At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.

Finally, after curling up with the dog on the floor, Perez broke down and confessed. He said he had stabbed his father multiple times with a pair of scissors during an altercation in which his father hit Perez over the head with a beer bottle.

Perez’s father wasn’t dead — or even missing. Thomas Sr. was at Los Angeles International Airport waiting for a flight to see his daughter in Northern California. But police didn’t immediately tell Perez.

    • @andros_rex@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      235 months ago

      It’s funny - I live in a neighborhood where I routinely need to call the police. They don’t show up.

    • @Astongt615
      link
      English
      135 months ago

      If there are bad people in the police, there would be bad people without the police.

        • @CaptnNMorgan@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          10
          edit-2
          5 months ago

          Well that’s the real issue, the oversight. It’s not that they exist, that’s retarded. It’s that they have very little oversight, training, or personal accountability. Those things need to be added to the police force.

          How anyone wouldn’t see that “no police” would lead to either complete chaos, military controlled or a bunch of tiny dictatorships being controlled by the citizens who already owned guns before the police got defunded, which is pretty damn close to chaos, is baffling. The only argument for how getting rid of the police could be a good thing relies on the assumption that only good people will have guns.

        • @intensely_human@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          25 months ago

          Centralized, overwhelming military power makes the formation of alternate military power structures impossible.

          The idea of a police force is to prevent the formation of a gang with enough violent power to control others.

          • @masquenox@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            45 months ago

            a gang with enough violent power to control others.

            Sooo… the police exists to prevent the existence of police?

          • @sudo@lemmy.today
            link
            fedilink
            English
            35 months ago

            I think you mean the formation of a different violent gang. One that doesn’t extrajudiciously represent the owner classes interests.

      • @Bertuccio@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        9
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        People think the police do a lot of things they don’t actually do, and aren’t required to do.

        Police don’t – and don’t have to – protect anyone, prevent crimes - even if they can see someone committing a crime and can stop it - Chase down criminals running from them, go find criminals that have been reported, bring criminals for court dates, and more.

        Basically all police are genuinely required to do is file a report when someone reports a crime. And I think that society could get away with not having that.

        Basically everything about the justice system that you probably care about and that supports society is done by someone other than a cop, or just isn’t actually done at all and people presume it is.

        • @thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          75 months ago

          I was standing on a corner in downtown Seattle and someone standing next to me wanted to sell me crack. I crossed the street and a cop pulled up to a red light. While crack dealer still standing there, I tell the cop and point at the guy. He tells me to call 911 and then drove off.

          That’s the time it dawned on me that they don’t really care about crime happening in their face

        • Zorque
          link
          fedilink
          65 months ago

          Assuming that that’s the only way people become worse.

        • @masquenox@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          15 months ago

          It doesn’t make them worse - the police just gives the worse people a gun, training, and next-to-complete immunity from the law.

    • @sunbeam60
      link
      English
      25 months ago

      Well I do for a start. I imagine I’m not the only one.

      • @masquenox@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        25 months ago

        Well I do for a start.

        You do? Unless you’re a capitalist… no you don’t.

        The history of policing is no longer hidden from us like it was in the days before the internet. It’s not society that “required” police - it’s capitalist parasites that required police to protect them from society.