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“The email was not in line with OSP values and appropriate action was taken as a result,” spokesperson Capt. Kyle Kennedy told the news organization. “Any glamorization of the use of force is not only contrary to agency values, but contradictory to the SWAT team’s history of resolving public safety incidents with a reduction of force.”
Bullshit. You don't get to fight the release of the email for 4 months, then announce that it doesn't reflect your values.
As always, ACAB.
"This is not who we are."
"Normally we wouldn't tell you we are full on psychos, but they forced us to after getting caught this time."
“Typically, we do everything we can and more to ensure things are not taken to a physical resolution,” VanMeter said. “I would assume you would know that.”
Actually we assume that cops, and definitely cops that choose to be SWAT, are trigger happy goons who didn't get hugged enough as children.
State police fought for months to keep from disclosing the most incendiary parts of the email, claiming it revealed confidential tactics.
David Park, a now-retired civil rights lawyer who filed lawsuits against state police in several fatal shootings, said the email reflects an “adolescent” and “toxic macho cowboy culture” that has no place in policing.
I'm guessing that's the "confidential tactics".
Wedgies
I am incapable of the kind of black and white thinking that would allow me to believe that literally ACAB, but an awful lot of them clearly are, and maybe even an overwhelming majority. And I appreciate finding and documenting as much evidence as we can find of that, so that we can have an honest and accurate accounting of how many cops are actually, indeed, "bad".
ACAB was never premised on any black and white statement of every single cop being a monster. Rather that due to the systems in place and the overwhelming corruption. It is impossible for a cop to ultimately be good. Especially as long as the systems of we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing are allowed to persist.
Plenty of people go in with the aspirations of helping the community. Those people are the exception. And often weeded out before ever joining the force. And on the off chance that they were to actually make it in. Are pressured and beaten down to Overlook and accept the corruption of their peers or risk personal threats or loss of their own job.
You may have a friend who is generally good and is also a cop. They may be a good friend. But that doesn't make them a good cop. The system makes that impossible.
IMO ACAB is great on a behavioral science level: it sets the anchor/starts the conversation with a statement as an absolute, which the defense then has to find exceptions to. While they do that grunt work, the catchy phrase enables confirmation bias in the fence-sitters and people who already agreed with it.
It’s like starting a barter at an exorbitantly high price so the buyer is primed to offer a price higher than they would’ve before hearing the anchor.
There's a This American Life episode from years ago about a guy who joined NYPD saw all the corruption and started talking about it. The Chief of police and a whole goon squad showed up at his house and kept going on about how he wanted to kill himself and he needed to be mentally evaluated in an institution. He got the whole thing on tape.
Good cops don't last long, they get bullied and harassed into quitting.
ACAB.
Jfc. I’m going to go listen to that it I can find it… but I won’t be in a rush.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/414/transcript
Pretty sure this is the one.
I said I WASN’T in a rush…
(…but thank you! 🙏)
Well it's there when you're ready lol.
I remember that one. Episodes like that stick with you years later.
I think a truly good cop wouldn't be able to stomach being part of such a large group of bad people.
And power corrupts people, that combined with the overwhelming peer pressure and the "Us vs Them" mentality means every good cop will either eventually turn or be pushed out and replaced with someone with the same "morals" as the majority.
I'm sure not all cops are bastards, but they do a great job of filtering out the ones who aren't.
Other commenters did a good job, but i wanted to share an insight that helped me understand the ACAB idea: all cops are bastards because the job is a bastard. If you are an american cop, you will be compelled, at some point, to do something immoral: the prison-industrial complex demands it.
I am incapable of the kind of black and white thinking that would allow me to believe that literally ACAB
Well...ACAB is not just an assessment of all officers' individual characters [1]. It's an assessment of their role in society. Even a polite, protocol abiding, perfectly gentle cop is, on their best day, a member of the enforcement arm of the State, i.e. they are part of the organization that imposes the will of the capitalist class on the rest of the community every single day. Anything else that individual cops or individual police departments do is subordinate to the designated goal of enforcing the will of the capitalist class. In almost all cases where police departments attempt to do things beyond their primary function
I.e., literally all cops are the enemies of the community by design, regardless of the internal character of an individual officer or department. ACAB communicates this sentiment as well as you can do in 4 letters, i.e. something that can be graffitied in a pinch.
[1] To be clear, like 99.99% of all cops are still shitty people, even if the "cop" portion of their life is assumed to be separable and then ignored. And like you, I really don't like black and white thinking, so the leftover 0.01% does not represent any cop I have ever personally met or read about; I'm only leaving open the theoretical possibility that there exists a person who would otherwise be a good person if they were not a cop. This observation is almost a corollary of the main point of ACAB, and then plug in the statistics about officers beating their partners and history of police brutality, violating their own protocols, enforcing heinous laws, etc..
well when you consider the math, “all” is simply indicative of a rounding. 99.9999% is basically “100%”.
So while one in a million may be Coppy McPerfectface, that doesn’t matter.
It’s like water sanitation. Mixing 100 liters of tainted water with 1 liter of clean water doesn’t give you 101 liters of clean water. It doesn’t even give you 100 liters of dirty water and 1 liter of clean water, it gives you 101 liters of dirty water. That’s why ACAB.
The saying "one bad apple spoils the whole barrel" rings true. Even if bad cops were only the minority, the overwhelming majority of cops tolerate the bad ones, rather than working to get rid of them, spoiling the whole "barrel". Look at the Chris Dorner situation. His downward spiral resulted from retribution resulting from his filing of a report alleging excessive force by another cop. He was then targeted for retaliation, which ultimately broke him. The system is rotten to the core.
When 40% of them freely admit (anonymously) to abusing their spouses, it’s a safe bet that an overwhelming majority are in fact total bastards.
“Are you jonesing to fire 40mm less lethal rounds and gas munitions through windows, gables, cameras, and at fleeing suspects?” a sergeant wrote.
“How about tossing diversions (flash bangs) or launching gas cannisters with a shotgun launcher? Anyone want to shoot some pepperball into vehicles or basements or crawlspaces or the attics of houses to flush out hiding suspects?”
"We’ve responded to several dramaticand highly intense hostage situations during which our snipers have shot and killed the suspect, our entry members have shot and killed the suspect, and our entry members have been shot at and hit by the suspect (fortunately the rounds hit the shield they were holding!"
He sent the five-page pitch to the estimated 700 sworn members of the agency in mid-February to entice rank-and-file troopers to join the specialized tactical unit, he said.
Full email: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25972280-email-wm/
Depraved. Not one mention of de-escalation, nothing but celebration for the bad people killed. Not that I expected to find it.
It doesn't even say the people killed were bad.
Looks like VanMeter shot a 26 year old who wasn't even a suspect at his house last year.
Link without paywall: https://archive.is/MLjQr
It's a gift link. People with Javascript turned on dont hit the paywall
It blocked me for having an adblocker turned on, which is why I provided the link.
Note it's the second part, but they're both interesting.