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[Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism (i.imgur.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/maliciouscompliance@lemmy.world
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[–] 94 points 1 year ago* (20 children)

The poor copper lost all that time arresting a guy with Plasticine Action on his t-shirt only to have to de-arrest him when he could've been arresting an old lady with the words "Palestine Action" written down on a piece of paper for her to be prosecuted and maybe even get a jail sentence.

That mistake was making it hard for him to make his quota of arrests for that week, the poor bloke.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago* (19 children)

    This is why I always imagine it'd be funny to ask a cop "so how many murders got solved this week?" whenever they're wasting time on mundane shit.

    I've never had an interaction with a cop where they didn't make it unnecessarily intense.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Their job is not to solve crimes, their job is to get people convicted, the subtle difference being that they'll turn non-crimes into crimes (for example, they'll chose to legally interpret things which can go both ways as crimes which require prosecution, which is why one often sees kids criminalized for childish bullshit) and it doesn't matter if the person convicted is innocent, all that matters is that somebody got convicted (so, for example, they won't try and find exonerating evidence).

    This partly explains their tendency to take an adversarial posture towards people who aren't from their group, also partly explained because that posture itself indirectly feeds back on them (people are weary of them because of how act towards the general public, which in turn makes them feel apart and suspicious hence they behave even more so) and partly because they do tend to get exposed far more than most people to the seedy side of humanity all with a judgemental mindset and an aim to see crimes, so even a lot of the stuff they see which most people think is just silly fun (say, most drunkenness), they'll see as crimes.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

    Police solve something like less than 2% of reported crimes.

    Even a libertarian can see this is fucking stupid, imagine a restaurant that gets 2% of its orders correct and served in a timely manner.

    Police do not primarily exist to solve crimes.

    They primarily exist as a goon/thug class to protect property and capital, all other behaviors and effects are ancillary.

    If Police wanted to actually lessen crime, they'd either attack its root causes and use significant parts of their budgets to fund affordable housing and public schools, or massively reorient toward pursuing white collar crime, which is often of such a huge financial scale that it basically directly impoverishes society at a large scale.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    That figure is a little misleading, but I understand how you picked it up because it’s everywhere.

    Police “clear” crimes to be progressed for prosecution.

    Prosecutors “prosecute” crimes. It’s this that the 2% figure is aimed at. The clearance rates (the job done by the police) is higher.

    According to this article[1], 22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions. They then halve both of those numbers to account for unreported crimes. The article still uses the 2% figure in the headline despite the nuance in the article.

    That might sound academic given the overall point you make still stands. I just thought it was worth mentioning.

    1: https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes-143878

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    Ok then, so more technically, and more generously to police from a purely reactionary perspective of 'they can only respond to reports'... they do an adequate job of clearing 4% of what actually gets reported to them.

    I know that cops dont actually prosecute, I made that post before falling asleep, I was a bit loose with language.

    Their role in the prosecution process is basically to be witnesses, to gather evidence for the trial.

    And, unless I am misunderstanding this... ~82% of the arrests they do actually make ... don't result in convictions, and are thus 'overarrests' in some sense... as ... you went to all the effort to make an arrest, and it turns out that no actual crime was committed?

    Cops have an ~18% chance of making an arrest for a serious crime that actually sticks?

    They have an ~82% likelihood that they are overpolicing, like by definition, when it comes to serious crimes?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Apologies if I sounded like I was lecturing there. I got very into the numbers.

    I see the 82% figure you mention too. But I feel out of my depth now. An arrest requires probable cause (a low threshold), whereas courts require reasonable doubt (a high threshold). The gap between these two seems to be what should let police work function. Eg: attorneys examine or challenge the charges, plea deals, case dismissal / acquittal etc. But I’m skimming articles I don’t understand at this point.

    82% does seem high to me too. But I also see too many cut-and-dry cases on TV. I don’t know what to think.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

    No worries about seeming to lecture me, you were more correct and precise, I was sloppy, any other person reading this convo would be well served by the precision and context.

