show transcript
a tumblr post from slyeposting:
You order a package off Amazon. When the Amazon delivery guy shows up to your door, instead of giving you the package you bought, he beats the shit out of you. Then, when he sees that you are not dead yet, he calls all of the Amazon delivery people in the area and they all proceed to beat the shit out of you. Miraculously, you survive. Another miracle: a friend in your neighborhood caught the assault on video. After a month of recovery and extensive hospital bills that you have no idea what to do with, the video has gone viral. You read the comments below. “This is what happens to people who fuck with Amazon!!!” Someone says. “I’ve never been beaten up by Amazon employees, and I’ve been using them all my life!” Someone else comments. Later, you start to see articles popping up about your story. They all mention that when you were 17, your license was revoked for reckless driving. In a Facebook post on your mom’s feed, someone is going on a rant about how not all Amazon delivery guys are bad, and that if you look really close, the “bad” ones are just stressed out. Your name is trending on Twitter. Jeff Bezos films a response to your attack, denouncing the video of you getting beaten to within an inch of your life by his employees as becoming “a symbol of hate towards Amazon.” The people who attacked you still deliver packages around your neighborhood. You saw one of them just yesterday as you were watering your plants. You still can’t pay your hospital bills. Your phone dings- Twitter again. “Maybe if you didn’t order from Amazon,” someone pipes up, “this wouldn’t have happened!”
slyeposting replies:
a screenshot of a comment under the post reading: “if amazon delivery guys are beating you up maybe you should call the police”
[reaction image of Gru from Despicable Me looking down in bafflement]
holy shit
No, it expressly is not the role of American cops to protect people.
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/do-the-police-have-an-obligation-to-protect-you/
In the 1981 case Warren v. District of Columbia, the D.C. Court of Appeals held that police have a general “public duty,” but that “no specific legal duty exists” unless there is a special relationship between an officer and an individual, such as a person in custody.
The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that police have no specific obligation to protect. In its 1989 decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the justices ruled that a social services department had no duty to protect a young boy from his abusive father. In 2005’sCastle Rock v. Gonzales, a woman sued the police for failing to protect her from her husband after he violated a restraining order and abducted and killed their three children. Justices said the police had no such duty.
It is only their job to ‘enforce the law’, which they are abysmally bad at.
In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.
Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action, for example.
In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review, of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.”
https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/08/20/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes/
In reality, about 11% of all serious crimes result in an arrest, and about 2% end in a conviction. Therefore, the number of people police hold accountable for crimes – what I call the “criminal accountability” rate – is very low.
Police are agents of the state who are vested with the ‘legitimate’ monopoly on use of violent force within a state.
In a state that is overwhelming controlled by the wealthy, this means their primary function is to ensure the property rights of wealthy people.
Everything else they do is secondary or ancillary to that.
Police do not ‘reduce crime’.
Police have zero obligation to protect anyone.
What actually reduces crime? Actually protects people?
Lifting them out of poverty.
Very well written and put together. Thanks! None of this is new. But I am still saving your comment as bookmark, because it’s so concise.
Cops are agents of violence, not designed to perform any duty beyond being the government’s muscle. Even when they do useful things like shutting down roads so the fire department can clean up car crashes, they’re doing that as a wall of force.
However, the main thing people don’t understand about violence is that IT IS NEVER NON-LETHAL. Any less-lethal tool of violence, from tear gas to tasers, can kill. Rubber bullets and choakholds can kill! Even fucking pepper spray CAN KILL!
I blame the media for showing heroes subduing people by knocking them unconscious. The entire concept is total fantasy; a cheap writing trick to prevent main characters from being murderers. If someone is unconscious for more than a few moments, they likely have serious brain damage.
Batman being able to never kill is absurd fantasy logic that people go on to believe. Statistics dictate that eventually someone will die. Cops will always kill people. It’s their job. We shouldn’t rely on them for anything else, and attempting to use them as the main tool for reducing crime is a fool’s errand.
