Police in the US use force on at least 300,000 people each year, injuring an estimated 100,000 of them, according to a groundbreaking data analysis on law enforcement encounters.
Mapping Police Violence, a non-profit research group that tracks killings by US police, launched a new database on Wednesday cataloging non-fatal incidents of police use of force, including stun guns, chemical sprays, K9 dog attacks, neck restraints, beanbags and baton strikes.
The database features incidents from 2017 through 2022, compiled from public records requests in every state. The findings, the group says, suggest that despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.
Contact the police and tell them that you think that the US police departments are sliding into fascism.
I did that to the local police chief and gave examples when they have acted fascist to me.
They sent “mental health professionals” to interview me. Because one must have mental health problems to see police as fascist ?
Anyways if you do start down that path with the police, then expect their family and friends, and the other agencies with access to your locale will begin to show you what fascism looks like in full force.
Fucking worth it.
The psych part is key too - if they can claim you are mentally ill, not only can they ignore your concerns but they also have a convenient way to dump you in a psych word if you get to annoying.
Friendly reminder that 988 = 911!
I did that to the local police chief and gave examples when they have acted fascist to me.
They sent “mental health professionals” to interview me. Because one must have mental health problems to see police as fascist ?
And now you know why red flag laws are a bad idea
What was the reason stated on the warrant when they came into your home?
They didn’t show me one, they just broke in and kidnapped me.
I did a quick dig because I wanted to see if the rise in police homicide would trend with population growth and violent crime rates. It did not.
Violent crime has been pretty stable for the past decade. Growth in police homicide exceeded the population growth rate by about 7%, if I did my math right.
I’d like to investigate more when I have the time.
TBF though, US use of force has been underreported and lacked nationwide statistics for most of the previous decades. If I’m not mistaken, one of the federal agencies who attempted to track it stopped giving annual reports in 2017? Idk I’m kind of fuzzy about that.
The most accurate records of how many people were killed by the police in the US are pretty much from a journalist who counted news pieces or something.
Here’s the head of the FBI in a hearing of some sort: “We can’t have an informed discussion, because we don’t have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend or how many books were sold or how many cases of the flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by the police in the United States, last month, last year, or anything about the demographics.”
edit oh yeah the thing I was trying to say in the beginning of the comment comes instantly after that bit: researcher Philip Stinson accumulated over a decades worth of Google alerts on police killings
I am europe based. Can I ask why this is such an issue in the US?
Police aren’t legally accountable for their actions so long as they’re acting in the performance of their duties, and lots of departments knowingly have illegal policies on the books to maintain that immunity for their officers.
People try to sue over it, but the cases are thrown out by the local judge because there’s no standing to sue unless the illegal policy had impacted you, so a cop basically has to kill someone before the policies are modified in the smallest way possible, but the killer cop still gets off.
Additionally, police are allowed to lie in most of their interactions with the public. They have created a culture that encourages dishonesty, so perjury isn’t an ethical problem in their eyes.
Not entirely true. Cops are fired, penalized, and held legally accountable quite often. Not frequently enough but you’re stating that they are immune.
Qualified immunity protects state and local officials, including law enforcement officers, from individual liability unless the official violated a clearly established constitutional right.
The prisons are for profit and the state gets to keep anything it seizes.
Ignoring problems tends to make them rot faster. Hollywood is superficial, it’s all we got. None of the basics are taken care of, it’s why I left (e.g. wealth before health). No safety nets, desperation is easy to find. Limited opportunities if you can’t afford to do anything. It’s an unsustainable way to live, if you call that living. It’s more like surviving.
Yeah but I was referring specifically to the police attacks. Cause I hear about it regularly in the news just to see another aggression?
Any parallel between expenses and police violence?
We’ve been hiring these “police trainers” that have been telling police that their job is super dangerous and anyone can kill them at anytime if they’re not ready to kill at the drop of a hat. Then creating bullshit scenarios where grandma passes by in the street and shoots them. Like the lady in the red dress in the matrix training.
Anyways being a cop has a lower chance of getting you killed than being a pizza delivery driver, so these people are ALWAYS ON EDGE but the payoff never comes. So they behave like an immune system when nothing is happening by attacking the body.
