There were a couple on some of the r/Australia threads.
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 5 months ago
Where’s the ACAB people?
RarePossum@programming.dev 5 months ago
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 5 months ago
It’s just such an echo chamber on these sites. Whatever is popular gets upvotes and goes to the top, whatever isn’t popular receives downvotes and sinks to the bottom. People feel peer pressured to vote similarly to others on comments, the cycle continues.
Ilandar@aussie.zone 5 months ago
One of the reasons why I didn’t want Lemmy to grow any more than it did. Keeping the community small but active allows people to discuss and debate without massive pile-ons occurring.
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 5 months ago
I wonder if it would be better without votes at all: You have to comment to interact, you can’t be passive. That way mods can deal with spam more effectively. There is no way for me to tell which users are abusing their votes to silence people rather than interact respectfully. I hate it when I comment a legitimate argument (or worse someone else has and I agree with it) and it gets downvoted with no comments at all. It feels like I’ve committed the horrible act of having an opinion.
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Okay, I’ll bite. I think she did her job well here. I don’t think her job should exist. I guarantee, whether intentionally or not, that she has wielded her power to make a minority’s day shittier during her career, when they didn’t deserve it. Giving that sort of power to a person, giving them that control over other people, almost always leads to corruption. A few people shining through is the exception, not the rule. Victoria police ran a scare campaign in the media last year about the decriminalisation of public intoxication. How it would cause an outbreak of other crimes, and make their job harder. But no such thing has happened. Even if you don’t believe the police should stop existing, it’s undeniable that they’ve systematically lobbied for more and more powers, which disproportionately affect minorities and the poor. Reducing those powers and shrinking the force has more benefits than not doing so or allowing their power and sizes to continue to balloon.
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 5 months ago
I’ve no doubt that the prejudices of individual officers affects their policing and in some cases may be racist or anti-minority. I think the way around this is more accountability for police officers: they must have bodycams when doing their jobs which are publicly available (we live in a Democracy do we not?) and officers can be removed due random reviews. There is no internal process, it is done by an independent commision. In incidents like this or when in a dodgy area I wouldn’t feel very comfortable with a low police presence. I’m not sure what the alternative to police would be, something like the second amendment in the US?
princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
I wouldn’t feel very comfortable with a low police presence.
Are you Indigenous Australian? A person of colour? LGBTQ? Homeless? A drug addict?
Because from my experiences, these groups tend to feel most comfortable when there’s a lower police presence. And I think their experiences should be considered as just as important as yours.
I’m not sure what the alternative to police would be, something like the second amendment in the US?
You’ve got to be joking, right? Personally, I’d rather not start seeing local school shootings on the evening news. It’s hard enough hearing about the ones in the States. Let alone how much more trigger-happy their cops are due to fearing that any person they interact with may have a concealed gun on them.
I’d go the opposite direction. Take guns off regular uniformed police. That’s how it is in London. De-escalate the threat of violence and bad people are likely to do the same. Wouldn’t you pick a bigger knife if you knew the people showing up in response would have guns?
I think the solutions needed are social ones. Victoria built, and is building, sobering up centres. They are staffed by nurses and social workers, and have drug and alcohol counselling available as well as being able to do referrals to other services. Increasing these sorts of services and improving social safety nets and public housing all have negative effects on the crime rate.
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 5 months ago
I mostly agree with what you have said. I’m not denying that the problem is societal:
I’m not sure what the alternative to police would be, something like the second amendment in the US?
What I meant by that statement was what do we do to prevent crimes (especially of the violent kind) when societal change fails to prevent it? My solution would be a much, much smaller police force that can run more efficiently with much higher standards of training and accountabilty
m13@lemmy.world 5 months ago
There’s not a lot of point in an event like this when emotions are high and reactionaries are high on the “heroism”.
But “all cops are bastards” remains true.
In capitalist society the role of the police is to protect the private property of the ruling class and to serve their interests.
Since their inception that has been the role of the police force in Australia, beginning with the genocide of aboriginal people in order to secure land for settlers.
In the 80s and 90s we saw how little the role of the police force is in “protecting and serving the people” as they formed gangs to hunt down, murder, then cover up the murder of queer people.
Can you really justify the role police play in keeping workers from striking and making meaningful change in workplace reform, or in housing where the police use violence to evict the poor in order for the rich to buy up all the houses?
We haven’t even touched on mental health. Why in general are the police called when there’s a mental health crisis? Where are the counsellors, psychiatrists and social workers? Why was someone with schizophrenia allowed to get to the point where they became a threat to the public?
The actions of the individual are justified in this situation. Incidentally police do some good actions sometimes by virtue of the fact that they’re currently the ones with the power, weapons, and authority to act in these circumstances.
But there are much better ways of organising a society that don’t create such disparity, and there are much better ways of protecting communities that aren’t primarily centred on using violence against the poor to protect the greed of the rich.
unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 5 months ago
I think hating the police is a distraction from holding politicians who create and protect the laws which the police enforce. For anything to be done politicians need to do it, yet they don’t. Don’t fight the symptoms fight the disease
Zozano@aussie.zone 5 months ago
“No, but you see, since all cops are part of a systemic issue, all of them are bastards, even if they have the best intentions and aren’t complicit in the problems I have with police”
Probably a lot of overlap with people who think all white people are racist, or all men are rapists.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
Bangeo@aussie.zone 5 months ago
A lot of the anti cop sentiments come from the US where cops are much worse. It seems some australians dont understand that police are trained here for much longer, training is of higher quality and they dont need to worry about the constant threat of handguns or rifles. They just read reddit and facebook and follow the yanks blindly with no critical thought whatsoever, just an angry fantasy.