THE POLICE PROBLEM
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
① Real-life decorum is expected. Please don't say things only a child or a jackass would say in person.
② If you're here to support the police, you're trolling. Please exercise your right to remain silent.
③ Saying ~~cops~~ ANYONE should be killed lowers the IQ in any conversation. They're about killing people; we're not.
④ 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
• 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
a woman and her infant who were killed last week during an incident that led up to a shooting involving Independence, Missouri police.
What the fuck kind of language is that? Is it even possible to further remove police culpability in this?
the only thing i saw was that the coward cop 'saw a knife' and clearly had to kill everything in sight instead of, ya know, backing off.
de-escalation is not in their vocabulary or police training.
Blue lives don't matter.
Seriously, that's the entire point of police. Or at least, that's the propaganda. Police exist to protect the citizens from criminals. They're given authority in the form of a badge, and power in the form of a gun, and they are expected to enforce the law as defined by our elected leaders and judicial appointees.
Cops are heroes. They risk their safety to enter situations without hesitation or concern for self preservation. They are trained to be as safe as possible, but there isn't a police officer alive who wouldn't claim to be willing to lay down their life for the life of a baby.
Unfortunately, in practice, that's not what we see. We do not see heroes protecting civilians. We see criminals protecting each other. We do not see selfless sacrifice and empathy. We see megalomaniacs protecting their power.
Good cops, true police officers, would all agree and say proudly, their lives don't matter. Not when it comes to being sure of your targets. Not when it comes to being sure of the threat. Not when it comes to being sure that lethal force is required to keep everyone safe. An officer who is so afraid of injury or death that they are willing to trade the life of a child to protect their own has no business being a cop. We should never tolerate the idea that blue lives matter.
I'm so disenchanted with policing that I'm not sure it can be rehabilitated without heavy heavy changes, but you remind me of how I felt signing up for police college as a young guy. I was pretty religious too at the time, and going into policing felt like the ultimate service to the community.
Anyway, a few ride-alongs cured me of that notion.
I told my father, a Nazi and former cop (but I repeat myself), that body cams should be turned on from the moment a cop is on duty to the moment they are not, that this data should be live-streamed to servers where the footage can be reviewed by the public and become subject to feedback. He RAILED against this, crying about how cops would never have any privacy, etc. (completely missing the point and the detail of what I said because he's completely reactionary, like cops tend to be).
I'm an open source code developer. My code, including the often dumb and embarrassing errors I make from time to time, are available to the world for immediate scrutiny the instant I push a commit or open a pull request. My code isn't really the kind of thing involved in life or death situations. So why should I be subject to more direct scrutiny than cops? Why should we allow cops this whiney attitude toward job evaluation?
Agreed re body cams, except maybe how "public" the footage is. Thinking here about the privacy of the subjects being recorded.
Maybe sent to a watchdog org which can accept requests if people don't want details of themselves or their lives freely available.
Opens up the avenue for intimidation ofc, so kid gloves
Sure, I'll take a citizen-led board of reviewers, as long as they have legal teeth and aren't under the purview of those being evaluated.
Police exist to protect the citizens from criminals.
But they don't. They exist to protect the STATE from CITIZENS, in the same way the military exists to protect the state from foreign aggression. Police are the only people empowered to do violence to citizens of a state, and they do it on behalf if the interests of that state. That is their genuine and explicit reason for existing.
Blue lives don't exist. Full stop.
A guy with not one, but two knives was just stopped today by German police. They shot him in the foot and he's now in the hospital. In contrast, American cops always claim that hitting the legs is not a reliable way to stop an attacker. They always act like they are in a military occupation zone with suicide bombers at every corner.
It is, unfortunately, not about the expediency of stopping the person, but not having a person to challenge their actions in court after being shot. They are far, far, more likely to have the shooting be judged as bad, in court, if they have a victim narrative during the trial. We have had many recordings of police, in training, being told to shoot, to kill, for this very reason.
De-escalation is when they go from two guys pointing guns at you to one guy pointing a gun and one guy hitting you with an asp. And I am not joking. It relates to the use of force continuum.
De-escalation doesn't get them to do the shooty-shooty part, and thats the best part of their day, they aren't trying to avoid it (especially once they confirmed there is no lethal weapon that would put them in any actual danger).
Interesting.
Name of the victims but no names of the police officers who shot a fucking baby.
Well, gonna expect the highest form of police punishment then: A video from the chief saying that they will do better. 😒
"And the baby was being kind of a dick," they later told reporters.
Don't forget the cop being shuffled to a job in a different jurisdiction.
I'm only surprised the cops aren't pushing their usual line:
Police Spokesman: The suspect in this police involved shooting was no angel. Confidential informants have talked about how often her mother was up at night, imagining what trouble her little baby might be in this time. How many times she cleaned up her messes, only to find her in the same trouble all over again. The absolute filth the suspect covered herself with under that diaper day after day ...
Reporter: But didn't an officer shoot and kill the mother also?
