this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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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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Once on vacation with my wife, we were on a highway and saw a woman painting her fingernails while driving. She was doing this for a few mins and we heard a police motorcycle coming up from behind and we thought “Oh nice, go get her”… but they pulled us over instead! Apparently where the highway ends it goes from like 75mph to 30mph. Turns out cops hide in the area to catch people. It was a hefty ticket too since we were technically going “40mph” over (like everyone else). During the rest of our stay we noticed motorcycle cops everywhere! They were just camped out all over with radar guns in pairs trying to catch people. We ended up hiring a local lawyer to appear in court (since we had to appear in court for the ticket as well), since we obviously weren’t from the area. It was dismissed and we paid less for the lawyer than it would have been to pay the ticket plus insurance would have gone up each month.
In my area we often have oversized speed limit signs and maybe even a flashing light to indicate such a drastic drop in speed, did this area have similar signage?
No flashing lights or anything that stood out. I am usually the one that points that stuff out. I’ve never seen that many cops on bikes hiding around, so I have to assume it’s just how this town was setup.
Same except I paid the ticket because idk how lawyers work
My wife was very determined to not mess up her car insurance and her clean record. So she spent a while looking up and calling lawyers. It’s not time she got back, but in the grand scheme of things, very worth it.
There's actually a neat trick to avoid traps like this, and it works anywhere in the country - what you do is: slow the fuck down and obey the fucking speed limit 🤷
You must be ignorant of the reality of speed traps. Towns where it drops from 65 to 35 and the sign is hard to see. Andy Griffith, the twilight zone version, makes his living off people not from town. Also look up sundown towns. The signs are gone but they still exist, black folks generally know about them, there are probably still guides.
Here ya go.
https://justice.tougaloo.edu/sundown-towns/using-the-sundown-towns-database/state-map/
The comments in question:
You can also get a ticket for impeding the flow of traffic even if you obey the fucking speed limit depending on the state and mood of the pig.
You can get tickets for lots things, but we're not talking about them, we're talking about driving faster than the legal speed limit.
No you were talking about avoiding the traps. If the same cop can pull you over for impeding traffic, "just slow down" doesn't avoid the trap.
He can't pull you over for speeding if you're not speeding. All these wankers crying about speed traps are basically saying 'it's not fair, the rules shouldn't apply to me. I'm so special, it's not fair I can't drive everywhere at 100mph.wha wha wha'
I am a stickler for going to speed limit everywhere, which drives my wife crazy, but being out of town there is no way to know some local things, so you just follow the flow of traffic. We were even going slower than some people around us, we were just the lucky ones the cop picked out. Those areas are created to be speed traps on purpose.
Or if you had an out-of-state plate, they may have seen you as an easier target (for just paying the ticket instead of fighting it in a town you don't live).
Y'know, no matter how much you love and lick them boots, they'll never love you back.
Not a fan of the boot. Also not a fan of having my family killed in a RTA caused by some entitled wanker who feels speed limits shouldn't apply to them.