So they’re beating innocents and abusing criminals left right and centre and there is nothing we seem to be able to do about it other than give them more militarized equipment so they can beat us better while feeling safer doing it.
Don’t forget the military surplus from endless wars, and the lack of social services causing mentally ill people from biology or circumstance to further burden an untrained police force (obviously shouldn’t be their job to begin with, fuck cops). They can keep throwing money at police, but it won’t fix any of the causes and people in general are bad with grasping exponential feedback loops.
…partly it’s cultural, partly it’s legal immunity from abuses of power…
…law enforcement receives negligible training nor regulation, funds itself on the spoils of abuse, bullies anyone who objects, is immune to accountability, and readily hops jurisdictions in the event of public backlash…
Also anyone that tries to fix the system from the inside tends to get targetted, at least by HR if not by their peers whose corruption they are threatening. The bad apples are in control and have a system to either turn new apples bad or toss them out.
And the police unions are used to avoid reform from above, since pretty much any attempt to discipline is challenged with whatever means available.
And they are a gang with state resources available to help enforce their will, plus inside information about how investigations are run and access to those doing the investigations, should their other lines of defense fail.
It’s an issue in many other countries as well and there are a great many contributing factors.
- Race and “Tough on Crime” politics - Ever since the emancipation of slaves on the basis of race, there have been political figures passing discriminatory policy that allows police to pursue and harass people at their own discretion: black laws, Jim Crow era laws, forced segregation, the 1994 Crime Bill, etc.
“We have to strengthen our laws when it comes to mob violence, to make sure individuals are unequivocally dissuaded from committing violence when they’re in large groups,” Florida state Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin, a Republican, said during a hearing for an anti-riot bill that was enacted in April.
It’s clear that you can convince people to deregulate and militarize the police if you convince those people they have a greater enemy. You can see these stances and policy directions mirrored across Europe as refugees and immigration from poorer countries have increased in the last decade.
- Lack of Centralization - The FBI is in charge of investigating police departments, and sometimes you see jurisdiction overlaps which allows other agencies like the DEA, State Marshals, Sheriff’s Department, etc to investigate each other, but in general a Police Department is held to no standard but their own until things have already escalated past a point of return.
Some federal programs have tried rewarding PDs that behave well and adhere to specific training or standards, but it’s far from enforced.
I wonder if we’ll ever connect the dots. The FBI released a report more than 10 years ago that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement agencies throughout the country. Sauce: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Supremacist_Infiltration_of_Law_Enforcement
Lemme guess. 70% of those are black victims.
Kinda goes to show the failure of modern protest movements. What did BLM accomplish exactly? They didn’t convict Chauvin, it was the people filming him that did that. A lot of realistic ideas were floated to fix policing, but they were drowned out by edgelord calls to “defund the police” and “ACAB”. 4 years later nothing has been fixed.
People need to find a better way to make change happen. Raising your fist and marching around doesn’t change a thing. Maybe instead of that, people should pool their money together and spend it removing bad politicians/sheriffs/judges etc from office. That’s how oil does it.
A lot of realistic ideas were floated to fix policing
This guy’s grasp on reality:
people should pool their money together and spend it removing bad politicians/sheriffs/judges etc from office. That’s how oil does it.
I mean I plead guilty to posting while intoxicated, but it seems to me the fossil fuel industry does spend a lot of money on elections and basically has a whole caucus representing it in Congress. What do modern protests like BLM, Occupy, etc. have to show? Is there a single meaningful legislative change they can point to? The article seems to suggest quite the opposite. To be fair though, they did inspire a bunch of dismissive lemmy users to feel smug.
What I found weird was how many large BLM protests were organized for what I think were legitimate cases of police violence. Michael Brown and Jacob Blake come to mind.
Like there are plenty, plenty of legitimate cases, but when the same crowd doesn’t seem to make any distinction between obviously trigger happy cops and pretty undisputable self defense, the end goal and the solution becomes very unclear.
As you say: vote for better politicians. Vote for as much footage being recorded (cameras on vehicles, bodycams) and fully released immediately. Advocate people of underrepresented ethnicities joining the police force. It’s not easy but it’s the real path towards a better situation.
