this post was submitted on 22 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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• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
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• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Don't talk to the police.
• Killings by law enforcement in Canada
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• 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
• So you wanna be a cop?
• When the police knock on your door
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MODERATORS
The USA never heard of tasers?
I mean you shouldn't tase everyone but at least if you shoot someone with it at least they are taken out of the equation with a high chance of survival.
Oh, they use those when they want to torture you.
There was an alternative option out there that I haven't seen much of - it's an attachment on normal 9mm pistols, that dampens the first shot with a less-lethal projectile. The idea is, if someone is resisting, you can use the shot and avoid killing them. If they're playing Superman, then you still have lethal force ready in the rest of the magazine.
Police departments haven't favored it. I assume, because they just gosh darn love killing.
Hear me out on this: Let's leave guns to the undeniable 'this is for killing' variety. We need to reduce the normalization that it's ok to draw a gun and this would only serve to have a stronger 'gun first policy' to encounters. I don't want to be in a world where I hear gunshots and have to question if it's non-lethal or not. "It's ok. I only heard one shot." Is not the next step I want to see.
I would assume that if the police were forced to use this they would condition themselves to double tap in every scenario to get right to the lethal rounds.
I don't want to defend the police here. It seems like they're more than capable of defending themselves against toddlers and innocent people sleeping in their homes.
What I will say though is on the efficiency of tasers. They're grrrreat, if you get skin contact with both electrodes, on the first try. But both prongs must hit, pierce the clothing, and get skin contact. Reloading the taser, or switching to the side arm, can take too long. There's a lot of myths about what will stop a taser, and I guess that some of the myths are affecting cops in their choice of force method.
But going for the gun on a disturbance call about a woman with a baby and the baby's grandmother? And shooting the baby? What, as the baby identified as an armed and dangerous fugitive?
It's only a problem if you think that you need to kill. And I mean there lots of different tasers, you just described one and then went on to say that it won't work.
Not only that but you have to be a preeeety exact distance from the target, too far and you're likely to miss a prong entirely, too close and there's no chance you get enough prong spread for intramuscular incapacitation to take effect (think the difference between taser videos where they get the right spread and the guy locks up vs videos where they don't and we get the "I'll get you bitch" video lol).
(Of course as you said this situation likely called for neither. It seems to be a domestic between a 30ish/yo woman and her older MIL, unless one of them was armed this was a "hands" matter not a "weapons" matter, at worst OC spray.)