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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Let's be honest, police trying to catch speeding cars or compulsive phone users with unmarked or hidden cruisers is not the reason why people don't trust the US police.
I can only speak for myself, but I absolutely add any form of hidden speed traps to the list. Cops know they can perform "traffic calming" by parking a marked cruiser in an easily seen location, be it on a highway or a city street. People see the car and slow down. This works anywhere it's clear they can join traffic and pull you over. The officer effortlessly achieves a local bump in traffic safety just by sitting there, and cops don't need to do risky traffic stops unless someone is really not paying attention. So that's gotta be the preferred method, right?
Meanwhile, hidden traps and unmarked cars have only one purpose: generate ticket revenue. The only mass "calming" that happens is kinda/sorta in the area where a cop has someone pulled over - and that's after the car is clearly visible.
Edit: We can also solve speeding and reckless behavior by engineering calming measures into the road itself. The freaking DOT wrote a manual for it. IMO, it's hard to view speed traps as anything more than a band-aid fix with this in mind.
That's not true - knowing that there could be a speed trap hidden anywhere makes drivers more likely to actually follow the law. Hidden traps are only an issue for people who believe that breaking the speed limit should be the norm.
I dont believe this is true in practice as much as you might like it to be, and I'd love to see any actual data you might have to support your assertion
How exactly would you collect data on this
Self reporting is going to be dubious at best when it comes to admitting breaking the law
IF there's no data, then we don't come to @[email protected]'s conclusion . We don't draw any conclusion. We admit we don't know, and continue to try to discover a method for collecting data.