this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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Our definition of ‘cops’ is broad, and includes prison guards, probation officers, shitty DAs and judges, etc — anyone who has the authority to fuck over people’s lives, with minimal or no oversight.
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ALLIES
• r/ACAB
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INFO
• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Killings by law enforcement in Canada
• Killings by law enforcement in the United Kingdom
• Killings by law enforcement in the United States
• Know your rights: Filming the police
• Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of 'I can’t breathe' (as of 2020)
• Police aren't primarily about helping you or solving crimes.
• Police lie under oath, a lot
• Police spin: An object lesson in Copspeak
• Police unions and arbitrators keep abusive cops on the street
• Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States
• When the police knock on your door
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It's very telling that nothing close to mainstream news has covered this.
This headline makes it sound like the police hunted someone down for having an abortion, but in fact the woman's family reported her missing, and the police used this database to try to locate her in that capacity. The potential for misuse is certainly there, but isn't what happened here
Why did she "go missing" ?
Because she needed privacy to get an abortion from the police in Texas.
Why didn't she want to tell her family where she was ?
Because it would implicate them in her having an abortion which is her right.
Her abortion is not Texas' nor her family's business. And making excuses for that dynamic is white knighting authoritarian abuses.
Her family knew she had had an abortion before reaching out to the sheriff's office. When reporting her missing, the family told the sheriff's office about the abortion and their concern about her physical safety, which is why he listed that as the reason he needed to locate her in the database.
So she did tell her family, then went out of communication for days, and her family, who was worried about her, issued a "request to locate," which has a police department attempt to verify someone's safety. Once they established phone contact with the woman and verified she was safe, the entire thing was over.
If someone you love suddenly goes incommunicado like this and you're worried about them, you have the same right to issue a "request to locate" and have the police attempt to verify they're alright.
Sheriff Adam King of the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told 404 Media in a phone call that the woman self-administered the abortion “and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital.”
“We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever to get an abortion,” he said. “It was about her safety.”
He said the search “got a couple hits on her on Flocks in Dallas,” but Flock was not responsible for ultimately finding her. Two days later the Sheriff’s Office was able to establish contact with the woman and verify she was okay, he added.
Bullshit stop licking their boots. ACAB and I don't buy their story. They don't give damn one about your safety.
The search record listed the reason plainly: “had an abortion, search for female.”
that sounds like something that would happen in a dystopian oppressive government.