    So thus I will now nitpick you: 'beyond a reasonable doubt'.

    Hehe.

    I definitely concur that basically all cop oriented or cop centric media is set up to make almost all cops and such look like extremely well intentioned and competent people, when factually, most cops are simply of average intelligence, and are uh, kind of well known for things like abusing their partners, being right wing authoritarians, also doing overtime fraud.

    I would be curious to see if other countries have a substantially different arrest to conviction ratio.

    I know that many other countries spend far less money on policing, have far lower rates of incarceration, and some even require something akin to, or an actual law degree of some kind before they can actually be various grades of police officer.

    Further, obviously, almost all other country's police are significantly less highly armed, and the US is just rife with absolute bullshit practices being promoted as legitimate training and procedures... we still widely use 'lie detectors' that simply measure stress, and often give false positives snd false negatives, we have nonsensical 'body language expert' shit everywhere... and just generally, the police are taught that the general populace is basically an enemy combatant force, ala how we approached policing in the Iraq occupation... because a lot of the people and materiel from Iraq War 2 just got recycled into local Police Departments.

    EDIT:

    Oh right, and then now ICE just is the Gestapo, and has more funding than the Marine Corp.

    Also the NYPD currently has more funding than the entire military of Norway, or Vietnam, or Mexico.

    (not combined, but singly)

    It would be the 30th largest military in the world by funding, if you threw it up there.

    ICE, alone, would be uh... abouth the 18th, as large as the entire defense budget of the Netherlands.(tied for 18th), somewhat less than the entire defense budget of Israel (17th), a bit more than the entire defense budget of Brazil (19th)... if you go by per annum allocations.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Counter-nitpick accepted 😄

    If you’re in the US, yes, you’re famed for all the policing issues you mentioned. I can only go off of conversations with my friends dotted around the EU but the perception we have is that police here are different because of circumstances rather than innate qualities. They’re generally not armed, they’re slightly better educated and at least on paper, there are institutions providing oversight.

    But the same problems exist here to one degree or another, especially racism. But also excessive force, using their position as an officer to protect themselves from accountability around issues including domestic violence … and while lie detectors are rarely used they are starting to use AI at border control to detect if people might be lying: https://peopleofcolorintech.com/articles/ai-lie-detectors-at-borders-who-does-the-eus-ai-act-actually-protect/

    So I don’t know how we really compare. I see some crazy videos from the USA of people’s interactions with police. It seems like another world completely compared to here in Ireland. And ICE seem like domestic terrorists rather than law enforcement.

    But we also have institutional corruption so bad that the force tried to frame a whistleblower (Maurice McCabe) for child abuse. The most senior people were replaced with someone who wasn’t Irish (Drew Harris), essentially given the job of draining the swamp / reforming the institution.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

    I think I generally agree with everything you've said, yes I am from/in the US, I also have had many EU internet friends over the years... yeah, policing problems exist everywhere, but they're a lot worse here tham the EU generally.

    We have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, of any large, developed country.

    We imprison more of our population than commonly referenced authoritarian states like Russia and China.

    We have more total prisoners than Stalin had in labor camp gulags at the height of the gulag system, we have more people incarcerated than China does, and their population is roughly 4x larger than ours.

    We treat way, way too many problems as crimes to be jailed or imprisoned for, not social problems to be solved at the root cause, and we have a neat little carve out in our Constitution that explicitly allows slavery, forced labor, for imprisoned people... we have a massive industry of private, for profit prisons, that exploits this slave labor.

    Oh and also police are nearly never actually prosecuted, convicted, or sent to prison, we only very recently even began to attempt to have meaningful data on much of that... cops are literally above the law in a wide range of scenarios, allowed to violate their own rules routinely, you have to really, really fuck up hard as a cop to actually be convicted...

    And then going to prison, as a cop, is often a death sentence... because the other prsioners fucking hate cops.

