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
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In authoritarian regimes it isn't uncommon for the state officers and soldiers to engage in casual theft along side their official duties. With the way our country is going, there is a non-zero chance this was an actual ICE officer just working his "side hustle".
American cops have been robbers for a long, long time under the guise of civil forfeiture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States
That is "legal" theft, which can be fought in court, and isn't what I'm referring to. A law enforcement officer committing theft not associated with their duties is what I'm talking about like this example reported just yesterday.
"Legal theft". Careful not to choke on your words. It is a well known and well documented abuse of the legal system. A great many police departments, corrupt even more than usual, use it to fund departmental expenses, staff perks and bonuses.
Fighting street level injustice through inaccessible and notoriously corrupt courts is also a sad joke.
Abuse? Its codified in law. Its working as intended. I don't agree with it, but its not extra-judicial. You'll see I specifically put it quotes to communicate that, while it meets the letter of the law, it is far from actual justice.
It adheres to the letter of the law only when you ignore the 4th and 5th ammendments. But why bother? The constitution ain't worth shit anyways.
Just because it is codified into law doesn't make it not abusive in nature. That just means the law is attempting to justify abuse.
Almost as if something being a "law" is nothing more than those in power attempting to legitimize their oppression of the people under their authority.
Are we really just having semantic arguments now?
"Abuse of the law" I interpret as equal to "breaking the law". Civil Forfeiture doesn't break the law it is written from. Is it unjust? Absolutely! Do I agree it should be abolished? Absolutely!
Again, I've clearly separated the concepts of "lawful" from "justice". They ARE NOT always equal. This is a case where they aren't.
Are we done having arguments over grammar and semantics? You can keep going if you like, but I'm more interested in focusing on our world burning than arguing over something we both already agree should be abolished.
Sorry the point went over your head it seems.
Then be more clear.
No you are just grasping at straws here
Those stolen assets don't end up as personal property of the officer though.
They do. Way way too often.
You are very lucky if they stop with casual theft.
Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret police in Stalin's USSR was a serial rapist and murderer. He had at least hundreds women and children kidnapped off the street, both people who weren't missed but also celebrities, and raped them and then murdered them if they wouldn't pretend it was consensual. A pile of bones covered with lime was uncovered near his one-time residence 15 years ago, but contemporary testimonies say that his torture chamber of a basement had underground passages to other burial sites.
Once some people are above the law, nothing is off the table.
Yep.
Obviously this is a pretty extreme example but without the rule of law, government officials will engage in corruption, hold overs, and blackmail.
With ICE just seizing and deporting whoever they like, it provides white Americans with incredible power over others because they can just threaten to call ICE.
ICE was always lawless from what we know about them in reports, there were articles about rape cases even back under Biden.
Also Stalin told his daughter to never be alone with Beria because even he couldn't ensure her safety. Honestly I'm convinced that Beria was on Stalin's shit list and the only reason he wasn't purged was because WW2 kicked off.
Stalin was the one thing keeping Beria alive though even after the war, after Stalin died, the first order of business for the Politburo was to kill him.
I'm not saying Stalin liked him, I'm saying he was useful enough that Stalin never got around to purging him.
It’s already been happening, it’s documented in this Afroman song Edit: 3:50 timestamp
I know it happens with other law enforcement. I even posted a link to a police officer fired for stealing just a few days ago. However, I was specifically talking about ICE, which isn't what Afroman was talking about, but this thread is.
As a non-American this is really one of the weirdest things about ICE. Why don’t they do their raids in uniform/with badge and face uncovered (perhaps apart from tactical headgear) like any other law enforcement agency? Even when arresting terrorists/mobsters you would expect the cops to be identifiable.
As far as I know the plain clothes arrests and covered faced raids are new artifacts of the GOP's trump administration. I think there may have been plain clothes investigators before for some undercover work, but never used in the way it is today.
There are two reasons, I think, they are doing it today.
Masks add anonymity and reduce accountability. These folks are deeply disliked and under the hoods and masks, yet they're people with homes and families. They need to conceal their identity so their actions don't follow them home.
The trump administration wants a law enforcement arm with broad authority to arrest and detain with federal powers. ICE and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) have broad sweeping powers in the most populated portions of our country.
It’s naïve to think that this behavior hasn’t been common already for decades, likely centuries
It's technically not a crime if you label it civil forfeiture.
Oh but that's totally only if you can't prove you weren't going to use it for crime!
How do you prove you weren't using it for crime? Good question!
And even if a judge believes you, OH well, too bad the cops already spent it! No, you can't get money from their budget, that would be theft or fraud or some other crime we can figure out after arresting you.
Maybe everyone should become an ice agent...what would they do then if everyone was larping
This was basically the end state of East Germany right before the wall fell. Something like 1 in 6 people were either in the Stasi or were Stasi informants working alongside them. One wonders what the power dynamic might have mutated into once there were no more sheep because everyone was working for the wolves.
Maybe that's the kind of loyalist utopia these (and those) chumps were dreaming of but I'd doubt that'd actually shake out how they expected it to.
I doubt the dynamic would have changed much. They’d just start with the purity and loyalty tests and start devouring each other. The fascists always need a convenient enemy
They did do that
Fascism is a means to an end. The end result of fascism is cronyism, where power is delegated based on fealty.
Each level of fascism is a concentric circle, with a new out group named at every iteration.
Right now, it's LGBT, specifically trans people in addition to immigrants. Once all of the outgroup is gone, a new one is named.
It's a good thing we don't have the gubmint compiling lists of, say, neurodivergent folks, so everything's all nice and ready when the time comes.
That is hardly comparable.
Eastern Germany did not have an oligarch class to feed and did not aspire to invade other countries to rob their resources.
Most of the people you mention were informal informants (190k vs. 90k regular employees by the lat 80s) and these mostly worked out of ideological conviction and didn't receive relevant payments for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_collaborator
Obviously these informants did not know who else around them was an informant. Economically they were doing normal jobs and receiving normal pay like everyone else. This cannot be described in terms of "wolfs and sheep". American cops, ICE and the like full well know who their colleagues are. They get paid, usually full time to exercise their jobs and they have a direct authority to abuse, like with civil forfeiture.
A Stasi informant couldn't reveal himself to his neighbor and demand money from him. First of all his neighbor might as well be an informant and second of all the informant has no power except to make allegations, for which he would have to compromise himself and be targeted himself.
The GDR was authoritarian for ideological reasons, not to feed the greed of a select few. This is fundamentally different to Capitalism and its final form, Fascism.
I Am Batman?
Yeah i was just going to say, its not like theyre tracking these things, so isnt it more likely he just is an actual ICE officer?