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75 cops, 6½ hours of gunfire, for an eviction in Pittsburgh
(www.nbcnews.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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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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Can you show me where the military was involved?
They didn't need to be because a dude with a gun is not nearly that big a deal.
That's how silly it is that people buy guns to try to overthrow the government
No they would not lol. They'd just bomb the house.
Once the military is involved, ordinance and utter air superiority is also involved.
"Dudes with guns" have a 0% chance of defeating the US military. People bring up vietnam and Afghanistan as if A) those wars weren't heavy on RoE and more about military policing than war - which a revolution most assuredly would not be and B) the kill ratio of those conflicts is in US favor by shit like 30+ to 1. That's in enemy territory, thousands of miles from home, with stretched logistics lines, and a hostile or at best indifferent local populace outside of every major city.
The US lost fewer than 2,000 soldiers to enemy actions in Afghanistan. That's fewer people than died in 9/11, spread out over 2 decades. That's more than 1/3rd fewer people than the US lost in just the battle of Iwo Jima.
Once you consider that these "armed revolutionaries" will be viewed as terrorists by at minimum 160 million of their neighbors, and they will be denied all critical infrastructure, funding, and support, it is a no-brainer that they will be slaughtered. That's even assuming these irregulars count as soldiers and wouldn't just piss and shit themselves once they started getting bombed from beyond visual range. War is really fucking scary and the average angry shut-in cannot handle it.
The math just doesn't hold up. This isn't a real option - it's a dangerous, radicalizing fantasy that encourages lone wolves and militias to attack soft targets.