this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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Malicious Compliance

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People conforming to the letter, but not the spirit, of a request. For now, this includes text posts, images, videos and links. Please ensure that the “malicious compliance” aspect is apparent - if you’re making a text post, be sure to explain this part; if it’s an image/video/link, use the “Body” field to elaborate.

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[–] callouscomic@lemmy.zip 21 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

This is why I always imagine it'd be funny to ask a cop "so how many murders got solved this week?" whenever they're wasting time on mundane shit.

I've never had an interaction with a cop where they didn't make it unnecessarily intense.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Police solve something like less than 2% of reported crimes.

Even a libertarian can see this is fucking stupid, imagine a restaurant that gets 2% of its orders correct and served in a timely manner.

Police do not primarily exist to solve crimes.

They primarily exist as a goon/thug class to protect property and capital, all other behaviors and effects are ancillary.

If Police wanted to actually lessen crime, they'd either attack its root causes and use significant parts of their budgets to fund affordable housing and public schools, or massively reorient toward pursuing white collar crime, which is often of such a huge financial scale that it basically directly impoverishes society at a large scale.

[–] FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago

That figure is a little misleading, but I understand how you picked it up because it’s everywhere.

Police “clear” crimes to be progressed for prosecution.

Prosecutors “prosecute” crimes. It’s this that the 2% figure is aimed at. The clearance rates (the job done by the police) is higher.

According to this article[1], 22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions. They then halve both of those numbers to account for unreported crimes. The article still uses the 2% figure in the headline despite the nuance in the article.

That might sound academic given the overall point you make still stands. I just thought it was worth mentioning.

1: https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes-143878

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Their job is not to solve crimes, their job is to get people convicted, the subtle difference being that they'll turn non-crimes into crimes (for example, they'll chose to legally interpret things which can go both ways as crimes which require prosecution, which is why one often sees kids criminalized for childish bullshit) and it doesn't matter if the person convicted is innocent, all that matters is that somebody got convicted (so, for example, they won't try and find exonerating evidence).

This partly explains their tendency to take an adversarial posture towards people who aren't from their group, also partly explained because that posture itself indirectly feeds back on them (people are weary of them because of how act towards the general public, which in turn makes them feel apart and suspicious hence they behave even more so) and partly because they do tend to get exposed far more than most people to the seedy side of humanity all with a judgemental mindset and an aim to see crimes, so even a lot of the stuff they see which most people think is just silly fun (say, most drunkenness), they'll see as crimes.