| ▲ | jmyeet 5 hours ago | |
Let me outline how broken policing is an institution in the US: 1. Cops are generally stupid and untrained. You just had to watch them testify in the Afroman trial and you might think "geez these guys aren't the brightest bulbs". No, theyre not. But they are also the most average cops; 2. Cops are corrupt. They steal things all the time. "We miscounted the money". Yeah, right. You got got caught stealing; 3. Cops lie all the time. They'll lie on the stand. This happens so often there's a term for it: testilying [1]; 4. Cops never go after other cops. In fact, you're generally punished or even killed for going after other cops. It's career suicide; 5. If, somehow, you get charged with a crime, you as a cop have rights the rest of us can only dream about. You're not allowed to interview the suspect for 24 hours. Their union rep must be there and so on. Enough time to get their story straight. Why don't we all have those same rights? 6. Cops aren't trained to de-escalate. They're only trained to escalate, lethally. Cops kill over 1000 people a year [2]. A pretty famous example is the murder of Sonya Massey [3]. Sonya was lethally shot for being near a pot of boiling water. This case was also quite rare because somebody went to jail; 7. Some departments go so far to essentially be gangs. One of the most famous examples is the LA Sheriff's Department [4]; 8. Should a prosecutor actually go after a cop, it's typically career suicide. Prosecutors live and die by conviction stats. It's how they get promoted and seek judgeships and higher office. Why? Because for there other cases, their cop witnesses will start missing court dates or even changing their testimony so your cases get dismissed or found not guilty. A lot of TV is what's called "copaganda". It typically paints police as competent, not corrupt, honorable and not at all the job most likely to commit domestic violence [5]. One exception to this is The Wire, which is a portrayal of institutional failure at virtually every level of American society. For bonus points, We Built This City [6]. It's a much deeper topic why it is this way but unsurprisingly the answer can be overly reduced to "racism" eg the origins of American law enforcement are in slave-catching. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury [2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/policekillings_total.htm... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sonya_Massey [4]: https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history... | ||