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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ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
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They didn't used to look like this. The shift happened sometime in the late '90s - early aughts. The fonts and designs until then were gradually modernized but it was similar to corporate letterhead. They also shifted from baby blue shirts to all black around the same time.
The image went from stressful/powerful bureaucrat in a funny uniform to GI Joe action figure.
The shift happened in direct response to the ruling of Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. That case fucked up a lot of things, because SCOTUS was, unknown to them, handed an illegally amended version of the law in question that was relevant to the case. The law is § 1983 of the federal code. When an unnamed secretary was tasked with copying the Congressional Record of 1871 into the Federal Register in 1874, said unnamed secretary illegally removed a 16 word clause that completely reversed the intent of the law.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230520080201/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/us/politics/qualified-immunity-supreme-court.html
I mean, I guess you can make the case that it was that one particular thing.
This is a major cultural shift away from peace officer to Judge Dredd. It's more than just the one, admittedly terrible, court ruling. You can just as easily make the argument that right wing talk radio of the time was the major driver of the change.
I don't think that's a coincidence. Consider when Jeeps started showing up with all the off-road accessory options. I've seen some that were just short a Cobra/Joe logo on the side. Gen-X is has been in the management and disposable-capital age bracket for a while now, making all the decisions that drive these aesthetics, and we were all raised on that stuff.
Around that time, the show "Cops" became one of the most popular shows on television and people believed it was real and unedited. As well as a slew of "realistic and gritty" cop shows hit the airwaves (ask your parents what an "airwave" is) and there was a wave of pro-cop sentiment after the LA riots because media selectively showed cops being "heroes against the mobs" which at the time, was very new to see playing out on live-ish television.
There was some pushback because of the Rodney King beating and others that were being caught on video, the term "police brutality" became a buzzword, but it also seemed like it was a small, isolated problem that went away because people carried cameras all the time and "a few bad apples" and all that. (Not shown before body-cams: cops beating or shooting the people carrying cameras.)
24 was another one that legitimized brutality.
I've occasionally seen early episodes of Cops, the difference in uniform is notable. Don't know how you'd ever measure it, but I bet Cops is actually responsible for a lot of deaths due to the cultural shift.