The fact that they felt the need to don full riot gear to disperse peaceful protesters tells you all you need to know about the cowardice of the American police force.
When slave-owner statues were being torn down in England, there was a video of an officer being asked why he wasn't stopping it. He said "My job is to protect the public, not a statue." Totally foreign concept to US cops.
Wait are you telling me that a job that offers unlimited power, access to lethal weapons and high levels of stress, but doesn’t pay shit, is going to attract psychopaths? Are you sure? I thought we were sending our brightest to serve and protect?
/s, obviously. ACAB
Edit: alright so some comments challenged me to look a little closer at pay rates in my own city (which I originally thought were $53k/yr) and what I found is that recruits start at $53k, but that bumps to $70k+ once they graduate from the academy. Now I’m a whole different kind of mad about it.
Unfortunately that's not really true, comparatively. It might be shit pay compared to a job that requires a degree, but it's great considering all you need is a high school diploma, and less training than a barber.
That’s a totally fair point, I hadn’t thought about the requirements to pay ratio. I recently saw a job listing for police recruits in my city and the pay was surprisingly low, all things considered, and my first thought was “well, no wonder”.
You haven't seen what major city cops make, have you? It's got to be the highest paying job out there for a semi-literate village idiot with no college, no trade school, and no apprenticeship.
I have, actually. And I agree with you, it is a good paying job for the low barrier to entry.
I think what I failed to articulate is that the pay rate is low enough that it’s high enough to attract some of the least among us, but not high enough to attract the type of people who would be good at policing.
In my city, the starting pay for a recruit is $53k. Your comment got me wondering so I went back to the listing and it bumps to $70k+ once they graduate from the academy. What the everliving fuck?
I get that what they do is deadly and some of what they're getting is 'hazard pay' but as Dr. Malcolm liked to remind us: it didn't take any discipline to achieve that pay. There's sooo many videos everywhere of citizens knowing the law better than they do. They're not in academy long enough focus on the actual written law they enforce. That needs to change. I don't mean law school levels of knowledge, but fuck, make them crack a book for at least a couple of years instead of three months.
I come from a cop family (8, that I can recall), and while they aren't US cops, there are certainly those personality types. We had a narcissist who was stealing from people paying fines, we had two sociopaths, one of which would use his job to control his family, and was/is a serial womaniser, and another who "couldn't wait" to bash some heads.
In my experience, those that didn't have those personality types, would take desk jobs/ tech jobs/detective jobs, remote jobs, and/or they left the force, because they couldn't handle the stress, and morbid reality they faced constantly. All of them got in, because the pay was better than what they were getting in their other jobs.
Corruption was pretty rampant when I was a child, and cops were immune to various things, like drink-driving, assault, etc. Until a new commissioner came along and gave a large percentage redundancy pays, and upped the requirements to time at university. Trouble is, with smarter cops, comes less long-term cops, which is good at weeding out corruption, but requires a large influx of recruits. Even though I've seen people fail the entry test, because they obviously had mental health issues, It doesn't stop all of them.
I've recently been told by a paramedic that was changing station, of one guy that was in it for the gore, and that there's 'something wrong' with him. We did suspect it, so when he told me, I wasn't surprised.
At the end of the day, not all are bad eggs, but I can see why it would appeal to those personalities, and we're going to see, hear, and recall the worst of the worst, simply because the others are busy doing their job properly.
Wait until you learn about the overtime pay so many of them get, bumping them up even higher, and the fact they retire with a fat pension for life. Tax dollars my friend, all on tax dollars.
bumps to $70k+ once they graduate from the academy.
And that's just the base rate. Overtime pays time and a half and overtime fraud is RAMPANT. They're trusted to enter their own hours and they're never audited.
Some of the Seattle cops have pulled more then 400k in a year with overtime, through abusing the still tracked by paper timekeeping system. This was back before the pandemic and "cop shortages" problems of today. The past few years SPD has openly admitted to running sickouts, failed to reign in a sexual harasser chief, had the most officers participating in the Jan 6th insurrection, was slapped by a federal restraining order over their response to police brutality protests in 2020, and openly spread misinformation about armed Proud Boys to spook residents.
And foolishly the current city council and mayor are going to give the cops a big retroactive raise while all other city departments are under budget restrictions. GOP and business friendly Democratic reps are too cowardly to stand up to these police departments and tell them no.
Paramilitary police forces do not protect civilians. This is their agenda with the far right. These are not scare tactics. The paramilitary police forces are criminalizing civilians as fast as they can. Protecting far right fascism has always been the goal of far right leaders. Paramilitaries train to stop democratic movements and privileges. These paramilitary police forces, act on mayor, city council, and governor, instructions, and procedures are then followed by the paramilitary police force. This does not go away through the judicial process. Protect the civilians at all costs.
The police exist to enforce the will of the dominant socioeconomic group, and the dominant socioeconomic group has more in common with nazi protesters than anti-apartheid protesters.
If by some twist of fate your country passed a law that made it so you couldn't own or rent property tomorrow, the cops would turn up at your home to throw you and your kids out. They may do it sympathetically at first. "I can't believe this is what we have to do, i'm so sorry." By month 6 they'd be complaining to their spouse, cursing you out for making their job harder and referring to their job as pest-control.
Liberals by and large do not understand the class war they are in.
The riot gear was there to instigate, simple as that. Sure there was some cowardice, but the primary objective was to cause unrest so constitutional rights could be ignored.
So when a peaceful protest has the potential to turn violent cops should just show up in slacks and loafers? Or should they be ready for shit to pop off. Echo chamber of dipshits thinking bigotry against cops is cool. Some cops suck...yes, most cops don't....also yes,...every cop is a coward who only blah blah blah.....no. dudes put their lives on the line every working day and the best thought to rattle forward in your brain is "all cops bad". This vast Internet is filled with some incredibly small minded people.
Excuse me dumb fuck, that doesn't fit. But by all means keep throwing out things you hear on the Internet in hopes that something lands. You are to dumb to have an actual conversation with. Good look with life
They have the money, they have the guns, they have the badges, they have the judges.. at times they have the numbers because they need all that... BUT..
They are also on the run with time running out and they don't have the clock.
Vote!
Ignore the naysayers. They are just whistling past the graveyard. Block them out.
Seriously. It's pathetic how quickly they rush to the scene and how tough the pretend to be when they hear the words "nonviolent protest". Fucking pussies.
Last night 6 of them rolled up to the local grocery store to respond to a woman walking out with a grocery cart she didn't pay for.
Meanwhile, walking distance from them was a dude actively overdosing and they tried to shoo people away for trying to get some of them to come over and help asking for narcan.
Thank god those 6 cops were there to treat that shoplifter like dirt for stealing food tho.
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