As an outside observer it seems like American police culture is fundamentally rotten and it's not a funding issue.
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
1790 points (99.1% liked)
Microblog Memes
7757 readers
2330 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What's cool is they are exporting it. The cops where you are look up to the American style. When the American cops retire, they will be hired to train your cops with seminars and books. Its a fun little community. So you're an outsider, but not for long. Just a few more years of passively waiting and you will be an insider soon.
load more comments
(3 replies)
To address this problem, we need to fundamentally revisit the idea of the social contract. Even the definition of crime today feels outdated almost archaic. If you look into your country’s penal code, you’ll likely find absurd and antiquated laws that have no place in a modern society.
The deeper issue is this: most legal systems are still grounded in Victorian moralism, Puritan ideals that glorify work and wealth, and a liberal ethical framework that collapses under its own contradictions. Trying to solve complex structural violence with these tools just makes things worse.
The problem isn’t just systemic it’s internal. As long as we defend our comfort zones like fragile sandcastles, thinking “as long as I’m safe and untouched” (aka “I've got mine, so screw the rest”), then we will continue to see public resources diverted—not toward justice or equality—but recycled back at us as institutional violence.
F.e. the current Dutch penal code was accept in 1881. Thats 144 years ago.
Part of the issue is that we are mostly stuck in an economic structure that cannot continue forever unless everybody partakes. Getting more wages every year, getting more revenue and profit every year, just doesn't work for eternity. In theory, if everybody got their 2%$ wage increases and interest was just 2% a year (excluding promotions or corrections for pas years etc) it would be fine.
The circular economy theory is one of those theories that attempts to fix that AND also work on helping the repair, reuse, recycle movement.
Can we be real? Police do not reduce crime.
Police punish criminals, or rather, they punish those that they think are criminals, since everyone is innocent until proven guilty (also the reason you shouldn't argue, fight with, nor run from cops.... They can charge you with crimes like evading arrest, even if the arrest is unlawful, resisting arrest, or assault on a "peace officer"... Justice does not come from police action, it comes from the actions of the court)...
Police usually show up, and/or take action after crimes have been committed, not before.
If you want effective crime prevention, there are plenty of good studies that prove what works, and putting more police on the streets, and giving them better and better arsenals is not on that list.
From social programs to "handouts" for healthcare and basics like food and shelter, among so many more proven tactics, can significantly reduce crime rates.
Giving the police money under the guise of reducing crime or being tough on crime is just political spin. What they're trying to do is funnel public dollars to their friends who make the equipment that the police use. Vests, weapons, radios, vehicles, you name it. More police means that police departments need more equipment to supply everyone.
These fuckers in government are serving themselves and their fat cat friends, not the public interest. The worst part is, that many believe their shit and think that it's for the public good to give the police more money.
That's the real problem here, ignorance. But again, that's what the fat cats want. The majority to be just stupid enough to believe whatever they're told and do no further investigation.... To have faith in liars, thieves and cheats.
What they're trying to do is funnel public dollars to their friends who make the equipment that the police use.
Don't forget funnelling a steady stream of prisoners into their corporate prison system...
Also criminalizing any political opponents...
Same idea, different context.
They're still funneling public money to their friends, just the friends that run the for-profit prisons.
They're happy to criminalize anyone and everyone they can. That's the entire point of the police "service".
"To protect and serve" is incomplete. It's more like "to protect and serve corporate interests and profits"
In a normal state of things the police doesn't decide who is a criminal, the justice system does and that should be separated from the government. Sadly there are more and more corrupt countries these days. But yeah giving them more money for anything else than to get more/better personel doesn't help.
In a normal state, yes.
I don't think anyone confuses what's happening in the USA in recent years to anything that should be considered "normal".
The fact is, the Justice system relies on the investigative work of the police and other law enforcement agencies, in order to collect the evidence and reconstruct events, then accuse the likely perpetrator.
