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.
♦ ♦ ♦
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.
♦ ♦ ♦
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.
♦ ♦ ♦
ALLIES
• r/ACAB
♦ ♦ ♦
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
♦ ♦ ♦
ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
view the rest of the comments
1: “Expect the best and people will rise to the occasion.”
2: Good police officers like in OP are fired every month. 800,000 cops in the US… there is a police department trying to fire their good cop(s) RIGHT NOW! Why plaster ACAB everywhere and risk discouraging them?
I do imagine many would argue even the fired officer (Taisyn Crutchfield) was a bastard but that gets tough to defend.
btw here’s the footage of the incident
No. Fuck the police.
ACAB.
I struggle with this myself, and I choose to look at it as a semantics issue. The point of ACAB is to highlight that bad cops are empowered by colleagues and departments who let them do that they want. It's a condemnation of tolerating bad apples vs pruning them out. I think of it like the Nazi example -- when 4 people happily sits down at the table with 6 overt Nazis, you end up with 10 Nazis. ACAB is condemning those 4 as enablers of the 6 and allowing them to persist.
So I agree, but I don't think literally every cop is a bastard. There are some good people who are trying to use their position to change things while still helping the public -- just like Crutchfield. It's not worth the effort to specifically exclude them though because that's not where change is going to come from. The good cops are fighting a losing battle. We'll only see things fixed if there's sweeping federal legislation to reform police.
And in that sense, ACAB is useful. It reminds people that these aren't just a couple cops that needing weeding out, its entire systems and institutions. We can't solve this by addressing only a few bad apples -- we need to change the whole bunch. Now it might be that the only ones we throw away are the bad ones, and the rest of the bunch proves capable of realizing the problem. But you still have to address the whole bunch at once.