I completely agree with you. They need to be made accountable.
That’s the real root of the problem. ACAB/defund/whatever, if they were actually held accountable for their insane actions a lot of the problems would go away.
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mozz@mbin.grits.dev 5 months ago100% agree with this
I should make clear I am not an ACAB person by any means. The whole mentality that the police are automatically the enemy makes just as little sense to me as that the police are never the enemy.
But no one in the world should simply have unaccountable power. Body cams, judicial oversight, warrants, charges when they abuse their power, get rid of police unions or anything else that makes it difficult for a department to fire an officer who they feel is causing problems. Just like some percentage of non police people do bad stuff and we need a system to watch them and try to protect everyone else from them, we need it 10 times more for police people.
TachyonTele@lemm.ee 5 months ago
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 5 months ago
Yeah. The frustrating thing is that the blanket "defund the police" attitude actually makes the problem of department-hopping bad cops, or tolerance for bad behavior by cops, worse a lot of the time, by starving departments of resources which makes it harder to hire as many cops as they need which makes them more desperate for employees and makes it harder to be selective about who they employ.
hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
The way I’ve understood the “defund the police” movement’s point is that they’re saying police funding is excessive because a lot of the things cops do should be handled before the cops have to get involved, eg. with higher funding for mental health and social services
MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
This is exactly it. But it doesn’t fit on a hat or bumper sticker so the details get ignored.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 5 months ago
Yeah. That part makes perfect sense to me. It's a little different from what you were saying, but someone on Lemmy was actually telling me about their experience with someplace where something like this had been implemented -- mental health people going on certain calls instead of cops, with cops assisting in cases that might turn violent, and it sounds like it works out great from all people involved's perspective. The callers are happier because people come who are better at handling the problems, the cops are happier because they don't have to deal with calls they are less qualified to deal with, the mental health people are happier because they have cops on standby for violent calls but they also get to deal with things right from the jump, instead of coming in after the cops came and just tackled and cuffed the person or whatever and now they have to come into the middle of the wreckage.
I know you were talking about things at an even much earlier level than when the 911 call happens; that sounds good to me too. The only part I was objecting to was the vindictive framing of it. Like if you want to fund mental health and homeless services that sounds great, we should do that. Coupling that idea up with punishing the police because they were bad (not saying you're doing that, but definitely some people have that in mind saying "defund the police" I think) I don't think is the way to produce progress though.
electric_nan@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
That’s what ACAB means though. You cannot trust cops, because there’s no real accountability for them. Why is there no accountability? Because their colleagues lie for them, their bosses lie for them, the prosecutors decline to prosecute them, judges trust them implicitly, their unions intimidate mayors and lobby politicians for more funding, tougher laws (for non-cops) and less accountability for themselves.
The system is so fucked up that reforming it seems like a waste of time. Actual “good cops” get squeezed out or worse. You might as well assume that ACAB, because the stakes are too high to assume otherwise.