Honestly

ALL cops you say?

I have many friends and family who have joined the Scottish Police and given years of their lives to serving their communities, risking their own lives and health. Should I say fuck them too?

I joined the police for six months before deciding it wasn’t the career for me and got back into charity work. Are you saying Fuck Me now or just for the six months I was in? Did my fuckery expire?

How can thousands, millions of people doing a job be reduced to such a binary sentiment.

So what's the alternative to police? Just getting rid of them would just lead to militias taking their place which would be much worse.

Yeah nah. This is such an American way to look at the world

You should purge all the white cells from your body. Not only are they extremely militant cops, they're white.

Thanks for sharing our pain. I don’t understand how people pretend that Europe isn’t going thru the same stuff like we are in the US.

Inflation, migration debates, cost of living crises, rise of authoritarianism, income inequality, all of this is and has been global. Some places affected more than others depending on what you look at.

Far right is hoping for civil wars, and people in the center or left of center think everything is business as usual. One side is going to go vote in greater numbers than the other.

Haha sounds about right!

Is this based on actual event or is it a general joke?

So? Where is Your punchline?

Or the recent wins of fascist parties in Europe.

It's the best way to sow division. Put everyone into discrete groups and tell them that the other groups are bad.

Yep. I can remember not too long ago that French police blinded people when dealing with the yellow jacket riots. Also the president's bodyguard being there dressed as a cop and hospitalised someone instead of protecting the president. There's also the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK and every year here there's multiple cops charged with raping women or using excessive force against a minority.

Cops are shit everywhere.

Me too. I just don't understand why so many people think that these "ok boomer / millennials, gen x,y,z does this and that" things don't work on the same principle tho. I think it's just as stupidly stereotypical...and I'm not even a boomer.

Not sure about you, but I'll take workers reminding everyone who is in charge and how democracy works over cops constantly shooting the innocent - people, dogs, whatever, and generally carrying on like thugs.

Certified European here, can confirm individual member states and EU as a whole as not being a utopia.

Especially us Dutch folks who have been fucked over and held hostage by a waaay to large upper middle class for years. To the point where we've managed to abolish the ministry of housing, open up the housing market to foreign investors, replace a functioning healthcare system with a healthcare market where insurance firms rule with an iron fist and demand more bureacracy than actual care being provided.

... and the list goes on.

It's a worldwide symptom of economic unequality and the decrease in social skills stemming from the fact that we live our lives increasingly isolated in our own online social bubbles. We're turning increasingly hostile towards each other because we're no longer confronted with all people and perspectives in our surroundings, but just the ones we like.

The United States, being a large country filled with very diverse people, despite all being taught to "love America", still deals with Nebraskan farmers having wildly different wants and needs, and way different social standards than the Californian yuppies.

You're a large country, with 334 million people spread out over a vast amount of land. Meanwhile, we're 18 million living on a patch of marshy land roughly 3/4th the size of West Virgina, and we're further from being united than ever before. The fact that you're even holding together as a country is nothing short of amazing considering the fact that your political systems probably cause way more chaos than ours do.

A lot of Europeans probably mean it when they say "How are you even a country?". And it's not so much an attack on the American people as a whole (though some of y'all deserve to be made fun of), but geniuine amazement at the fact that it has more or less held together since 1776.

All about comparisons, man.

It's probably because French citizens are smart enough to put their own well-being before their governing powers well-being.

Yeah we've been together for 200 years, but it's not going well at all.

between being a civilian and being a Police officer

Also, in Europe, police are considered to be a part of civilian society. Here, "civilian" means "not part of the military". Police officers are civilians.

Hmm. Come to think of it, I don't think I've really heard of many cases of FBI agents or similar federal agents doing shootings like ordinary cops do.

Only ones that come to mind are Waco and Ruby Ridge but those occurred decades ago.

Better education and training would really, really help.

In Quebec it's three years in college and another half year in police school. Pretty sure that's the highest standard in North America and it seem we have much less trouble here too...

The quality of the cop is irrelevant when their entire purpose in existing is to serve the rich owning class by oppressing everyone who gets in their way.

Stop making excuses.

We're younger than the US though.

It was the same with the original development of the country.

The difference is apparent when compared to Canada.

In Canada the pioneers were led or joined by the police, the newly created Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Law and order arrived either before or with the new pioneers.

In the US, it was the other way around. Pioneers went west without any officials, police or law enforcement. Pioneers dealt with everything by the force of a gun. Whoever had a gun was the one with power and controlled everything ..... you could be a good moral person and lead a community or you could be a gang leader, decrepit, immoral and unjust, as long as you had a gun, you could do whatever you wanted.

