Well, it may not be the most constructive way of dealing with police abuses, but it's one of the vanishingly few consequences police have faced for their malfeasance and unfettered violence.
And 40% of police officers inflict domestic violence on their families, yet we give them weapons, a license to use violence to back up their authority, and release them into the streets, where they can do... Pretty much anything they want, without legal or social consequences.
Yep. Imagine they beat Tyre only 20% as badly. He didn't die, but it was still a brutal beating. Would anything have come of it? The only punishment comes when cops go many levels beyond what is already grossly unacceptable behavior, and even then this punishment is far from guaranteed.
Isn't abuse of power the most terrifying when it is used not for the extraordinary, but for the mundane? The very idea that police abuse of power is "mundane" in some way is disturbing.
As far as I can tell, the rules that are on the books for handling dangerous situations is not at issue, it's the complete disregard for those and any other rules. It's the rampant abuse of power that's the real problem.
There is no longer any accountability or consequence for a police officer committing the most heinous of crimes in the United States. At worst they'll get fired, then hired back onto the force in the next town over.
Ok, some are great, but when you see that the ‘bad guys’ in the police face no consequences for their actions, the police force looses respect in the eyes of the public. And that’s a normal reaction. But they can earn it back, though it seems, through their training and instructions, they quite often prefer intimidation over respect.
I'm surprised more people don't go tit for tat on cops that do that. It's shocking that cops's reputations are not ruined permanently, and to the extent they cannot continue in their jobs and living in their communities when they use extralegal punishment.
Merely firing officers for wrongdoing is itself a huge departure from the norm and starts to set a precedent. Of course, it must continue even when riots aren't gathered outside the precinct.
Unfortunately not everyone has the same sense of duty and the respect for life. Since "these bad apples" don't get punished anyway, and since the system is evidently useless from removing them from ranks, one alternative is to hurt them where it really hurts them, their wallet. I don't know of this will push the half-dirty in police forces to go all the way to the dark side since they will feel that society owes them and they need to make up for the reduction on their disposable income.
I would say police abuse does appear to be a serious problem and lawsuits are probably the main thing that keep it in check. The departments themselves don't seem to deal with offending officers properly very often. It always pains me to see settlements and the offending officers returning to duty with little repercussion.
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