Police Spokesman: I can't comment on an ongoing investigation
/s
In all seriousness, this isn't a tragedy, it's a travesty. It's a predictable and recurring outcome our society has been engineered to accept because it's easier and cheaper than changing a system that benefits those already wealthy and in power. I use this gallows humor to cope with it, with the casual brutality and racism that caused it. To live with what none of us should be able to live with. Fuck this shit.
Respectfully, fuck that. This was no ‘tragedy’ it was straight up murder. Murder of an infant child.
The bullets didn’t just happen to end up striking the child or the mother. Call them what they are, murderers
I mean a predictable, recurring outcome engineered by a flaw in a system of power is the classical definition of a tragedy
I mean the officer was clearly scared for his life. I know to you and me that seems absurd, but police officers are hand-picked and trained to be the biggest cowards imaginable. Several people are killed by babies (with guns) each year in the US and that makes them logically scarier than half the shit police officers are scared of.
I can't believe he even entered a home that had a known baby in it, it's almost as scary as entering a school with an active shooter!
ACAB
When I went through MEPS, they make you piss in a cup and get a blood draw during the whole duck walk day. One guy started crying and vomited when the medic went to put a blood draw needle in.
I bet you’ll never guess which guys in that group have Silver Stars and which one has a highway patrol cruiser with multiple complaints of excessive force.
E) ACAB
I'm watching Peaky Blinders, and in one scene a lady pushes a carriage in between two rival gangs. Both back down rather than potentially killing a woman and child.
Nice to see police practice less restraint than warring mobsters.
Even the Crips and Bloods respect momma on Sunday.
Independence Police Chief Adam Dustman said Friday the officer who opened fire followed training because Pike had a knife.
And therein lies the problem. The training for the officer was to shoot anyone with a knife.
Right? If your training leads to shooting babies, you're training wrong
Chefs: "I'm in danger."
Her and the baby are coming right at us!
If only that baby had a gun, it would have been safe from that lone bad apple.
A sad indictment on society.
Criminals start so young these days...
Greenfield said Pike didn’t have a knife in her hand in the closet, but thinks she may have reached for a knife when the first shot was fired. Pike allegedly attempted to get off the bed. Then a second shot was fired at her, Greenfield said.
A shot was fired at her, huh? The shot just jumped right out of that gun?
Edit: shit -> shot, I guess autocorrect knows me too well
When asked why, the officer only responded with "there wasn't a dog on the premises."
"FREE HAT! HE SHOT THAT BABY IN SELF DEFENSE!"
Geoblocked in the EU. But i would bet on the skin color of these victims any day. Empathy just switches off for some people and then psychopath mode flips on.
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From this article. https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article295483354.html
The dad looks Hispanic to me, but it's hard to tell. Mom looks white.
Here's the text:
Authorities have released the identity of a woman and her infant who were killed last week during an incident that led up to a shooting involving Independence, Missouri police.
Blue Springs Police Department Capt. Kyle Flowers confirmed Maria Pike, 34, and Destinii Hope, 2 months, were both killed in the incident at Oval Spring Apartments.
Flowers is heading up the eastern Jackson County Police Incident Investigation Team (PIIT), which is investigating the incident that involved multiple Independence police officers.
Flowers also provided an update on the investigation Tuesday, saying the PIIT has now reviewed the footage from body-worn cameras that captured the incident, and investigators will be interviewing people involved in the incident again Tuesday.
The goal, currently, is to turn over information on the investigation to the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office next week. However, there is no specific deadline for the case.
Independence Police Chief Adam Dustman said Friday the officer who opened fire followed training because Pike had a knife.
Several people have said they saw an Independence police officer running with the injured Destinii in his arms to his police cruiser to take her to the hospital because he didn’t want to wait for an ambulance.
Assistant Property Manager Gavin Delaney helped the two police officers get inside the apartment.
After he was told to leave the apartment, Delaney heard gunshots and then saw the officer with the baby.
He’s already spoken to a counselor.
"It's obviously very tragic and traumatic and everybody has their different ways of processing. But, you know, my intention is not to make it seem like I'm the only person that was involved in this. I want to be able to push the resources to the family or to the people who really need them," Delaney said.
To that end, Property Manager Carrie Lufkin reached out to nearby Comprehensive Mental Health Services to provide free counseling at the Oval Spring clubhouse Monday and Tuesday.
"It was a horrific, tragic event that ended awful. And I want to do everything that I can do to help our community move forward," Lufkin said.
"Our staff are available to check in with everyone, see how they're doing, help, talk them through whatever they experienced, whatever they're feeling now," said Julie Pratt, Kansas City Region president, Comprehensive Mental Health Services. "I know we try to talk to people about trying to keep a normal routine.
Keep your daily day-to-day routine as you normally would. Pay attention to your sleeping patterns, your eating patterns. But just trying to be available for the community here in this apartment complex," she said.
Destinii’s grandparents, Brian and Talisa Coombs, said Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker called them and told them she’d pay for their counseling if they want it.
They also said Baker told them her office is conducting its own investigation.
Destinii's aunt, Felisha Holder, has put together a GoFundMe page with a goal of $7,000 for the infant’s funeral.
There are also plans for a candlelight vigil outside the apartment building where the incident took place, scheduled for Friday at 7 p.m.
A purple and white balloon release will be held as part of the vigil.