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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RULES

Real-life decorum is expected. Please don't say things only a child or a jackass would say in person.

If you're here to support the police, you're trolling. Please exercise your right to remain silent.

Saying ~~cops~~ ANYONE should be killed lowers the IQ in any conversation. They're about killing people; we're not.

Please don't dox or post calls for harassment, vigilantism, tar & feather attacks, etc.

Please also abide by the instance rules.

It you've been banned but don't know why, check the moderator's log. If you feel you didn't deserve it, hey, I'm new at this and maybe you're right. Send a cordial PM, for a second chance.

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ALLIES

!abolition@slrpnk.net

!acab@lemmygrad.ml

r/ACAB

r/BadCopNoDonut/

Randy Balko

The Civil Rights Lawyer

The Honest Courtesan

Identity Project

MirandaWarning.org

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INFO

A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions

Adultification

Cops aren't supposed to be smart

Don't talk to the police.

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

So you wanna be a cop?

When the police knock on your door

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ORGANIZATIONS

Black Lives Matter

Campaign Zero

Innocence Project

The Marshall Project

Movement Law Lab

NAACP

National Police Accountability Project

Say Their Names

Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration

 

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MODERATORS
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A slide show presentation titled, “Gun PowerPoint 2,” covers training on engaging targets when in street clothes. The instruction advises students to yell “‘Drop the gun!’ while drawing and firing on the target.” Also under the title, “Engaging Targets,” the training suggests that “videos, cameras, phones, and witnesses” are targets to engage presumably to limit “Monday morning quarterbacking” from the public.

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On Sept. 12 at 8 a.m., came across a stopped vehicle with hazards on the left shoulder near John Hanson Highway and got out of his cruiser to help.

"Are you here to help her?" Sgt. Warrington asks the man.

"No, she's taking me to the hospital," he responded.

Moments later, he fires a single shot at the passenger who says he was getting a hat blown onto the road.

"Oh my God, what did you do? What did you do?" the driver screams out.

"He had a gun!" Warrington says.

"No, I don't have a gun!" the man shouts, lying on the roadway.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21657306

The woman was wearing clothes so no headlines for her.

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According to the news source, some of the posts stated, “I am sorry. If you support the Democratic Party, I will not help you” and “The problem is that I know which of you supports the Democratic Party, and I will not help you survive the end of days.”

In another post, according to WHIO, Rodgers wrote that people would need to “provide proof of who you voted for” before rendering aid.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/21422219

Revealed: officers appear to hold Michael Kenyon, 30, to hot pavement in July, causing third-degree burns

On 6 July 2024, a day when temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, reached 114F (45.5C), Michael Kenyon was walking to his local store to buy a soda when two officers of the city’s police department stopped him.

They hastily told him he was being detained, Kenyon recalls, without clearly stating why. Two more officers arrived.

Surveillance footage from across the parking lot, which was viewed by the Guardian, shows the 30-year-old on the pavement soon after, with several officers on top of him and holding him down. Once they lift Kenyon off the ground after roughly four minutes, he appears limp.

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He's finally arrested.

Minneapolis police are now facing heavy criticism for not arresting Sawchak before the shooting even though he had multiple complaints.

Members of the Minneapolis City Council, including Mayor Jacob Frey, pointed blame at the Minneapolis police department for not acting on any of the prior complaints against Sawchak and failing to arrest him immediately after the shooting. https://newsone.com/5658819/white-man-shoots-black-neighbor-minneapolis/

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Three changes created this shift: Overdose deaths became a national crisis. Law enforcement agents grew more effective at targeting physicians and pharmacists they thought were over-providing opioids. And legislatures and pharmacies pressured pharmacists to use prescription drug monitoring programs, known as P.D.M.P.s, big data systems funded in part by the U.S. Department of Justice.

P.D.M.P.s are surveillance technologies initially created for law enforcement. They generally compile personally identifiable information about all controlled substances (not just opioids) dispensed to patients in a state and feed it back to law enforcement and health care providers. Law enforcement uses P.D.M.P.s to track physicians, pharmacists and patients, and health care providers use them to track medications patients receive. P.D.M.P.s lack privacy protections applied to other health care data.

Use of P.D.M.P.s changed pharmacists’ routines and relationships by incorporating surveillance into patient interactions. When pharmacists refuse to dispense opioids to patients who need them or call the police on patients, they route them toward illegal drug supplies or into law enforcement territory. The result: people with substance use disorders are dying at alarming rates, and some patients with untreated chronic pain are turning to suicide. Pharmacists protect themselves from becoming law enforcement’s targets, but they put their patients in harm’s way.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/8XrQU

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Your privacy is important. Protect yourself from Google with the FreeTube app.

The Supreme Court denied hearing Novak's case Feb 2023 effectively making parody illegal in the United States.

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Archive link:

https://archive.ph/9gx9I

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21621324

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Body camera video shows two Phoenix officers violently assaulting Tyron McAlpin, a deaf man with cerebral palsy

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Medlock also ordered Noel, 53, to pay $270,000 in fines and more than $3 million in restitution to the agencies affected by his actions, telling the former sheriff he had “tarnished the badge and failed everyone in law enforcement.”

Prosecutors accused Noel and his family of spending millions of dollars for personal purchases that included travel, gifts, clothing and vehicles, the News and Tribune reported. Medlock said in June that Noel had used the firefighter association’s funds as a “personal piggy bank.”

The Indiana State Police conducted dozens of searches that uncovered questionable payments for classic cars, college tuition and an aircraft.

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The video posted by Cavender claims that deputies were dispatched to "speed" through Cobb County to respond to Sheriff Owens' issue at a nearby Burger King. The video appears to depict the deputies running red lights and using their sirens.

When deputies arrived at the fast food restaurant, the sheriff leaned out of the driver's side window and spoke to a recording deputy.

"Hey, do me a favor," Sheriff Owens said. "I need to get- all I need is the owner's name of whoever owns this damn facility, or the manager."

The sheriff explained how he was given an incorrect order by a Burger King employee, asked for it to be replaced, and was denied.

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“Even if these sources of data bias could be identified and corrected, however, there may still be some group-based differences that are not attributable to data bias. If so, groups may experience different risk scores and categories that would not necessarily indicate bias. Further, it is often difficult (or impossible) to discern whether some observed group-level differences in data are genuine or reflect some sort of systemic bias.“

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The victim, G.H., is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who met Officer Rodney Vicknair of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) in May 2020 when she was just 14 years old, according to a copy of the lawsuit filed in a Louisiana federal court by her mother and obtained by Inside Edition Digital.

At the time, Vicknair had been dispatched to the scene of a sexual assault and took G.H. to a local children’s hospital so a rape kit could be performed, according to the suit.

Soon after the second rape Vicknair was arrested and later confessed to raping G.H. He died in prison earlier this year from a brain tumor, having served less than a year of his 14-year sentence.

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"On an attempted burglary, we understand that an individual attempted to gain entry into the residence," the sheriff explained. "Once inside, the homeowner produced a firearm in self-defense and shot the individual. At this time, the individual is deceased."

Authorities revealed that Horton also lived in the neighborhood, about a half-mile from the scene, and may have been experiencing a mental health episode or under the influence of narcotics.

Investigator Horton was honored as "Officer of the Year" at the "Crime is Toast" breakfast just days earlier, on Sept. 24.

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