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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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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
Just want to remind everybody that when the Snowden Revelations came out, not only was the UK's NSA-equivalent (the GCHQ) more abusive and extensive in its civil society surveilance that the NSA, but whilst the US government actually walked back on some of the abuses, the UK government simply retroactivelly legalized it and probably issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK's Press censorship scheme) to quiet it down (certainly the UK press went real quiet on it really fast).
Also the chief editor at the British newspaper that brough out the Snowden Revelations - The Guardian - was kicked out some months later and that newspaper has not mentioned that subject since.
The country is way more authoritarian than people outside of it think: just because the "upper" classes are generally trained to be posh and project a gentlemany image (that and being inducted into the "old boys network" are the main selling points of private schools in the UK, curiously called "public schools" over there even though they're £30k per year per pupil) doesn't mean they don't think everybody else are plebes that need to be kept in their place and share the "lower" classes' belief that foreigners are inferior.
So many famous Brits are private school grads, seeing John Oliver and Richard Ayoade went to the same schools as the likes of BoJo and Thatcher is insane. So much of their public face is made up of this tiny population of people.
Well, if I remember it correctly 11% of the population attends Public Schools, though the most exclusive ones are attended by a tiny fraction of the population which are overwhelmingly represented in the Media, amongst High Court judges and in Politics.
The system that preserves power and wealth across generations through limiting opportunities for the rest also includes Cambridge and Oxford, were public school educated students used to be 70% not long ago (though nowadays its better and and they're only about half) even though they're 11% of all pupils, no doubt due the unmeritocratic selection process which relies on interviews rather than independent educational assessment (one of my acquainces was refused entry into an Architecture Degree because, as he was told, "he did not went to the right school", an impossible barrier to entry for most, more so for somebody of Arabic ancestry who had grown up in a Single Parent home because his father died when he was a child).