THE POLICE PROBLEM
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
① Real-life decorum is expected. Please don't say things only a child or a jackass would say in person.
② If you're here to support the police, you're trolling. Please exercise your right to remain silent.
③ Saying ~~cops~~ ANYONE should be killed lowers the IQ in any conversation. They're about killing people; we're not.
④ Please don't dox or post calls for harassment, vigilantism, tar & feather attacks, etc.
Please also abide by the instance rules.
It you've been banned but don't know why, check the moderator's log. If you feel you didn't deserve it, hey, I'm new at this and maybe you're right. Send a cordial PM, for a second chance.
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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
view the rest of the comments
28 people in two years doesn't really sound like a lot. Is that higher per capita than the regular population?
Depends on how and what they die from. It's a controlled environment with (what should be) heavily monitoring by personnel (that's what they're paid to do).
Problem is, jail / prison guards don't give a shit about inmates. Even if you're in pre-trial jail (a massive overpopulation), they'll barely give you the fucking time. And asking for necessities is a chore itself.
So if they actually gave a shit, few to no inmates would ever die in holding.
That's a pretty good question.
On this page, the city says it held 6,138 inmates on 9/1/2023, and as of August the average stay was 92 days. Wikipedia says the city's estimated population was 8,467,513, as of July 2021.
Someone's gotta be smart enough to calculate an approximate answer from those numbers, but I slept through the kind of math it would take. Anyone?
Uhhh, I'll try. This site lists the New York death rate at 0.0060 (0.6%)
28/6138 = 0.0046 (0.46%) So it's about the same? Not sure how to include the average length of stay in the calculation.
It's math, so I'm out of the running. I think we need to factor in length of stay, but might be wrong. I suppose the average inmate is younger than the average New Yorker, too.
Does Lemmy have an ask-a-mathematician subLemmy?
You do not need to include the length of stay. You will need to divide the interval (22 months/1 year)... 0.46%/(22/12)=0.25% per year.
From there, it would make sense to control for age. To do that, youd want to integrate an actuarial table based on age demographics for both populations. It would also make sense to control (if data is available) death rates mortality rates for a similar at-risk population... you could go on and on.
Ultimately, statistics can be tortured into telling you whatever you want to hear.