“So the cop was tracking random people off social media using this incredibly invasive technology, on a pretty regular basis.”
“That’s bad.”
“But, an audit detected his abuse of the system and he was slated for termination.”
“That’s good!”
“But the system still exists, and can be used for nefarious purposes as long as those are state-approved uses backed by a case number, which is honestly a bigger deal and concern than one random officer using it for, presumably, stalking.”
“That’s bad.”
“And, from the description of the nature of their auditing, it would be pretty easy for an officer to use the system abusively as long as they were more careful to disguise the nature of their access than this guy was.”
“That’s… also bad.”
“And, it’s notable that the auditing in question was done by his department, not ClearView itself. It sounds like it’s up to each individual law enforcement agency to make sure its officers are using it ethically, without centralized oversight from ClearView let alone any type of judicial or legal oversight, which sounds like a recipe for abuse even leaving aside the issue of state-sanctioned abuse of the system and the general increase in police powers it represents.”
“… Can I go now?”
Do. Not. Trust. The. Police.
100% 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.
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.
“You killed three peop- oh you resigned? Nevermind then. Have a good day Officer.”
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.
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, housing for homeless people etc. So the point is that you wouldn’t need as many cops in the first place if things were handled more humanely “downstream” so to speak, instead of just letting problems fester until things go sideways
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.
This is exactly it. But it doesn’t fit on a hat or bumper sticker so the details get ignored.
The cartoon is excellent but yes the problem is that the phrasing doesn’t match the reality. “Fund the nonpolice” isn’t catchy though.
Honestly, just properly funding anything that is designed to do benevolent things for the community as a whole is a tough sell with way too many US community politicians
This seems to be a problem with at least conservative politicians everywhere. In Finland where I live we do still have the vestiges of a welfare state (and it really is vestigial at this point), but right wing politicians keep dismantling it and cutting taxes on the rich, and later on leftist politicians find it impossible to roll back any changes due to resistance from the right.
Defund means to essentially get rid of a department or thing. The phrase “defend the police” means “get rid of the police”. It doesn’t matter if there’s some cartoon to re-explain away the phrase or a bunch of other people trying to re-define the English language. English is English, and words have meaning.
The “defund the police” movement failed because us liberals don’t fucking understand marketing. Like, at all. I can’t count the number of times some liberal movement crops up with their slogan and Republicans turn that slogan against them because nobody spent the ten minutes time to think about how that phrase or thing could be abused. For example, that brief time when the LGBT movement wanted to rename themselves to LGBTQIA2SUVWTFBBQ? Seriously?!?
It’s like naming your baby “Assman McAssface” and wondering why he gets bullied in school.
I have a private theory, for which I have absolutely 0 evidence, that the forces of the establishment have some way of sneaking stupid unpopular things or phrases into the left’s discourse which the left then seizes and runs with, much to the establishments’s delight. E.g. renaming the Green Party the Green-Rainbow Party, climate activists attacking famous artworks, things like that.
I have 0 evidence for this, as applied to “defund the police” or anything else. Actually I sort of suspect that “defund the police” was an original creation of the ACAB contingent which meant exactly what it sounds like, that got retconned by more sensible but still reform-minded people into meaning “more properly fund everything else” for exactly the reasons we’re discussing. But as a general rule I suspect (again, with 0 evidence) that some of what you’re talking about actually comes from deliberate sabotage.
But in order to get the money for those programs, especially if their effect is to lower the workload for police, you should get the money from the police budget, otherwise it’s just wasted money. Are you just going to keep giving the NYPD a billion dollars a year to do nothing?
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.