Their job isn’t to protect us, that’s a misnomer, their job is to enforce laws by submitting possible offenders for punitive adjudication. The only way that they can do that efficiently is via force; as such a behavior is in itself abusive, it will be resisted often.
Police Forces need to be replaced with Civilian Protection Services: unarmed, but arms trained, servicemen and women who act as mediators and patrol our communities on our behalf: identifying threats to peaceful society, and peacefully working to remove those threats through the prescription and provisioning of various civil services.
Armed SWAT teams should still be in place in big cities or by county, so they can be used like Firemen; but tactically deployed to severely hostile situations rather than to put our fires. They’d be restricted to armed bank robbery, armed hostage situations, active shootings, et cetera…
Accountability, Rule of Law, Due Process, all hamper the ability of cops to do as they please. They may get in the way of legitimate activities now and then, but it’s not a sufficient reason to do away with them.
I noticed a fair bit of the “good” guys dispensing with legality for convenience since they were knew they were right. I’m at a loss to remember when they suffered for doing so.
Fuck the police. Seriously, in everyday life, I’m less afraid of gang members, terrorists and serial killers than I am of “officer [could be friendly, could just decide to kill you so he can get some paid vacation]”.
For a little while, I was learning to become a paralegal. That was enough. I can’t watch courtroom dramas anymore. The most common thing I see that doesn’t happen is someone surprising the other side with an eleventh hour witness or piece of evidence pulled out of their whatever. It’s just… never that dramatic. Unless really terrible lawyers are involved, then it’s a shitshow. One lawyer in our area tried to conduct a sting operation and sell drugs to people to discredit them as witnesses, then admitted it in open court. His license was suspended. How he got to keep it at all is a mystery to me.
You don’t even need to be in the legal profession to see how unrealistic all that surprise evidence and sudden witness stand confessions and melodrama are, you just need to have sat on a jury, or watched a trial from the gallery. But nobody wants to watch an actual unedited trial for entertainment. (Same way watching unedited police work would involve a lot of paperwork and waiting around in courts and hospitals and directing traffic.) That shit is bo-ring. I would rather sit in a featureless silent room all day.
Oh, good, a second new thing police <a href=“https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/list-of-things-that-frighten-police/75690"target=”_blank">are afraid of in the same thread - teenage girls on bicycles.
I can’t tell you how much I’d love to watch SVU with MrPants. I always sit there thinking, “Wait, can they do that? Is that legal?” But I lack the legal expertise to answer my own questions.
He can yell at the TV for unrealistic portrayals of the legal system and I’ll yell at it because they started a conversation at the station, drove somewhere, then picked up the conversation right where they’d left off while getting out of the car. Who the hell does that, and did they spend the entire ride in silence or did they talk about something completely unrelated?
Right? I like that the entire station works on ONE CASE AT A TIME, collectively, as a team. Even if there was ONLY a single crime a day, these guys spends weeks working on one case together, so what happens to all those other crimes that are reported daily? They just don’t get worked on at all?!! Unpossible!
MrPants likes to point out how they ruin peoples lives. They just pick up and hold the first suspect for days and weeks or months, and then find the real suspect and all they say is “cut him loose” - dude! You just ruined that mans life! He’s likely been fired, evicted, and dumped! And they (and most people) do not care a whit.
And to carry on further -
As a cop, even on the rare occasions when you’re CAUGHT doing something grievously wrong, you’ll most likely receive a nice vacation while the taxpayers foot the multi-million-dollar bill for the lawsuit regarding your actions.
“lots and lots of police officers” are pulling back from aggressive confrontations with the public because of viral videos.
Excellent outcome then. We have no use for aggressive confrontations with the public by police. We would rather have professional interactions than aggressive confrontations any day. It’s just gotten to the point where aggressive confrontations seems to be our only option.
