the preponderance of movies with cops as the main characters where their bosses turn out to be corrupt and then get arrested by the Good Guy Cops who are the REAL cops isn’t a fuckin accident tbh its straight up propaganda distracting from the very real fact that the problem is not “bad cops”, the problem is cops in general and as an institution
Are you saying that an institution meant to prevent/protect against criminals is a bad thing? I understand that it can be corrupt/that power can be abused but I don’t see the idea of police as bad. Or am I misunderstanding you?
police aren’t intended to protect anyone but the law
like for instance, the police force in the US was created originally to capture runaway slaves, and it hasn’t changed much since
Most european police forces came out of state suppresion of industrial disputes.
And the majority of private eyes were used as strikebreakers
I mean, not only were Pinkertons strikebreakers, they formed the basis for the FBI afterwards. So domestic intelligence is in the same boat.
The New Jersey state police (among others) in the early 1900s modeled their uniform on the uniforms of police forces in Europe specifically to invoke fear in European immigrants, who at the time were heavily targeted by police for their associations with radical labor and communism.
The London River Police is widely recognized as one of the first public municipal police forces, and it was created to protect the private property of wealthy sugar merchants from labourers collecting traditional compensation through “sampling” or “lumping”. The “wages” of the labourers were so low that they could barely feed their families, and thus police force was set up to ensure that they didn’t “take any more than they were owed”, even though there had been an unspoken understanding that these practices were PART of their income for generations. When caught “stealing”, these labourers were now often transported to the penal colony at Botony Bay. “The Law” is all about criminalizing poverty to protect the profits of the rich, my friends.
– Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century has a chapter that focuses specifically on this topic. x
– Learning about Jeremy Bentham and the development of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 is also helpful for further developing our understanding of how poverty became associating with moral failure/laziness. x
Sure, keep this “Cops are bad mentality” when you are being attacked or robbed by someone. I wonder how that will end for you.
Because it’s a great sign of admiration when someone who is supposed to serve and protect will blatantly leave you to die because you posted some anti police shit on Tumblr. Way to completely prove our point.
Additionally, “calling the cops” when someone is attacking you or has robbed you is statistically very unlikely to do anything. The vast majority of robbery cases go unsolved and unpunished, and if someone attacks you calling the police doesn’t stop or undo that, it just means they may face legal punishment and you may have someone to make a civil case against if your injuries are severe. Assuming the cops can successfully find the attacker, when they usually can’t. The vast majority of these cases go unsolved. Police departments are wildly inefficient at everything except for crowd control, and are actually less efficient at solving most crimes than the small localized sheriff’s departments they replaced. They have been for years, and the money we spend on them would prevent a lot more crime if it were instead spent on social programs and welfare programs.
It’s almost as if the point of the police *isn’t to protect people* and is instead *to keep people in their place.*
Cops did nothing but blame me when I had a flasher come after me
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 