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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 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
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Maybe a stupid question, but: How broad are the presidential pardon powers?
Could he pre-emptively pardon anyone who will kill person X?
Could he blanket-pardon all cops convicted of a crime while on duty?
Could he pardon himself for all crimes past, present and future?
Extremely broad, for federal crimes. None of your examples have been tested yet.
Expect them to be.
Pardons cannot apply to the future*
*Unless you start seeing John Roberts doing a nazi salute, then you should get ready, because you're about to be in a camp
remind me 2 years
Quite the optimism on how long it will take when the guy who bought a new department was throwing nazi salutes during the inauguration.
didn't Biden just preemptively pardon his family?
He did.
But the meaning of "preemptive" is more like a "Just in case", rather than, "immune from future offences".
They were all pardoned from 2014 until now, but trump admin could theoretically invent a new case that allegedly happened on Jan 21 and make an investigstion out of it. (It probably wouldn't go very far tho, I mean considering that even an indictment requires a majority of a grand jury to indict)
seems like preemptive ones and reflexive ones havent been tested but we are probably about to find out what happens when the prez, congress, and judiciary are all politically aligned and wanna do evil.