    Even if you are not a cop, basically you should just expect to be raped in prison, thats how common it is, everyone acts like this is a funny joke though.

    And all those figures and facts were true for years, decades, long before Trump and MAGA just went full fascist, and decided to bring back WW2 style internment camps, but for undocumented migrants, and the homeless.

    We've already got disease outbreaks running through these concentration camps, which are largely being blacked out of the media, I will be entirely unsurprised if we just progress as the Nazis did to 'work till you die' camps and outright death camps, in just a few years time.

    Shit's really bad over here.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I didn’t realise how high the prison population numbers are. I first became aware of the issue when System of a Down released “Prison song”.

    Those numbers you shared are really abhorrent, and explains why my lawyer acquaintance finds the prison system there shocking (he visited the US a few times). He absolutely would not want to see something “so inhumane” here.

    I wonder how to interpret the 82% non-conviction in the context of over-conviction.

    We have people in prison that are as much victims of poverty and undiagnosed problems like ADHD / autism. So if we have people imprisoned who would be better served (including society) elsewhere, I can imagine it’s pretty bad there in the U.S. Ifs a genuine tragedy, but an injustice against human rights too.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (6 children)

    System of a Down?

    Here's my attempt at an inverse:

    Rammstein: Amerika (it's wunderbar!)

    Yeah, I'm sick of us too.

    We are a third world country in a gucci belt, we are basically a failed state at this point.

    Oh hey! David Bowie: I'm afraid of Americans.

    Me too Dave, me too. RIP.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I know (and like) the David Bowie one partly for that line. Thanks for the Rammstein recommendation, I hadn't heard it. It feels apt for Europe, which seems increasingly Americanised.

    When I was growing up there was a song called "In American" by British band Red Box. But looking back, I think it's hypocritical to criticise America if we don't also acknowledge our own comparable problems here. We're not dealing with the same scale of predators you have there because - at least in Ireland - there was less for the ambitious and power-craving individuals to aspire to. Those people usually left for America for that reason, where they could be their unbridled, exploitative selves and make more money than they ever would have here.

    So I don't see Americans as the problem, but the systems and the difficulty in changing them. Many problematic people have simply been exposed to unimaginable amounts of disinformation and cults. It's a difficult problem but if anyone can overcome it I think you can.

    There are more decent people in the USA than the news cycle and online grift-fluencers make it seem.

    I think we're all the same. I despair too, but each population grows up in its own Petri dish. Depending on what attention your resources have attracted and how corrupt the news cycle is, different traits will be evoked in society. So while it's bad, and seemingly getting worse, I have a bit more hope in people wherever they're from.

    I feel for you. I'm not even based in the USA and I find it impossible to avoid US news of the latest political vulgarity. So I follow the good people who lift my heart - whether that's Project Pink!, Mumdani in NY or anybody who gives me hope. We can't let the despair get us, because that's the real war that's going on here. Once we let despair reign inside us, they've won. Keep the faith!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Funny you say that about the Irish that migrated here...

    I'm aporoximately half Italian by heritage, and from what I know of my own family, and uh, general Italian American culture... uh fucking yeah, yep, same thing lol!

    Where we differ is that... yeah, to a great extent, we are a bit uniquely fucked by our systems...

    But I spent the better part of two decades getting a Poli Sci and an Econ degree, being involved at tons of ground level political stuff...

    ... and almost nobody fucking cared, back during Obama, back when we actually had a realistic shot and altering the institutional inertia of those systems.

    We could not reform the electoral college, which doomed us to the Imperial Presidency.

    We did not repeal the PATRIOT ACT, now everyone who thinks wrong is a terrorist sympathizer.

    We did not countermand Citizens United, now our government is wholly corrupt, bought and paid for by corporations and their boards of directors.

    We did not implement a ranked choice voting paradigm that would have made it much, much harder for the Republicans to keep their power, to keep gerrymandering and rigging out voting systems.

    That was it, the Obama years, historically speaking, that was our shot!

    And we missed it.

