Comment on [Video] Cops not sure whether to arrest man with "Plasticine Action" shirt for supporting terrorism

• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  No worries about seeming to lecture me, you were more correct and precise, I was sloppy, any other person reading this convo would be well served by the precision and context.

  So thus I will now nitpick you: ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’.

  Hehe.

  I definitely concur that basically all cop oriented or cop centric media is set up to make almost all cops and such look like extremely well intentioned and competent people, when factually, most cops are simply of average intelligence, and are uh, kind of well known for things like abusing their partners, being right wing authoritarians, also doing overtime fraud.

  I would be curious to see if other countries have a substantially different arrest to conviction ratio.

  I know that many other countries spend far less money on policing, have far lower rates of incarceration, and some even require something akin to, or an actual law degree of some kind before they can actually be various grades of police officer.

  Further, obviously, almost all other countries police are significantly less highly armed, and the US is just rife with absolute bullshit practices being promoted as legitimate training and procedures… we still widely use ‘lie detectors’ that simply measure stress, and often give false positives snd false negatives, we have nonsensical ‘body language expert’ shit everywhere… and just generally, the police are taught that the general populace is basically an enemy combatant force, ala how we approached policing in the Iraq occupation… because a lot of the people and materiel from Iraq War 2 just got recycled into local Police Departments.

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  • FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Counter-nitpick accepted 😄

    If you’re in the US, yes, you’re famed for all the policing issues you mentioned. I can only go off of conversations with my friends dotted around the EU but the perception we have is that police here are different because of circumstances rather than innate qualities. They’re generally not armed, they’re slightly better educated and at least on paper, there are institutions providing oversight.

    But the same problems exist here to one degree or another, especially racism. But also excessive force, using their position as an officer to protect themselves from accountability around issues including domestic violence … and while lie detectors are rarely used they are starting to use AI at border control to detect if people might be lying: peopleofcolorintech.com/…/ai-lie-detectors-at-bor…

    So I don’t know how we really compare. I see some crazy videos from the USA of people’s interactions with police. It seems like another world completely compared to here in Ireland. And ICE seem like domestic terrorists rather than law enforcement.

    But we also have institutional corruption so bad that the force tried to frame a whistleblower (Maurice McCabe) for child abuse. The most senior people were replaced with someone who wasn’t Irish (Drew Harris), essentially given the job of draining the swamp / reforming the institution.

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I think I generally agree with everything you’ve said, yes I am from/in the US, I also have had many EU internet friends over the years… yeah, policing problems exist everywhere, but they’re a lot worse here tham the EU generally.

      We have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, of any large, developed country.

      We imprison more of our population than commonly referenced authoritarian states like Russia and China.

      We have more total prisoners than Stalin had in labor camp gulags at the height of the gulag system, we have more people incarcerated than China does, and their population is roughly 4x larger than ours.

      We treat way, way too many problems as crimes to be jailed or imprisoned for, not social problems to be solved at the root cause, and we have a neat little carve out in our Constitution that explicitly allows slavery, forced labor, for imprisoned people… we have a massive industry of private, for profit prisons, that exploits this slave labor.

      And all those figures and facts were true for years, decades, long before Trump and MAGA just went full fascist, and decided to bring back WW2 style internment camps, but for undocumented migrants, and the homeless.

      We’ve already got disease outbreaks running through these concentration camps, which are largely being blacked out of the media, I will be entirely unsurprised if we just progress as the Nazis did to ‘work till you die’ camps and outright death camps, in just a few years time.

      Shit’s really bad over here.

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      • FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I didn’t realise how high the prison population numbers are. I first became aware of the issue when System of a Down released “Prison song”.

        Those numbers you shared are really abhorrent, and explains why my lawyer acquaintance finds the prison system there shocking (he visited the US a few times). He absolutely would not want to see something “so inhumane” here.

        I wonder how to interpret the 82% non-conviction in the context of over-conviction.

        We have people in prison that are as much victims of poverty and undiagnosed problems like ADHD / autism. So if we have people imprisoned who would be better served (including society) elsewhere, I can imagine it’s pretty bad there in the U.S. Ifs a genuine tragedy, but an injustice against human rights too.

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