190
San Diego officer resigns after locking himself in patrol car with woman he arrested
(www.sandiegouniontribune.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
190 points (98.5% 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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There's been cases of underage students coercing teachers into sex and the teacher wouldn't get convicted of rape too. Or if you want to draw an even more extreme scenario, what if she was faking an emergency, the cop looks for her in the back and she forces herself onto her. Would you still argue he raped her because of power imbalance of his job and physical strength? We can go even further... Are all sexual acts of men onto women rape, because they're inherently stronger than women? Can men not get raped by women because of this?
The cop here clearly did abuse his power, but it was absolutely not rape. She was using his weakness against him. It's like accepting a monetary bribe, except that it was sexual favors instead. This is corruption, not rape.
That's not an argument in defense of rape, that's a reason to expand the legal definition to align with the reality of the situation.
Anyone who is empowered to take away all freedom from an individual cannot have consensual sex with that individual. Whether explicit or not, there is always the threat of force when a police officer has someone in custody. It is not possible to consent to sex under those circumstances. It is always rape.
They aren't able to just take away all freedom because they don't actually have that power. A cop can only hold you in custody for so long. A system can still only take away your freedom based on the crimes committed and that is still for a court to finally decide on whether you're found guilty of that or not. In this case the situation is that the cop can make you NOT go to prison by looking the other way or falsifying data. It's the opposite scenario of what you're describing. This is a quid pro quo situation where both parties would be benefiting from their underhanded deal that they've made.
Yes you get due process, with a bias towards believing the system. People can often spend months in jail before the process progresses to the point where the charges get dropped. So yes a police officer doesn't have the power to put you in custody for your whole life, but they do have the power to put you at the mercy of a flawed system where you are rolling the dice with your future.