That’s the fun part about that picture above, that is a picture of how they treat an innocent man. He hasn’t been convicted of anything. They never would have had all new oranges like that for him if it wasn’t for the number of cameras they knew would show up.
Exactly, the cops will pull out all the stops to convince you that the accused are criminals and the media happily plays along. Luigi Mangionie has no conviction and as an American is therefore innocent for the time being. The cops don’t want you thinking of this as them parading an innocent man like that. They routinely violate and abuse the accused, and in cases like this they’re trying to ensure that the public, potential jurors, go in with the assumption that he’s the individual who killed Brian Thompson. They treat not guilty verdicts as “criminals going free” rather than “innocence being decided” and they treat jurisprudence as a hindrance to justice rather than a foundation of it.
The cops believe all they see to be guilty by virtue of falling under their gaze. And they get angry you don’t celebrate them for it.
I want to upvote this more than once. Younger people I believe say based, but at 35 I still lack the vocabulary to properly say I agree with this opinion profoundly without fear of coming across to eager or strange.
(Starting to think I have anxiety issues after reflecting upon that)
It’s cool lol, this was one of my half lunch break rambles. And I totally get the anxiety lol
But yeah the fact is that if cops want to be liked and safe they need to make it easy and beneficial to comply and to follow the rules. As it stands if they decide you’re a bad person who’s committed a bad crime they’ll ruin your fucking life if not end it. So if they can’t catch the people who commit violent crimes against people like me or even bother to pretend to try, but they can decide to kill someone for running away from them despite none of the accused crimes being potentially capital offenses, then what are they for. If they can ruin your life on a hunch then the only thing stopping people from being violent towards them is that most people aren’t violent unless pressed.
I can see ways forward for American policing, but they all require the police to display a humility, vulnerability, accountability, and restraint that I’ve never seen from them. It will require them to learn the law, follow it, and accept punishment when they break it. It will require them to embrace a duty to protect all people in their jurisdiction, including both the accused and convicted. It will require them to see their job as impartial collection of evidence for the only entity that has the right to determine guilt: a jury consisting of the peers of the accused. It will require them to argue for evidence based legislation and justice that seeks to minimize harm to both victims and the convicted. And it’s going to require them to be ok with the dangers inherent to their profession where not accepting those dangers puts the rest of us in danger, because that’s what everyone else in a dangerous job does. And it’ll also require them to have mandatory therapy where the therapists can put them on paperwork duty because that’s obviously something they need, we shouldn’t have traumatized gunmen with a license to kill for a police force, but currently we’re preloading them with trauma responses as training and probably barring them from therapy because that’s how we handle mental health in this country.
Sigh, i just want this world to be better and I understand that it’s not easy. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible or not worth trying.