.... Except the law enforcement agencies are filled with people, and people suck. So 9 out of 10 times, people will "follow their gut" and look for evidence that supports what they think happened, and ignore any that doesn't. So only evidence that supports their conclusion is presented to the Justice system, everything else is discarded.... Even if some of those discards prove that the accused is not guilty.
The problem is that the Justice system is reading from the LEO's story book, so when law enforcement writes fiction, the Justice system has no real way to prove that it's not fact.... Not without the accused throwing literally thousands of dollars into the effort of defending themselves.
Therefore, Justice gets served for those with the means to defend themselves, for everyone else, you'll take whatever the LEO's think you deserve.
load more comments
(6 replies)
It's almost like their highest priority isn't lowering crime.
Chaos, artificial scarcity, and violence feeds the system and justifies its existence.
Otherwise, why would we still have a mass incarceration system? Why is it still punitive in nature with terrible and inhumane conditions normalized?
A cycle is created that makes people unemployable and industries and those in power reap the benefits at every stage of these people's lives - any police contact is effectively a scarlet letter. Specifically, many corporations benefit from the slave labor sourced from prisons and the private prison industry is its own can of worms.
With AI tooling screening job applicants with proprietary criteria, public data brokers, mass surveillance disguised as "adtech", people search websites, social media (where people have a tendency to overshare personal details), systematic reporting of arrest records/etc. in newspapers (generally with no updates to reflect the person's current situation); you can literally be unemployable in the US with no conviction or crimes that have been expunged or sealed.
If you have a felony or misdemeanor on your record - good fucking luck getting a job in today's market - background checks are normalized and are extremely accessible to employers. It's no wonder why people turn to crime to exist, discrimination is effectively legalized - there is insufficient regulation and protections for job applicants.
The only way to prevent crime is to rehabilitate those who commit crime and to provide services to enrich people's lives before they would otherwise commit crime. We also need to respect people's privacy upon rehabilitation - we shouldn't be permanently labeling (or dehumanizing) those deemed to be fit to return to society (e.g. people that aren't violent or who aren't a threat). We have to give them a path to participate in society.
California had a great mental health system in place. Ronald Reagan got elected and chose to close many of the in patient facilities. This lead to mass homelessness, which meant the police and prison budgets had to go up.
Then he did the same thing when he was President.
Their excuse was rampant abuse, so instead of fixing it, they just closed them.
Small government doin its thing, yay Murica. Also stricter gun laws thanks to good old fashioned racism and hospitals are more overworked than ever with patients dealing with substance abuse and other related mental health issues. We stopped putting sick people in treatment and the cops just started shooting them instead.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
California had a great mental health system in place.
I'm sorry, but no, we really fucking didn't. Reagan was wrong (about everything) to close them, but they weren't good before he did that by a looooong shot
I'm not disagreeing with this necessarily, but I don't like seeing a post by an account I have no idea about stating something as scientific fact, and then having that post taken as fact point blank. Once again, not trying to say what she is saying is incorrect, I just get concerned when I see bandwagoning on some random person's take.
That said, if you find the studies on this, please please please do us all a favor and comment those!
Here's a decent meta-analysis you can start with.
Sixteen reviews met the inclusion criteria. The reviews were comprised of nine peer-reviewed articles and reports from systematic review databases, five technical reports, and two working papers. Table 1 shows the reviews organized by objectives and geography
Well done and thank you.
Awesome, love this.
I wish this was the post or at least linked.
load more comments
(1 replies)
There is a mountain of evidence and everything she says is common knowledge at this point to anyone who has spent even a few minutes looking it up. You can just use you favorite search engine to see for yourself.
You really just come off sounding aloof and uninformed. What evidence!? When you are swimming in a sea surrounded by it.
load more comments
(2 replies)
doesn't protect private property though because that money might give poor people strength and power and we can't have the rubes having that now, can we? :(
They’re not giving the police money. They’re giving the people who supply the police more money. Which are their people
More crime also means more slave labour and more equipment sales
The reason no one in a suit cares is because most of the voting monkeys don't care because they lack the capacity to understand.
But giving poor people money is a crime, it encourages people to become/stay poor
/S
view more: next ›