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I more and more fail to understand why people from the USA tolerate their police / justice and assimilated services. From all the articles I see here they seem

by temac 11y ago

I more and more fail to understand why people from the USA tolerate their police / justice and assimilated services. From all the articles I see here they seem to do far more harm than good and to be populated with lots of insane people (how else would you define randomly spying on gardeners, then trashing them, then raiding them based on lousy evidences)? Do they ever do something good and not stupid? Are they ever accountable for they misbehavior and absurd investigations? Isn't there an inspection service that can investigate on police actions and actually recognize that they are insane when they are? Not that this is so much better in France. They recently administratively home arrested ecologist activists using extra power given by the state of emergency that was activated by the islamist terror attacks. That's beyond fucked-up, but given demonstrations were forbidden at the same time they could get away with that totalitarianism move without much trouble... :/

eric_h 11y ago
For the time being, it would seem that the vast majority of encounters with police in the United States is entirely uneventful: traffic tickets, a stern talking to, etc. Naturally, every police encounter where a gun is not drawn/no one's rights are apparently violated will never make the news. It's the exceptions that make headlines, and it's the internet that has empowered those exceptions to be made public and spread much farther and wider than they ever had even 10 years ago (what with everybody and their mother and grandmother on Facebook these days). This is perhaps one upside of the true eternal September that we've entered (much more so than the advent of AOL back in the day). This is not to say that there isn't a problem. The fact that stories like these have popped up in basically every state in the US suggests that there is indeed a culture that has developed amongst law enforcement/government that facts and science and reason play second fiddle to a number of other factors (not to mention the "thin blue line"). I do believe that most cops in the US act in the public interest to the best of their knowledge/ability; the problem is that it's most and not all, and the minority with perhaps ulterior motives now has access to a great deal of surplus military equipment manufactured for various recent US military operations (and provided to local law enforcement at tremendous discounts), and laws that allow them to behave in ways that they should not be allowed to behave.
awakeasleep 11y ago
It's very difficult to 'not tolerate' the government's policies and behavior. Hard to know how to change a problem behavior, hard to organize against it, and if you do organize against an existing power structure, you can be sure there are companies making money off the existing structure that can counter-organize with easier access to funding than your own group.

by temac 11y ago

eric_h 11y ago

For the time being, it would seem that the vast majority of encounters with police in the United States is entirely uneventful: traffic tickets, a stern talking to, etc. Naturally, every police encounter where a gun is not drawn/no one's rights are apparently violated will never make the news. It's the exceptions that make headlines, and it's the internet that has empowered those exceptions to be made public and spread much farther and wider than they ever had even 10 years ago (what with everybody and their mother and grandmother on Facebook these days). This is perhaps one upside of the true eternal September that we've entered (much more so than the advent of AOL back in the day). This is not to say that there isn't a problem. The fact that stories like these have popped up in basically every state in the US suggests that there is indeed a culture that has developed amongst law enforcement/government that facts and science and reason play second fiddle to a number of other factors (not to mention the "thin blue line"). I do believe that most cops in the US act in the public interest to the best of their knowledge/ability; the problem is that it's most and not all, and the minority with perhaps ulterior motives now has access to a great deal of surplus military equipment manufactured for various recent US military operations (and provided to local law enforcement at tremendous discounts), and laws that allow them to behave in ways that they should not be allowed to behave.

awakeasleep 11y ago

It's very difficult to 'not tolerate' the government's policies and behavior. Hard to know how to change a problem behavior, hard to organize against it, and if you do organize against an existing power structure, you can be sure there are companies making money off the existing structure that can counter-organize with easier access to funding than your own group.