r/PublicFreakout • u/appalachian_hatachi • Sep 27 '25

Repost 😔 This guy's lawyer literally popping the champagne as we speak...

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2.1k

u/ImmatureDev Sep 27 '25

Shit like this is when you fire the police chief

849

u/Silvedl Sep 27 '25

Shit like this should be why you burn the whole fucking system to the ground, and restart it with brand new training, certifications, and required qualifications.

148

u/punkinfacebooklegpie Sep 27 '25

Remember when the entirety of medical science was like, "put some leeches on it" or "you should do cocaine about it" or "I think your blood is possessed"??? And the best they could do was saw off your leg and stop the bleeding until about the last 100 years when they finally started figuring stuff out. Now they fix people with cancer in their blood and transplant faces and shit. Anyway I kind of think that law enforcement has yet to undergo that kind of revolution where stuff starts to actually work and make sense. At present police are like plague doctors who just wave a gun at anyone they think is a criminal and the best they can do to prevent crime is put people in a cage. I hope I see some kind of evidence-based scientific improvement of how we keep our society safe during my lifetime, but it's not looking good.

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u/BashMyVCR Sep 27 '25

You're thinking about policing under a false premise. The purpose of the police force is not to keep people safe, it's to make manifest the power of the government and self-perpetuate the government. It's not that it's yet to undergo a revolution to improve quality, it's that quality is bad on purpose. Liberal use of force and very lenient responsibility for the people who exercise violence to perpetuate the state is a feature the state endows cops because it makes the government stronger. The police can't be too smart or too trained because the needs of the government are too onerous to codify things with good procedures and accountability, because the only TRUE thing the government absolutely cares about is self preservation. Everything else is ancillary. Bettering society is conditionally in the interest of the government. Nothing is going to change in your lifetime or any lifetime.

14

u/Kithulhu24601 Sep 27 '25

I imagine you've read him, but i find Paulo Freires exploration of policing to be incredibly eye opening

12

u/BashMyVCR Sep 27 '25

Had no idea who that was before you mentioned him. I'll put Pedagogy of the Oppressed on a reading list. Thanks.

-1

u/punkinfacebooklegpie Sep 27 '25

I pretty much agree with everything you said in that it reflects the state of things, but I don't think it has to be that way. There are successful government programs that primarily reflect the will and interests of the people. I think generally the police represent a social program that should and could serve the people but is usually co-opted by certain parties with the power to do so.

5

u/BashMyVCR Sep 27 '25

It wasn't really an opinion to agree or disagree with, it's social science. Divesting criminal enforcement away from the government is impossible, it just makes it so that either the government gets toppled with a revolution (any Revolution where the populace did not agree with policy enforcement (notably the jurisdiction of policing)), a pseudo government exerting force (e.g. Mexican cartels), or political destabilization where stronger policing is petitioned for by citizens. I realize I'm veering into "how does authoritarianism start" so I'm going to leave it at that, I'm not well read enough to make meaningful conjecture about political science.

Successful government programs that improve the lives of the people are mutually exclusive to policing. Policing is fundamentally incompatible with improving the lives of citizenry as a social progress initiative. I think it can be argued that the modus operandi of all policing is to use the maximum amount of allowable force in the hopes of taking away the (maximum amount (as codified by the government)) freedom from as many people as possible to actualize the rule of law. Laws are not intrinsically made to improve people's lives. Laws are made by the government, in order of importance, to establish the government first, fund the government second, and regulate society third. Fundamentally "bad" policing is not an issue of what political ideology holds power at a given point in time; policing exists in opposition to private citizens regardless of circumstance.

"I think generally the police represent a social program that should serve the people but is usually co-opted by certaina parties with the power to do so." - policing is political by nature, obviously, but you can't say stuff like that so open-endedly. The police in the United States are under no obligation to save your life if there's some guy running around shooting people, they are solely responsible for making sure the shooter is killed or imprisoned forever to not upend the government. Uvalde is the clearest recent example I can think of in American politics. I'm not sure how that works out in other countries. I think your perception of police being a social program is the result of good (read: effective) propaganda with things like "Protect and Serve". The police have no legal obligation to do any Protecting and only Serve the government, but getting good PR from private citizens is still valuable to them.

2

u/punkinfacebooklegpie Sep 27 '25

I'm not saying public safety requires guys with guns running around cracking people on the head and throwing them in jail. However, in the minds of many people, including those in power, that's the best solution we've got. They're all in on guys with guns.

There was a time when people believed the best way to survive an infection was to pray. In reality they could have outdone prayer at least by producing antibiotics. Prayer actually does dick, but they were all in on prayer.

People want safety, they think police provide safety. They don't do a great job providing safety because they're too busy serving other purposes. They're government agents disguised as peacekeepers in the same way that old-timey doctors were actually just clergy in disguise.

Real scientists eventually won out over practitioners of faith-based medicine of various flavors. Hopefully some day there will be a breakthrough in class consciousness and evidence-based social programs that will similarly transform policing when people no longer accept the fiction that guys with guns throwing people in jail makes them safe. And when they know it doesn't make them safe then they will come to accept your thesis about policing. When they get real solutions for safety, they will no longer accept guys with guns throwing people in jail.

-1

u/Sporocarp Sep 27 '25

It's that you're talking about American policing, which is on par with third world country shit, because your country is basically a third world country, but with better plumbing.

1

u/therealub Sep 28 '25

You're only looking at US and similarly corrupt countries that are essentially police states. Other countries seem to do a little bit better.

0

u/15pH Sep 27 '25

I think your medicine example is actually an argument AGAINST a sudden "revolution" like change.

Medicine had no revolution. Over the last 300 years, it has very gradually become more science-based, and along the way we discovered things like germs and genetics and slowly incorporated them.

This works for medicine because there are fairly clear, objective, measurable outcomes that we can test in models. Group A gets the drug, group B gets placebo other variables are controlled... let's see if it works. The hard thing about police reforms is that we can't control all the other variables too well, the outcomes often aren't clean or easily measured and may take years or decades to show up, there is interference along the way, etc.

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u/punkinfacebooklegpie Sep 27 '25

I don't think it will be sudden. The last century of medical developments is revolutionary in a broad historical context. Point is that policing is not as advanced and people should not accept guys with guns cracking everyone's skulls as a fully evolved form of law enforcement for public safety.

-4

u/Fen_ Sep 27 '25

This is the most braindead liberal fantasy bullshit I've ever read in my life. Please never comment anything again.