    I told everyone I knew that what is happening right now was a very likely outcome if we didn't achieve those things at that time.

    And almost everyone I knew called me paranoid, delusional, hysterical.

    ... So no, the problem is Americans.

    We are too high on our own supply, we've been huffing our own farts for so long that we just assumed we were immune to the broader forces of history.

    We still barely even manage to get half the population to vote, for the President, and local and State level election turnout numbers are way worse.

    We don't care, it isn't cool to care.

    De Tocqueville rather importantly notes that a well informed and educated, and politically engaged populace is required for democracy to work.

    What he saw in America was a kind of practical communalism, everyone knows and interacts with and is willing to coordinate with their neighbors and their town... thats how he described our fledgling republic.

    But we abstracted that all away, got lost in our own propoganda amd gadgets and doodads, and now its all blowing up in our faces.

    Trump is a symptom of a deeply anti-intellectual and religious fundamentalist streak that consistently runs through our history, and no one ever really bothered to do anything systemic about this, even though its implications are obvious.

    Don't get me wrong, our systems are fucked, but we had so many chances to do... anything else, anything other than neoliberal phantasmagoria as a political ethos... we had so many people, and stories, and signs, and artists! all pointing out our own hypocrisy... and we basically just sung along and pantomimed being rebels that could change the system, as corporate America just turned that into another marketable demographic, and very very few 'hippies' and 'rebels' and 'punks' realized that is what happened.

    Sorry, I losing focus, starting to fall asleep, but basically uh... no we Americans fucking suck, trust me, I probably know more of them than you, haha!

    EDIT: Oh right, I'll have to check out Red Box, cam't say I've heard of them!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    I can't argue with anything you've said. Indoctrination is very hard to break out of, and it starts at a young age in the USA (if the people I followed when I was on TikTok are accurate). Singing the anthem at school, hanging the flag (we never saw flags at school here until St. Patrick's Day), being told USA is the greatest and that other countries want to be like the USA, that it's the land of the free ... all indoctrination. I'd go as far as to call it brainwashing.

    We're fragile creatures (Fragile, by Sting, since we have a musical theme going!). It's hard to contend with such an onslaught. I don't blame people for that. I'm curious, what did it for you? How did you begin to see the wood from the trees?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I came from a highly patriotic, religious fundamentalist family.

    Unfortunately for them... I am also very inquisitive, very curious, pretty autistic, and very good at analysis.

    The cracks were subtle at first... but they could not be ignored... the more I took it upon myself to learn... the worse it got, in terms of upholding the false reality.

    I couldn't pinpoint an exact thing or moment.

    Maybe it really was watching the Matrix... a barely describable unease, sense that something... is wrong... a splinter, in my mind, driving me mad.

    I was talking, with people from all around the world, in realtime, in the early 2000s, taught myself how to code, read voraciously, did well in school, got those two degrees... at the same time, just had to do either one or two extra summer quarters to finish in 4 years, went to work in corpo america, bounced off of its bullshit rather rapidly, went to non profits, to be able to use my skillset but not feel morally disgusted with myself.

    I do remember one thing... walking to work one day.

    A lump, of blankets, in the alley near the downtown corporate hq i worked at.

    ... huh.

    Work.

    Lunch.

    Time enough for a bit of a walk.

    Pass by that same alley.

    The lump is gone. In its place, there is a ... stain.

    And there are city workers, with flamethrowers, burning it away.

    Sterilizing it.

    Because it was the remnants of a decaying, human corpse.

    I think it may have been that moment that I realized our society does not give one fuck for the poor and homeless... and that at that point in time... my job was ultimately to facilitate the grander processes that led to that person's likely avoidable death.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The ‘tism can be a great asset for seeing through BS, along with education.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Which is why the Republicans intentionally misunderstand, infantilize and demonize the first, and destroy the latter.

    We are down to about an 85% literacy rate now.

    Average American reads at a 6th grade level, less than 5% can actually do critical analysis, compare and contrast different news stories covering the same event/story.

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