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Bar owner is arrested after St. Louis police officer crashes into his business
(www.seattletimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
149 points (96.9% liked)
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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Seems like if the owners are guilty of anything worthy of arrest, the pigs are guilty of property damage, assault and battery, attempted murder (all these add "with a deadly weapon" for the fact that they're armed and a 2000lb metal box is certainly deadly) , reckless driving, and a litany of other crimes that should land them in prison with life-crippling fines.
Attempted murder is an insane stretch and it devalues your whole comment.
He intended to crash a vehicle. Vehicles are commonly viewed as deadly weapons when used as one. It is not a stretch what so ever.
Did I miss the part where it was intentional?
No, I just do not believe cops what so ever. At least the angry pigs that love throwing their undeserved power around.
I don't trust them either, and I have plenty of personal experience to back that. Experience going back decades, when they were far worse.
Back to attempted murder, that's ludicrous. Cop fucked up and crashed, for whatever reason. They try to get away from responsibility by raising a fuss. Been there, done that. I can tell stories all night.
That’s not the same as intent to kill someone. Murder requires intent, without that it becomes manslaughter
I think it'd depend. There are degrees of murder. You can ABSOLUTELY get charged with murder if someone dies due to extreme reckless neglegence in some jurisdictions.
It's kinda' exactly why Derek Chauvin is in jail. He never intended to kill anyone, but he was so insanely reckless and careless. He was found guilty of BOTH lesser degrees of murder and manslaughter.
For a more direct example, just look up all the street racers that get charged with murder.
Unintentional second degree murder is Minnesota’s version of felony murder. Felony murder does not require intent.
Third degree murder in Minnesota requires a “depraved mind” which the example from this story wouldn’t meet.
Edit: As a resident of Minnesota who studied the laws in both my Criminal Code and Criminal Law and Procedure classes, the incident from this article would not meet requirements for murder charges.
So if I decide to crash into a tree, do I get charged with attempted murder?
Even in cases of reckless driving, the charge is manslaughter, proving murder is gonna be hard unless there's evidence of premeditation
Crashing into a tree would be charged as treeson.
Do we have a /c/treelaw yet?
Deciding to crash into a person is attempted murder. People live in houses.
They crashed into a place of business (as said in the article) at 1230am. No people are around shops at that time.
Your argument would never stand in court.
It was a bar so it’s very likely there were people around but it would still be hard to prove intent to kill.
Is that why the owner and others were still in the building? You're literally making shit up that doesn't even apply here.
Cops shoot people driving cars and claim it was for officer safety because the person could have run them over all the time.
How is that in any way relevant?
The officers crashed into a building, nobody started shooting ever in this case.
If person driving = using a deadly weapon to justify shooting at the driver then cop driving = using a deadly weapon.
Cops lie on official paperwork all the time. "Turnabout is fair play". It's not been a long thread, but if you're having that much trouble keeping track of the conversation, you can read the thread history before responding to remember what we're talking about currently.