For all my life I’ve heard we will hold cops more accountable. What happens is we pass laws allowing whatever abuse they are caught doing. Cops stealing? No problem. Let’s call it Civil Asset Forfeiture. Cops entering private land? No problem. We will call it hot pursuit. Cops enforcing non existent laws? Well he was ignorant and meant well. We’ll allow it.
We never have. And never will tighten the standards. We will always create more loopholes for the cops.
If my choice is between anarchy and corrupt police. I’ll take anarchy. At least then it is a fair fight.
Depending on what direction this society goes in over the next decade, I may end up agreeing with you, but for now, I trust my local authorities a lot more than the federal ones.
I have lived in Michigan, Wyoming, Colorado, Florida, New Jersey, California, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Georgia. I see the same corruption everywhere. I drove OTR trucks. I saw the same shot all over the nation.
You want to believe your local cops are different. I grant it is possible. It is extremely unlikely. I see the cops doing the same shit all over the place. One day, go down to your local magistrate court where pleas and charges are heard. Listen to the narrative the cops use. Every single one is exactly the same using exactly the same language and phrases. After a couple hours you will be hearing the lies. Small lies. But lies just the same.
Do you think this is unique to the US or is it a human problem?
It is said that Power Corrupts. If we accept that as true, then the problem is human in nature.
So how do we combat this problem? The counter to corruption is accountability. But accountability is the one thing we never do.
Look at the current situation. Just the threat, not even any action, but the threat of holding the police accountable for their misdeeds causes them to half ass their jobs and crime to increase. So we flee from the necessary out of fear. We as a people prefer corrupt police to anarchy.
We never hold the police accountable. Oh sure. We may throw a token sacrifice or two to the wolves but we don’t really hold them accountable.
So I don’t trust the cops. None of them. And I won’t lift a finger to help them. No more than I would to assist any other criminal. I will obey the law and report what I saw. But that is the limit. Otherwise the cop is on his own. If he doesn’t like it. Or she. They shouldn’t have joined a criminal organization.
What do people usually do beyond "obeying the law and reporting what they saw"?
Oh they do the usual. They’ll file a complaint. Nothing will happen. Even with video evidence of police misconduct nothing happens in 95 cases out of 100. Or they might sue. And even if they win, the taxpayers foot the Bill for the misconduct. Not the cops.
The truth is the Cops are no different than the Mafia in the old days where shopkeepers payed protection.
What we do as a society is decide that the bad things the cops are doing is fine, we pass laws or make court decisions allowing it.
A cop in North Carolina as one example. He stopped a car for not having a front license plate. The state the car was from did not issue front plates, only a single plate for the rear of the car. The cop searched the car because of reasonable suspicion. The search was challenged in the courts. All the way to the Supreme Court. The argument was that the initial stop was illegal. The cop had no legal reason to stop the car.
The Court decided, as they almost always do, that if the cop believes he is enforcing the law, that’s fine. Even if no law exists, it doesn’t matter. So the more ignorant our cops are the more authority they have, all approved by the Courts.
If I make a right turn on Red and it isn’t allowed, ignorance of the local laws does not excuse my behavior. Ignorance is no excuse, isn’t that the policy for every court in the country? But if I am a cop, ignorance is a perfectly valid excuse.
So even when the cops are caught breaking the law, we find excuses to justify it. A hundred cops were caught falsifying and lying on reports. A token two were punished. Their excuse was that nobody told them it was against the law to lie on the reports.
In the bad old days, the corrupt deputy would steal from people passing through the town. Turning in the valuable items into the sheriff. Today they do that and call it Civil Asset Forfeiture. We made it legal to rob people alongside the highway as long as you were a cop.
58% of the people think there needs to be major changes to the police. But we aren’t even discussing that. We are not even talking about what changes we should make. Nope. Any change or accountability is denounced by the thin blue line as risking cops or letting criminals go.
Nearly six in 10 Americans say "major changes" are needed to make policing better. Almost all Americans support making officers more accountable, while few support abolishing the police altogether.
news.gallup.com
So what do you think? Are the local cops good people who would never do that stuff? Or is Uncle Frank or your Dad just as corrupt as the cops in the worst departments?
That is why people want to believe their local cops are not corrupt. Family or Friends are cops and they don’t want to believe that they are corrupt.
voiceofoc.org
