this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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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.
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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.
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ALLIES
• r/ACAB
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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
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ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
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As much as ACAB, I can admit that sometimes an armed response is necessary. It sounds like you danes have a well trained force, rather than some 6 week academy psychos with a hard-on for violence.
Cops aren't really bastards in Denmark. Oh sure, you'll find anti establishment types everywhere; there certainly is no love for the police in Christiania. However, the overall opinion of Danish citizens towards the police is positive. In Denmark people genuinely feel safer seeing a policeman on the street.
Police in Copenhagen are also friendly; unless they're in the middle of something, you can, as a citizen or a tourist, walk up to one and ask them questions.
Police do carry pistols in Denmark, but someone just starting their career in law enforcement isn't immediately given a gun until they've had a good job record and proper training for a few years. The amount of paperwork a cop has to go through for even suggesting they'll pull their gun is staggering.
It isn't any more complicated than that ACAB is an obvious ~~US-centric~~ exaggeration and that there are police forces out there that doesn't suffer from the same systemic problems that according* to American media is pandemic in their country.
Started by working class British punks no less!
I stand corrected on that part then, it was wrong assumption based on the fact it seems like 99,9% of all negative news in regards to police I see is from USA. I'll strike it out.
Well tbf our cops do kinda suck a lot and we have some glaring systemic issues with our policing system lol, it's not like the assumption is unreasonable!
It's maybe not unreasonable, but as someone living in Norway with only neutral/positive experience with police, it certainly rubs me the wrong way when people speak of it as if it is an universal truth. Especially as American online culture inevitably affects Norwegian kids' view of society, which is very different from the American society.
Oh for sure, you guys actually train yours!
Yeah and that's really the core issue. Cops aren't evil people but the US policing context is toxic AF
Yeah it's a whole systemic thing, frankly there isn't really "one issue," but a multitude all working together. Stuff like no knock raids, qualified immunity, even just "one's tendency to stick up for one's friends" which we all have and we all do, but when you're the police force covering crimes it's a lot different than me clocking my friend in to work when he's running 5min late and doesn't want to be fired about it.
But as you say there are indeed plenty of good cops, though the "good ones" can't even do anything about the bad ones and so they end up being complicit or fired, making them "also kinda bad" or "no longer cops." That is another part of the phrase and why it's not "SCAB or MCAB, Some/most Cops Are Bastards," tbf.
It is a sweeping generalization, though, and as such it can never be 100% accurate by nature. Sweeping generalizations are too...general.
Personally I'd like more focus on the politicians who allow this system to be the way it is than the people working in the system (of course, you have to do both)
Police in the U.S. carry firearms at all times. Even those that get sent to assist with mental health checks, pack a firearm on their hip. Which means there's an implicit threat of force if you do not comply.
So, ACAB, at least in the U.S.
If children can't understand that U.S. police are not the same as Norwegian police, just by that above difference, I don't know what to tell you. Track their socials better, I guess. There's a ton of far more toxic shit coming out of this country than ACAB.
Of course, the worst influences affects adults/politics instead. That doesn't mean all other issues should just be ignored though.
That really isn't how it work though, and the saying isn't AACAB...
Okay well then educate your children about where that saying comes from and why some people feel that way instead of being pissed that people and other countries have different views of police than you do?
The saying started in the 1920s when police were brought in to bust up strikes, in the UK.
So why are you blaming Americans anyway?
Sure, let me go around the whole country of Norway to remind every kid/teen browsing the Internet that most of what they read are about a completely different society, and that all those people speaking in absolutes are in fact wrong...
I'm not really "pissed" about it, I'm get slightly annoyed the few times it pops up but that's about it.
US <> world
US is less than greater than world? Which one of us just had a stroke?
I believe it's meant to represent a distance.
Wherever it originated, it's the US cops that seem the most obvious and appropriate target for ACAB. I hate the acronym because while all police forces in the Western world seem to have some systemic issues, theyre not all as extreme as in the US. Also, it literally isn't all cops, it's the system they work in, so CAB would be both shorter and more accurate
It’s “all cops are bastards” for a few reasons.
First, ACAB because the good ones get rooted out if they don’t both turn a blind eye to their bastard peers misdeeds, or in some cases actively help them covered up. Good cops don’t stay cops for long.
Second, only bastards are attracted to that job. The power, the impunity, the unearned respect. Anyone who wants to be a cop is either already a bastard, or the few that aren't are stupid and misinterpreted the obvious situation, and they get rooted out very quickly. What kind of person looks at policing in America and decides that they want to be a part of that? A bastard, that kind
Third, “the thin blue line”. The true meaning of this is that there is a thin blue line that police are never supposed to cross, that being snitching on other officers.
The police (in the USA) are their own entity, a cohesive group. Time after time we see it on the news, the police abusing their power, killing people, forced confessions, torture, racism, misogyny, theft through civil asset forfeiture, rape. Sure, maybe there is a cop who hasn’t personally done these things, but they are a part of the group that does. They are 100% complicit, even though they would be putting themselves at risk to expose or protest these actions.
I think it has been long accepted that ACAB is in reference to the police of the USA. While police misconduct itself certainly isn’t limited to the yanks, it’s so overwhelming here that there really is no nuance to this situation.
In the USA, policing itself is corrupt. The idea that a member of this corrupt institution could be good is almost a paradox. Here in the US, there is no such thing as a “good cop”. “Good” and “cop” are mutually exclusive.
I noted another poster who.was from Norway complaining that his kids have picked up ACAB despite being from a place with a markedly better police force than the US. I'm in NZ and the same thing has happened with my kids. You may be just talking about the US context but the Internet is borderless