this post was submitted on 20 Nov 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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MODERATORS
You should post that to the Wikipedia community.
At this point it would be better usage of money to make it a surveillance state instead of a police state, cameras won’t shoot you
It's also a surveillance state at this point.
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so is this ad meant to push people to pay the fare or to start a revolution?
It's saying the quite part out loud about the normalized police state we live in.
I'd say a bit of both. The numbers they showed for it if I remember was that they spent $150m to catch like $100,000 of fares that were skipped. Then throw in 4 people dead and you didn't do much to help. You just made it more miserable for people travelling.
With fares making up 23% of your income, and payroll taking up over 30% of expenses... Odds are they could cut the number of guards patrolling tolls, ticket sales people, customer service reps, maintenance workers for all the machines/guard terminals etc by a shit ton and make the transportation free, and offset the costs elsewhere. It would also likely boost the economy of the area, do to people not needing to scrape together a couple dollars to take the train and spending it at businesses they otherwise may normally avoid do to costs or not having that extra few dollars.
Well, I’ll give you an update here as I have boots on the ground:
They cut back on the amount of cops on the platforms now—but now every single exit door has a private guard (one of those rent a cop companies). So now they’re bringing privatized security into the mix. But there are still cops on the platforms! Just not as many at the door because they’ve hired some security guards to have the same effect an MTA person has, which means they can’t really do shit if you don’t let them stop you.
So a slightly different way to waste money.
In Ontario, asshole political leader Doug Ford is trying to stop free public transit by paying for transit cops out of the provincial budget. That way no one can make the payment you just made. Can we have the same amount of money to spend on improving public transit? No. The only thing fearless leader Doug Ford fears more than free public transit is good public transit.
What a bag of dicks. Watch other conservative states and provinces follow his lead!
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This is why it's important to remember that in any revolution, resistance, or targeted action, it's the police that are the first enemy. They'll be the ones that respond first, and will likely toe the line the most reliably.
2nd Amendment is usually a punchline, but it may become necessary
Tbh, it always has been.
The only problem is that we've been set up so that the people that are most likely to oppose the worst case scenario are the ones least likely to be both armed and willing to fight.
Just wait, though. If things slide the way they could, it won't be long before the party policy shifts against armed citizens.
NY transit starts getting complaints about an ad they have no idea about.
"No, m'mam, we don't have a death penalty policy.....no......no m'man, I don't know what poster you saw....."
"but yes m'aam we did shoot and kill 4 human beings for cheating us out of the 2.90 fare"
Fortunately none of them died as far as I can find. Surgeons had to crack open the skull of the bystander they shot in the back of the head to relieve his brain swelling though. I hope he recovers because he's gonna be set for life.
They spent 150 million on overtime for cops to stop fare evasion. How much were they losing in fares? I'm gonna go ahead and guess it wasn't even a teeny fraction of that.
They spent 1500x more on enforcement than they could have ever recovered from fare evaders. Just like every single other monitoring and enforcement program for public services.
Has there ever been a single program like that which is actually a net positive? Fare enforcement, food stamps means testing, public services with drug screens, "welfare queen" check ups, means testing, etc. I'm not aware of a single instance where it wouldn't have been cheaper just to let a few people get benefits that "didn't deserve them" than putting these restrictions in place
But God's forbid we let poor people have nice things, or just to do good things for our society. Goddamned toxic puritanicalism. ..
Absolutely right. Brings to mind something I read a while ago which I will paraphrase.
"Liberals want everyone to get what they need even if a few cheat the system. Conservatives want nobody to get what they need if there's a chance anyone will cheat the system."
Somebody on Lemmy a while back asked about the phrase, "the cruelty is the point," and whether it was true and fair. Well, here's the evidence: The point is not a net gain on fare collections.
The fact that the numbers are public and they keep doing it proves it: The cruelty is the point.
That's why Seattle largely doesn't bother with fare enforcement and doesn't even have turnstiles. It's simply a waste of money and manpower.
What were you able to find out about the cases? 👀
Just what I wrote above. There aren't a lot of articles about it after the initial incident. Our media has the attention span of a frantic gnat with Level 11 ADHD so it's not surprising.
public transit fares are a steeply regressive tax on the poor
I disagree, the poor would be worse off without public transit since else it'd be much harder for them to move around. In fact many if not most public transit systems are subsidized and operate at a loss.
The richer don't use it and so care little, beyond the macro level that it benefits businesses and such.
I think you may have missed his point. He wasn't arguing against public transit, just the fare. It should be free. For the reasons you yourself mentioned.
Public transit never turns a profit, not because it's bad business but simply down to the economics of providing affordable transit. In fact, fares recover such a small percentage of a public transit agency's budget that there's good arguments being made for making public transit fare free. Public transit is a net good for communities so making it as accessible to those who want or need it is important
The statement they did put out about the poster was basically
"The shooting was not over skipping fare. But everytime someone skips fair we loss money and people are in danger"
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No lie the dude in the reflection looks like my NYPD cousin.
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