Everything wrong with state sanctioned violence in one convenient, illustrated package. Look at the whole assumption of Government as a punitive machinery. The entire narrative is that the state is constructed as a “punishment machine” for transgressions - and that the law is a set of regulators designed to accurately asses your readiness for this punishment.
Then there’s the whole “cop propaganda” angle. Expert in the Bill of Rights? Shoot the other leg, it has bells on it.
The first rule is to always get home alive? Um, shouldn’t the first rule be to uphold the law and keep people safe? It’s not to charge and fucking destroy anything that stands in your way when you’re threatened. Sometimes you have to take a punch, a knife, or a bullet to keep the public safe. It’s why being a cop is a terribly difficult job. It sounds callous to say so (with the caveat that in the end all lives matter), but cops’ lives should matter LESS than the lives of the people they protect when weighing the consequences of police actions.
Indeed. Don’t talk to the Police. I’m not sure whether the page is presented straight, or whether it’s an illustration of how “Police One” and the like distort the worldview of the police.
Somewhat related:
How Police Training contributes to avoidable deaths
More pointed lessons come in the form of hands-on exercises. One common scenario teaches officers that a suspect leaning into a car can pull out a gun and shoot at officers before they can react. Another teaches that even when an officer are pointing a gun at a suspect whose back is turned, the suspect can spin around and fire first. Yet another teaches that a knife-carrying suspect standing 20 feet away can run up to an officer and start stabbing before the officer can get their gun out of the holster. There are countless variations, but the lessons are the same: Hesitation can be fatal. So officers are trained to shoot before a threat is fully realized, to not wait until the last minute because the last minute may be too late.
But what about the consequences of a mistake? After all, that dark object in the suspect’s hands could be a wallet, not a gun. The occasional training scenario may even make that point. But officers are taught that the risks of mistake are less—far less—than the risks of hesitation. A common phrase among cops pretty much sums it up: “Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.”
A budding attorney needs to understand the biases of police officers in order to effectively use or rebut their testimony-- even if those biases are absurd and unjust.
Indeed.
The webcomic begins with a cast of characters—
The Cop
The Prosecutor
The Defense Counsel
The Judge
And they all have high opinions of themselves, they all have weaknesses, and they all serve defined roles in Criminal Procedure-- (The defendant is marginalized in this book)
That’s the meaning of this page
Here’s a bit about the prosecutor
and the defense counsel
Ok. That’s fair.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
