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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RULES
① Real-life decorum is expected. Please don't say things only a child or a jackass would say in person.
② If you're here to support the police, you're trolling. Please exercise your right to remain silent.
③ Saying ~~cops~~ ANYONE should be killed lowers the IQ in any conversation. They're about killing people; we're not.
④ Please don't dox or post calls for harassment, vigilantism, tar & feather attacks, etc.
Please also abide by the instance rules.
It you've been banned but don't know why, check the moderator's log. If you feel you didn't deserve it, hey, I'm new at this and maybe you're right. Send a cordial PM, for a second chance.
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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
Airman was in a Special Ops squadron, if I read the article right.
Fun fact, for every one person who graduates special ops training in the air force, something like 20 others fail and go on to do other jobs in the air force.
Even if he never saw action, he went through hell and back just in training. Just so he could be murdered in his own home by a florida cop.
I believe he was on a video call with a woman, and her account is that someone knocked, didn't respond when he asked who was there, and they hid themselves from the peep hole.
Then the police started pounding, still without announcing themselves, so he went and armed himself BECAUSE HE'S ABOUT HAVE HIS HOME INVADED.
Next thing, cops kick in door, see him, kill him, and blame him for making them murder him.
Oh, and cops were at the wrong apartment #.
Citation?
That version of events was in a different article covering this from a different Lemmy thread, not sure which one. Here's another one that appears to align with those additional details:
The article below says the video shows them announcing themselves, and then he opened the door with a gun in his hand. Not trying to excuse anyone but I think that could convince a judge that the officer feared for their safety.
Also idk about you, but my first instinct when someone is banging on the door, my last line of defense, is definitely not to open it up and say hi. OR let anyone know that I'm inside either way.
Fortson was assigned to the 4th Special Operations Squadron as a special missions aviator, where one of his roles as a member of the squadron’s AC-130J Ghostrider aircrew was to load the gunship’s 30mm and 105mm cannons during missions.
He was aircrew, not one of the operators that go through the Selection Pipeline.
ok, thanks for that. But still though.
Yeah it's fucked up
I'm a prior Special Operations Airman myself. Worked on a different version of the C-130 as a radio operator. It's still almost a year of additional training after BMT and usually involves a stint at a general aviation school, then technical training for your specific role on the aircraft, then specific training on your assigned airframe, then a SERE school (survival, evasion, resistance, escape...basically how to not get caught after you're shot down and how to handle being a POW if you are caught), then a bunch more training at your first unit. Still a pretty intense first year of service. What a fucking waste.
They aren't putting Gomer Pyle on that plane. Not everyone whose special ops is Delta or Pararescue.
Well shit looks like they're even killing military.
Honestly you're safer with a bunch of druggies than with a cop from Florida.
...or a bear?
I'd absolutely rather be in the woods with bears all around than with police.
Plus, the bears are friend shaped.
The bear won't kill you for fun, like a US cop will.
Well... some of them definitely would. But a lower percentage than cops, seems like, so still statistically safer. Plus bears can't use guns (yet).
Bears don't kill for fun.
Maybe you should read the causes section of the thing you linked. Fun is not listed.
Yes, researchers have stopped saying they kill for fun because it gives the wrong impression to people who can't understand that words can have multiple meanings and connotations. However when an animal is not killing for food, or defense, or practice, or any other definable reason, "fun" would be an acceptable label. They do not have to shout HELL YEAH BROTHER and put on sunglasses while doing it to call it that. Would you be more comfortable calling it "killing for the hell of it"?
Again, the article you linked suggests that they typically overkill, which is to say they kill more than they need. Like a person putting too much food on their plate. Not for fun.
"Eyes bigger than their stomach" is not the only reason bears will kill more than they can eat. Bears have been recorded killing a fuckload of prey without consuming any of it, in a manner that was not fully explained by adaptive foraging models (https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/30/1/202/5142956?login=false). If they don't touch it, cache it, or come back for it later they didn't kill for food; it's prey, so they're not killing in self-defense. Additionally, straight-up surplus killing like that was noted as a feature of some individual bears' predation style. Or put another way, it was noted in "SOME bears". Which happens to be the exact qualifier I used.
So again: if you don't want to use "fun" as a synonym for "no practical reason", give me an alternative word, but quit incorrecting me.
You can just leave out the Florida part.
I hope the Air Police get to arrest his murderers for violating his civil rights.
If the police can execute you in your home for having a gun on you then you don't have a second amendment right.
We don't have any rights until we get rid of these special snowflakes that kill someone the second they can.
These fucking pigs need to be leashed to a fucking desk
What actually happened. The article just says he died.
He was killed by the police. Media uses passive voice like a mother fucker, because gods forbid we put in black and white that the police killed someone instead of "so and so was shot and died".
I mean what events led up to this? The article doesn’t say. Like, was he just speeding or was he shooting at police?
He was in his apartment. There was a call to the police about an argument in the building. The officer went to an apartment that is said the be the wrong one, banged on the door and shouted to open up. Fortston answered the door with a piston in his hand, pointing at the floor. The officer shot him.
According to the media, Forston was on the phone with his girlfriend for a while by the time the police were called. It seems to me that, as far as the officer was aware, the only "crime" that occured was "an argument", and it sounds like the officer also had the wrong apartment. Unless I can view the bodycam footage it's hard to be certain but this definitely sounds like he was killed because he was black and had a gun.
I mean what events led up to this? The article doesn’t say. Like, was he just speeding or was he shooting at police?
I wonder if the police in Florida have a way of spying on the zoom/facetime call that he was on.
And I wonder if the woman was somehow connected to the police.
Dude, I wonder if he was an alien from a planet made of butts.