Castle Rock v. Gonzales for anyone curious about the SCOTUS opinion that says cops only have a duty to protect property.
And for those interested in is police really have to protect and serve, look up “Police duty to protect” online and feel free to start on the wiki. It’s astonishing how little police actually have to do. As someone trying to become a cop, this is one of my biggest issues with the field outside of blatant racism.
I once asked an elementary teacher what was to stop cops from breaking the law whenever they wanted and she told me that any cop breaking the law would receive double the normal punishment. I nodded my head as that made complete, reasonable sense to me. Then, as an adult, I learned THAT ISNT TRUE AT ALL! Not only do cops NOT automatically receive double the punishment, but 99% of the time the entire system will rally around to protect them if they commit a crime.
If any one would hear that in my country it would be the fiasco of the century. (we have had one) You aren’t even allowed to go near the studying line if you have any criminal record. When the police make an mistake in my country, there will be an investigation. And the investigation is done by a party not in the normie police force, which can and does lead to convictions of the members police force.
Instead, Americans: here is your gun, go shoot and kill anything that moves, you are unimpeachable.
Also, in my country, if a member of police force fires a weapon, this alone means there will be an investigation to determine if the action was really necessary. The police cannot fire weapons without paper work, and are thus reluctant to do so.
Oh, Sweden, how’s your problem of gangsters with explosives (and thus explosions) going on? We have had some, but those have been mostly directed towards tincan cops. (i.e. traffic cameras, fuck those.)
I don’t know why you’re downvoted. Unfortunately explosions and gun violence have increased exponentially. Now the news frequently talk of police officers befriending criminals or criminals joining the police force. It’s a shithole.
Finland. You can punch a cop in the face, and the only repercussions is that your are a violent moron with an pricey after math. You can avoid the pricey after math, if you give up before punching the cop in the face. :) (It’s temporary jail time in both cases)
Give power of life and death over others in an environment were they de facto are judged less strictly and punished less strongly than other people, to people with 3 weeks training.
If only it was a question of “3 weeks training”. The real brain rot of being a police officer happens as you’re jumped into the street gang that is your local sheriff’s deputy division.
Its a real Learn By Doing situation. And what cops learn over time is that they are utterly unaccountable save to their immediate superiors, who all have their own political and financial agendas that diverge starkly from the ostensible job of policing.
3 weeks? It’s more like 20 weeks, which yes, is low compared to other countries. I have two friends who are cops and they went through 20-25 weeks of training before they ever went on patrol, and then it was with an experienced partner. I’m not sure what academy is doing 3 weeks of training, but yikes.
Bro law and order explains this to five year olds, you should know how dumb that argument is.
In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.
Implying that the executive doesn’t need to know law is crazy, every branch of government utilizes the law but one can only make law and the other can only enforce it.
Ignorance of the law isn’t an excuse from the law unless you work for the government and then reasonable mistakes are somehow reasonable to make. Ie. The government can get away with ignorant criminality and use it as a defense but you and I cannot, that’s not ok.
In the case of cops, not knowing the law is actually a benefit. They’ve been allowed to enforce what they believe is law, and if they find something actually illegal in the course of enforcing imaginary law, then it’s still valid.
It’s a benefit for the government not the people, they get to extract more from people who don’t know better, it’s abusive. It may exist but I don’t enjoy it.
Implying that the executive doesn’t need to know law is crazy
Its not entirely crazy.
Police exist to follow a very particular set of orders from their commanders (not unlike soldiers in the military). They get told “Keep people away from this building” or “Point this radar gun down the highway and don’t come back to the office until you’ve cited at least 10 people over the speed limit” or “Keep anyone who looks suspicious out of this neighborhood” and they’re graded on that task, not on the overarching capacity to enforce all laws.
In the same way you don’t need to give a guard dog a chemistry degree, you don’t need to give a cop a law license.
The guard dog isn’t expected to do chemistry, it is however expected to know it’s job ie. Where it is and isn’t supposed to be and to be fair if a guard dog kills the sheep the dog don’t survive the night. Probably not a good example on your part.
You’ve clearly never owned a guard dog or worked ag. Stop pearl clutching shot that’s been done since the dawn of domestication.
They don’t, they do however have to know what they’re doing what smell is good, what is bad, what is uncertain and react accordingly and suffer consequences from bad choices. You’re argument is for more specialization in policing which I’m for but I don’t think you actually know your arguing for it.
No one is asking them to, but when like 70% of officers do not know thev4th amendment, how it applies and when it does not. Yes, they’re willfully stupid, we get that, it isn’t however something to accept it’s something to change.
Fucking baffling to me how the most armed country in the world doesnt train their officers. German police tends to suck ass, but to become a policeman you have to study for 3 years. And you have to pass a lot of law exams.
Where I live, the police are lazy but they are more trustworthy and are more community-oriented, unlike the American police.
At first when I heard the ACAB slogan, I thought it was rather judgemental. All cops are bad? Then I learned that the American police are hired primarily on having low IQs and receive only few weeks of training. Now I understand why Americans hate them. Not all American cops are bad, but majority of them probably are. What can we expect from hiring low IQ folks with minimal training and arm them to the teeth? No wonder the American cops are memes themselves.
ACAB as an actual term is a bit more ideological in nature, specifically, in regards to the task the police actually do, which is primarily protect the state and private property, no matter whether it’s good or bad.
If the state tells the police to disrupt a protest about climate change? Then that is their job, and if they don’t do it, they’re effectively not doing what they’re supposed to.
You’re a bit off in the ACAB definition. It’s not that the state makes them do bad things (they do, but that’s irrelevant). It’s that all cops protect bad cops, making themselves bad cops as well. If a department has 30 cops, 3 are “bad” and 27 are “good,” then the bad ones should be forced out. That doesn’t actually happen though, so you have 30 bad cops.
This system is also heavily self reinforcing. If you add a 31st good cop that tries to do something about bad cops, they are either forced out or intimidated into compliance. That still leaves you with all bad cops.
At first when I heard the ACAB slogan, I thought it was rather judgemental. All cops are bad? Then I learned that the American police are hired primarily on having low IQs and receive only few weeks of training. Now I understand why Americans hate them. Not all American cops are bad, but majority of them probably are. What can we expect from hiring low IQ folks with minimal training and arm them to the teeth? No wonder the American cops are memes themselves.
And when they do get things wrong, they rarely get punished.
The slogan probably wouldn’t be quite as prominent if the police that made mistakes like that were held accountable.
I think most “my kid made an interesting observation” stories sound fake, but this checks out for me.
When kids think of a “law man” they probably think of sheriffs and cops. When a kid overhears an adult mention “law school” they probably think it’s where a “lawman” went to school.
Police generally dont think the law should apply equally to themselves and civilians. That’s most cops; a group within that thinks they should be able to create the law on-the-fly.
Should they go to school to be better at this? Irrelevant. They have a gun and the idealogical highground.
Yup. By now I’m pretty sure all the federal warrantless wiretap stuff probably applies to local police as well. They’re like parents and we’re like the kids, and they have access to all our phone activity.
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