Memes

Thanks for sharing our pain. I don’t understand how people pretend that Europe isn’t going thru the same stuff like we are in the US.

Inflation, migration debates, cost of living crises, rise of authoritarianism, income inequality, all of this is and has been global. Some places affected more than others depending on what you look at.

ALL cops you say?

I have many friends and family who have joined the Scottish Police and given years of their lives to serving their communities, risking their own lives and health. Should I say fuck them too?

I joined the police for six months before deciding it wasn’t the career for me and got back into charity work. Are you saying Fuck Me now or just for the six months I was in? Did my fuckery expire?

How can thousands, millions of people doing a job be reduced to such a binary sentiment.

So what's the alternative to police? Just getting rid of them would just lead to militias taking their place which would be much worse.

Haha sounds about right!

Is this based on actual event or is it a general joke?

Or the recent wins of fascist parties in Europe.

It's the best way to sow division. Put everyone into discrete groups and tell them that the other groups are bad.

Yep. I can remember not too long ago that French police blinded people when dealing with the yellow jacket riots. Also the president's bodyguard being there dressed as a cop and hospitalised someone instead of protecting the president. There's also the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK and every year here there's multiple cops charged with raping women or using excessive force against a minority.

Cops are shit everywhere.

Not sure about you, but I'll take workers reminding everyone who is in charge and how democracy works over cops constantly shooting the innocent - people, dogs, whatever, and generally carrying on like thugs.

It's probably because French citizens are smart enough to put their own well-being before their governing powers well-being.

Yeah we've been together for 200 years, but it's not going well at all.

It was the same with the original development of the country.

The difference is apparent when compared to Canada.

In Canada the pioneers were led or joined by the police, the newly created Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Law and order arrived either before or with the new pioneers.

In the US, it was the other way around. Pioneers went west without any officials, police or law enforcement. Pioneers dealt with everything by the force of a gun. Whoever had a gun was the one with power and controlled everything ..... you could be a good moral person and lead a community or you could be a gang leader, decrepit, immoral and unjust, as long as you had a gun, you could do whatever you wanted.

It's not a thing where I live. There's going to be other countries where the police operate like a gang, but it's just not the case in almost all OECD countries. In authoritarian states like Russia and Iran, sure, but in functional democracies, it's just not the case. The USA is a big exception, it must be part of that american exceptionalism thing.

"Defund the police" doesn't mean salaries. It means stop outfitting them with weapons of war.

Indeed is reporting that the average starting salary is like $50k, and the average in the US is $60k. Policing also isn't even in the top 25 most dangerous jobs. That link is also talking base salary, but even in the situation you're describing, you're talking overtime in the $20k+ range.

The problem with bad cops comes down to two main things:

• they're not here for public safety or here to protect and serve, they're here to protect capital.
• well, it's really just the first one, but keeping that in mind, the system is setup in a way that the only outcome can be a corrupt police force. Legal civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, overly powered police unions (the only time I'll complain about unions), deliberately low standards in hiring, deliberately not require the police to even know the law they're supposed to enforce and probably a dozen things I'm forgetting. Police aren't there for us, they're there for capital.

Finally, police funding and increasing the number of cops has almost nothing to do with crime rates which is what calls to defund the police actually mean. Police are basically systematized violence where pretty much the only tools in their literal and metaphorical toolbelt are increasing levels of violence. The call to defund the police is more about funding the things that actually reduce crime – better education, economic outcomes, and people trained to deal with the types of issues that police are probably less qualified to deal with than the average retail worker like mental health crises. Advocates for defunding the police are instead advocating for spending to be allocated to people who are qualified to actually deal with these problems.

Anyway, tl;dr – if we offer cops better pay and better hours, we're just going to be getting more expensive cops stealing our shit, incarcerating us at one of the highest rates in the world, and murdering people with less consequence than the cashier at Target gets for not upselling credit cards enough because while plenty of good people* become cops, policing as an institution in the US is corrupt.

* "Good" people and "bad" people are mostly a result of the systems and culture they exist in and very few are truly "good" or "bad."

America has grown into something completely different from what it was when the British got kicked out.

Time evolves things, funny that