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Forgot to mention tourists
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 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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MODERATORS
My mayor, Keith Wilson of Portland, made a great point over the weekend in the midst of Trump's attack on the city that's stuck with me.
To paraphrase, since I've heard multiple versions of it, "Imagine if instead he sent hundreds of engineers, hundreds of teachers, or hundreds of addiction specialists."
Trump has no interest in improving America, only in being a strongman dictator.
The problem is the local yokels outside the city don’t see this as a good point, but as him being a sniveling fool who needs a Real Man like Trump to run his city. And that’s because they have a very different worldview.
Most same people, like us, see being bad or good as something you do, and as such, with proper care and help and education you can do better.
They, on the other hand, see bad and good as something you are, a sort of fundamental birth stat that can never change. That’s why they think these ICE raids are a good thing, that’s why they want prisons to just be wholly punitive, that’s why they’re fine with writing off whole groups. Because those people are Bad, and so they will always do Bad Things, and only naive fools think that Bad People can become Good.
The really troubling part of their worldview, though, is a lot of them seem to think Bad radiates out from these people/groups and infects things around them.
Holy shit. Thank you for this. You have no idea how long I've been looking for a more succinct explanation for this whole mess.
It would explain a lot, wouldn't it?
No matter what a republican does, it's good. No matter what a democrat does, it's bad. I'm not even going to get into the whole issue of how democrats are still center-right and there's no true left in the US (not a politically relevant one, anyway - I know people with opinions exist).
It's why Trump being on the Epstein list is no big deal - but Biden investing money into, among other things, green energy - which caused more American jobs to be created - was a bad thing.
Yeah, it’s seems the only way they think that stat can change is if you ‘find God’. Because only an all-powerful God can change an inherent stat.
I think that’s also why they so readily believe that you can ‘pray the gay away’. It’s not because they don’t believe being LGBTQ+ isn’t inherently a birth thing; it’s because they already know God can change Bad People to Good People so obviously he can take other ‘Badness’ away too.
We treat these professions as a public cost that drags the economy with debt and taxes. By contrast, ICE and the National Guard are always somehow paid for with free money.
There's never anything in the budget for engineers or teachers or physicians. Only armed thugs.
Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.