Smashing the boys face into a cactus

  • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    1: “Expect the best and people will rise to the occasion.”

    2: Good police officers like in OP are fired every month. 800,000 cops in the US… there is a police department trying to fire their good cop(s) RIGHT NOW! Why plaster ACAB everywhere and risk discouraging them?

    I do imagine many would argue even the fired officer (Taisyn Crutchfield) was a bastard but that gets tough to defend.

    btw here’s the footage of the incident

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I struggle with this myself, and I choose to look at it as a semantics issue. The point of ACAB is to highlight that bad cops are empowered by colleagues and departments who let them do that they want. It’s a condemnation of tolerating bad apples vs pruning them out. I think of it like the Nazi example – when 4 people happily sits down at the table with 6 overt Nazis, you end up with 10 Nazis. ACAB is condemning those 4 as enablers of the 6 and allowing them to persist.

      So I agree, but I don’t think literally every cop is a bastard. There are some good people who are trying to use their position to change things while still helping the public – just like Crutchfield. It’s not worth the effort to specifically exclude them though because that’s not where change is going to come from. The good cops are fighting a losing battle. We’ll only see things fixed if there’s sweeping federal legislation to reform police.

      And in that sense, ACAB is useful. It reminds people that these aren’t just a couple cops that needing weeding out, its entire systems and institutions. We can’t solve this by addressing only a few bad apples – we need to change the whole bunch. Now it might be that the only ones we throw away are the bad ones, and the rest of the bunch proves capable of realizing the problem. But you still have to address the whole bunch at once.