Skip Navigation
Remote View
AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND @lemmy.world
Doug Holland @lemmy.world

American police are out of control

• Multiple L.A. sheriff’s deputies relieved of duty as feds probe beating of trans teacher, and cops' organized cover-up of what happened

• Fired Utah police officer charged with sexual abuse of teen girl

• New York cop back on duty, despite refusing to take breathalyzer test after suspected DUI crash that permanently injured toddler

• 22-year-old left brain dead from ‘days-long brutal torture’ in Alabama prison, lawsuit says

• Southern California cop dies by suicide after being arrested for soliciting minor to engage in sexual acts

• New York Governor orders firing of 14 officers involved in prison death

• Former D.C. police intel chief found guilty of tipping off Proud Boys leader ahead of capitol attack

• Family sues over Michigan man's death at Bexar County jail

• Excessive force, negligence claims can proceed in case stemming from 2020 death of man in custody

• Hmmm: Man found dead in police vehicle apparently became trapped

• How a ‘blue wall of silence’ let Central NY prison guards get away with day of terror

• Indiana jail workers believed Louisville woman who died in custody was 'faking it,' records show

• Missouri Governor commutes sentence for cop who killed black man

• "Excited delirium": How cops are trained to get away with killing people

   
• Don't call the police.

   
Previously

21 comments

  • I get dogpiled anytime I suggest abolition. Americans will rabidly defend their existing systems, even if they are oppressed by them. It's difficult sometimes to be vocal about it, so I wanted to extend some appreciation for doing what you do

    • If we get rid of the police and all their frame-ups and bribes, beatings, killings, threats, PIT maneuvers and corruption and qualified immunity, some say it would be anarchy (in a negative sense) and ask, what would we replace the police with? Makes me think of someone going in for cancer surgery, asking, "But doc, if you take out the tumor, what would we replace it with?"

    • Legitimate question: how do you deal with murderers, rapists, muggers, thieves, etc?

      Somebody mentioned regarding police as a tumor, and asking the doctor to leave it in. But I see it more like chemotherapy. It is awful, attacks fairly indiscriminately, leaves people feeling worse than the cancer itself (at least temporarily), and the cancer, for some, is often preferable.

      Right now, chemotherapy is being used as a cure-all, and those who are all-in on supporting it want to expand it because what if there is cancer?! And those against it say to get rid of chemo completely because it harms so many and does much more harm than good, even when there is cancer (which is sometimes, but not always, true). But it's not a cure-all, and if you get rid of it completely you can't fight cancer, and sometimes you need to fight cancer.

      So we need to severely diminish use of it, create strong oversight as to its use, and expand funding for other curative options for things that aren't cancer related.

      (In case the analogy is not coming through, cancer is real crime, like murder, rape, etc, where physical enforcement becomes necessary. Non-cancer is stuff like wellness checks, mental health situations, traffic law enforcement, or about 90% of what police get used for).

      • No no --- you're misreading the chemo analogy. It's not, "asking the doctor to leave it in," it's the doctor asking the patient, "what are you going to replace the cancer with?"

        The point is that if you delay the procedure until the patient gives you a satisfying answer, the cancer will have killed them. The analogy suggests that we should just do the procedure now before the patient dies, even if we can't answer every single question. Delaying the procedure is the dangerous thing, not the lack of a replacement.

    • I like the idea of reform. Not a "retrain" sense, but a "purge every department and train the new department to the same standards as MPs, with regular auditing and oversight".

      • The problem is that the culture attracts new, awful cops.

        Kids grow up and see the news, the movies, the jokes, the memes, the entire culture surrounding police officers getting away with murder and think, "if I want to hurt people and get away with it, I should become a cop".

        Even if you purge every department and train new cops, all of the new ones will be bad too.

        Reform won't work. Abolition will.

      • Honestly, especially since abolition is politically impossible, I'd be pretty happy with genuine reform. It's never genuine reform, of course, if cops, ex-cops, and cops' buddies are in charge, or even allowed in the room.

  • I have an idea:

    Maybe defund the police and redirect those funding to militias?

    I mean, maybe that'd be worse in rural areas, but in my blue city, I'm pretty sure I can trust a well trained and regulated militia made of the everyday people in my neighborhood more than the cops. Probably much faster response times too, and much less trigger happy (militias don't have legal immunity like cops do, so that's a huge plus).

    I feel like a militia would be less detached from society than cops are. Being a cop is just a life time thing, they spend so much time with other cops that they have basically a different social circle completely detached from the reality the average person goes through. In my proposal, militias would still hold regular jobs for most of the time, but would have certain times be on militia duty to protect their assigned community, and the duty would get rotated between different people. It would be like the National Guard, but instead, they would be directly accountable to their community (as opposed to some Governor, or POTUS, or the Mayor).

    (It's a wild idea, sure, but depending on what type of people live in your area, it could work, and actually stop crime while not being an organization that is gonna murder a bunch of people.)

    • Sounds like an improvement, and nowhere near as nutty as what we have now — police out of control, above the law, answerable to no-one but other police, who are answerable to no-one but other police.

21 comments