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Cops get paid 6 figures for this
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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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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Honestly, mulling over this for a bit, I can't tell if you're saying it's dumb to have a shitty screenshot of CCTV, it's dumb for them to investigate a technical-but-clearly-petty Theft, or both.
For the former, as I said in another comment:
In my experience, while bigger corporations are more likely to have the means, they're also more likely to have all kinds of corporate red tape forbidding providing footage when law enforcement arrives (gotta get every rung of the leadership ladder to sign off, maybe even Legal). I've had months between the reported incident and corporate approval to provide the footage, usually a CD.
In situations like those, Loss Prevention "pretends not to notice" when you take a photo of the CCTV freeze frame with your agency-issued camera, and something like this is the result.
For the latter, despite what a lot of people believe, the police generally do respond to reported incidents and generally do follow up on all available leads. The disparity in response for some petty crap from a mega corporate location is due to the robust infrastructure they have in place to observe, record, and report incidents. Even in 2026, most people do not have extensive interior and exterior CCTV in their homes, for example.
"This investigation is kinda dumb and I don't feel like pursuing the available leads" isn't something a patrol supervisor would accept on your report.
Adding to this, as you mentioned with the infrastructure. Some businesses, especially big retailers have fantastic relationships with local LEO, they're likely not calling the emergency line or dispatch and requesting an officer. Their loss prevention calls their contact at the PD and the PD strolls over and takes custody of the suspect knowing the big retailers loss prevention has documented everything correctly, crossing all the T's and dotting the I's and is handing them a wrapped up case.
Wouldn't surprise me; nothing technically illegal about it and both parties benefit to a degree.