechanisms in the UK have an appearence of fairness whilst being de facto designed for operating differently or being easy to subvert, so a trully independent Human Rights mechanism whose judges didn't went to the same very expensive and very select private schools as the English power elites is borderline unnacceptable (clearly in the case of Brexiter leaders, absolutelly so) for said power elites.
PS: All this to say that in Britain the problem is a lot deeper than merelly the police, who to a large extent are just hired enforcers in a system designed to "keep people in their place", a mindset probably derived from the horror of the British Elites at what happenned next door in France during the Revolution Française (the political British system is one of the ones in Europe whoch has change the least for over a century).