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
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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
It really depends on the area and execution. Though this has been abused heavily by money-hungry police departments, if they solely set their sights on stopping the pieces of shit who weave wildly between cars while going 40+ kph faster than the flow of traffic, which is going 30+ kph faster than the speed limit, I’d welcome the stealthy police presence.
I’d like to go a week without nearly being run off the road by some fucker with a death wish, but the police have decided their priorities.
My “favorite” are those ghost cars where you only see the police markings if light hits it the right way. “Protect and serve” my ass.
Honestly I'll take that over unmarked anyway. It can be impossible to tell an unmarked police car from any random government fleet vehicle
The spot lights are sometimes a good clue
Let's be honest, police trying to catch speeding cars or compulsive phone users with unmarked or hidden cruisers is not the reason why people don't trust the US police.
I can only speak for myself, but I absolutely add any form of hidden speed traps to the list. Cops know they can perform "traffic calming" by parking a marked cruiser in an easily seen location, be it on a highway or a city street. People see the car and slow down. This works anywhere it's clear they can join traffic and pull you over. The officer effortlessly achieves a local bump in traffic safety just by sitting there, and cops don't need to do risky traffic stops unless someone is really not paying attention. So that's gotta be the preferred method, right?
Meanwhile, hidden traps and unmarked cars have only one purpose: generate ticket revenue. The only mass "calming" that happens is kinda/sorta in the area where a cop has someone pulled over - and that's after the car is clearly visible.
Edit: We can also solve speeding and reckless behavior by engineering calming measures into the road itself. The freaking DOT wrote a manual for it. IMO, it's hard to view speed traps as anything more than a band-aid fix with this in mind.
Eh, if enforcement was actually consistent then traffic behavior would still change over time, even with unmarked cars. I don't really have sympathy for drivers who disregard traffic safety rules and I'm not interested in giving folks a fair shake at evading enforcement. Driving is a privilege and speeding imposes risks to society at large.
Frankly, I'd be fine if we forced cops to fund themselves through ticket revenue, up until traffic safety stats improved.
Are the speed/ red light cameras hidden where you are.
Our red light cameras are usually at intersections and people tend to know about them because they are always trying to vandalise them.
Meanwhile, hidden traps and unmarked cars have only one purpose: generate ticket revenue.
That's not true - knowing that there could be a speed trap hidden anywhere makes drivers more likely to actually follow the law. Hidden traps are only an issue for people who believe that breaking the speed limit should be the norm.
I dont believe this is true in practice as much as you might like it to be, and I'd love to see any actual data you might have to support your assertion
Once on vacation with my wife, we were on a highway and saw a woman painting her fingernails while driving. She was doing this for a few mins and we heard a police motorcycle coming up from behind and we thought “Oh nice, go get her”… but they pulled us over instead! Apparently where the highway ends it goes from like 75mph to 30mph. Turns out cops hide in the area to catch people. It was a hefty ticket too since we were technically going “40mph” over (like everyone else). During the rest of our stay we noticed motorcycle cops everywhere! They were just camped out all over with radar guns in pairs trying to catch people. We ended up hiring a local lawyer to appear in court (since we had to appear in court for the ticket as well), since we obviously weren’t from the area. It was dismissed and we paid less for the lawyer than it would have been to pay the ticket plus insurance would have gone up each month.
Same except I paid the ticket because idk how lawyers work
My wife was very determined to not mess up her car insurance and her clean record. So she spent a while looking up and calling lawyers. It’s not time she got back, but in the grand scheme of things, very worth it.
Toronto police tried to pull this crap with the cars. They got so much heat they had to cancel and repaint the cars back. Rightfully the argument is that police are supposed to be highly visible. If someone needs help, how is camouflaging the response vehicle productive?
Trick question, they're not actually there to help
They're not there to help us.
We can frustrate them by making them pretend they are at the very least.
Visibility is like their biggest deterrent lol
I am of the firm stance that ghost police cars should never exist. If you need to be undercover to do a thing, then have a plain car.
But ghost cars are literally there to hide for "normal" everyday enforcement. And that type of police work should not involve hiding.
Every time I see police markings on American cars, they look to me like the cops are trying to be cool and hip with their sick fonts. But to me it just screams unprofessional.
They didn't used to look like this. The shift happened sometime in the late '90s - early aughts. The fonts and designs until then were gradually modernized but it was similar to corporate letterhead. They also shifted from baby blue shirts to all black around the same time.
The image went from stressful/powerful bureaucrat in a funny uniform to GI Joe action figure.
The shift happened in direct response to the ruling of Harlow V Fitzgerald in 1982. That case fucked up a lot of things, because SCOTUS was, unknown to them, handed an illegally amended version of the law in question that was relevant to the case. The law is § 1983 of the federal code. When an unnamed secretary was tasked with copying the Congressional Record of 1871 into the Federal Register in 1874, said unnamed secretary illegally removed a 16 word clause that completely reversed the intent of the law.
I mean, I guess you can make the case that it was that one particular thing.
This is a major cultural shift away from peace officer to Judge Dredd. It's more than just the one, admittedly terrible, court ruling. You can just as easily make the argument that right wing talk radio of the time was the major driver of the change.
GI Joe action figure.
I don't think that's a coincidence. Consider when Jeeps started showing up with all the off-road accessory options. I've seen some that were just short a Cobra/Joe logo on the side. Gen-X is has been in the management and disposable-capital age bracket for a while now, making all the decisions that drive these aesthetics, and we were all raised on that stuff.
late '90s - early aughts.
Around that time, the show "Cops" became one of the most popular shows on television and people believed it was real and unedited. As well as a slew of "realistic and gritty" cop shows hit the airwaves (ask your parents what an "airwave" is) and there was a wave of pro-cop sentiment after the LA riots because media selectively showed cops being "heroes against the mobs" which at the time, was very new to see playing out on live-ish television.
There was some pushback because of the Rodney King beating and others that were being caught on video, the term "police brutality" became a buzzword, but it also seemed like it was a small, isolated problem that went away because people carried cameras all the time and "a few bad apples" and all that. (Not shown before body-cams: cops beating or shooting the people carrying cameras.)
24 was another one that legitimized brutality.
I've occasionally seen early episodes of Cops, the difference in uniform is notable. Don't know how you'd ever measure it, but I bet Cops is actually responsible for a lot of deaths due to the cultural shift.
I can see different degrees of this. I agree that I'd rather have a visible presence in traffic monitoring that helps remind people they are being watched for adherence to the rules of the road, and give people who are pushing the limits an opportunity to fix it rather than catch them. So speed traps for money quotas or a door to gain access to vehicles to find or "create" issues (usually based on profiling) is the problem here. As well as abuse of the power to be able to speed and ignore the same rules when an emergency isn't pending, or escalating a traffic stop beyond what it was originally for again because of the power trip.
My response to the typical complaining about speed traps isn't usually first to focus on the police, but to ask, "well, were you speeding or driving recklessly?" When someone gets mad from that question, then the problem may not be (just) the police.
me just assuming every V8 Charger less than five years old, white, red or black and clean is a cop by default
Define irony.
What am I looking at
A truck that's about to gain some good ol' American Freedom™.
Why do we have pictures of a cop when there are so many of plain clothed, mask wearing, and unidentifiable ICE guys?
In Canada police vehicles are visible as all hell. A blind person can know there is a police car there.
Camouflage is one of the five physical traits of a predator, the others more or less apply with enough hand waving
its the five behavior traits all apply very obviously. Stealth, strategy (attack together), territorial (protect their jurisdiction), patience (speed traps), adaptability
Why not use Comic Sans ? :)