We also had an OP start point

Yeah. The US is a huge area with a relatively low population density and abundant natural resources. It participated in both world wars, and was nearly the only country to not take any real damage from either of them.

There hasn't been a war on US soil since the US civil war. There has barely even been any damage to a US state. In WWII they bombed Pearl Harbor before Hawaii was a state, invaded the Aleutian Islands before Alaska was a state, and one floatplane launched from a sub tried to set fire to the forests around Oregon and failed.

The countries that had been superpowers in 1900 were recovering from mass casualties and massive damage after 2 world wars.

It's no surprise that in Europe one of the only countries not to participate in WWII was Switzerland, and they're also rich today.

It's not a thing where I live. There's going to be other countries where the police operate like a gang, but it's just not the case in almost all OECD countries. In authoritarian states like Russia and Iran, sure, but in functional democracies, it's just not the case. The USA is a big exception, it must be part of that american exceptionalism thing.

Actually braindead 😂

Oof you think the US is superior.

"Defund the police" doesn't mean salaries. It means stop outfitting them with weapons of war.

Indeed is reporting that the average starting salary is like $50k, and the average in the US is $60k. Policing also isn't even in the top 25 most dangerous jobs. That link is also talking base salary, but even in the situation you're describing, you're talking overtime in the $20k+ range.

The problem with bad cops comes down to two main things:

• they're not here for public safety or here to protect and serve, they're here to protect capital.
• well, it's really just the first one, but keeping that in mind, the system is setup in a way that the only outcome can be a corrupt police force. Legal civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, overly powered police unions (the only time I'll complain about unions), deliberately low standards in hiring, deliberately not require the police to even know the law they're supposed to enforce and probably a dozen things I'm forgetting. Police aren't there for us, they're there for capital.

Finally, police funding and increasing the number of cops has almost nothing to do with crime rates which is what calls to defund the police actually mean. Police are basically systematized violence where pretty much the only tools in their literal and metaphorical toolbelt are increasing levels of violence. The call to defund the police is more about funding the things that actually reduce crime – better education, economic outcomes, and people trained to deal with the types of issues that police are probably less qualified to deal with than the average retail worker like mental health crises. Advocates for defunding the police are instead advocating for spending to be allocated to people who are qualified to actually deal with these problems.

Anyway, tl;dr – if we offer cops better pay and better hours, we're just going to be getting more expensive cops stealing our shit, incarcerating us at one of the highest rates in the world, and murdering people with less consequence than the cashier at Target gets for not upselling credit cards enough because while plenty of good people* become cops, policing as an institution in the US is corrupt.

"Good" people and "bad" people are mostly a result of the systems and culture they exist in and very few are truly "good" or "bad."

There is no danger!!!

They aren't even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the US. Pizza delivery is more dangerous.

Please stop with the copaganda talking point about danger.

It doesn't help that cops are expected to do so much. Don't get me wrong, it's not an excuse to do fucked up things to people, but it is probably a contributing factor. Like mental health for being a police officer can't be good. This is part of the reason so many people want to defund the police; it isn't about giving them less money, it's about moving funding to programs that are more focused so police can focus on their job and not try to be a mental health counselor as well.

Pay is definitely not the problem and there's plenty of places in the US where I'd argue they're overpaid, in fact.

The pay only sucks at the start, then you learn how to exploit overtime and pick up detail shifts.

America has grown into something completely different from what it was when the British got kicked out.

Time evolves things, funny that

It was created by Europeans who were booted out of Europe. We didn't want them here, so you have US now.

If your slogan is inaccurate you will face resistance at every turn. Not to mention that some people using ACAB actually do think that all cops are personally bad.

Yeah that might be convincing if it was tpss(the police system sucks) but instead the braindeads use ACAB, so...

Define country, because the American government is actually one of the oldest continuous governmental systems in the world. Certainly the oldest republic that isn't a micro-state.

Now if you want argue that France, for example, is an older country than America because there's been a fairly stable region largely called France for several centuries you can, you'd just be wrong.

Now if you want to start talking about nations that's different, but also a much, much blurrier subject in general.

It's also been just over 150 years since the last civil war.

The way things look around USA, I wouldn't be hugely surprised if some state tried to secede in the next 10 years. Then again, it wouldn't be like brexit, because only the poor states in USA are looking to secede... and UK was certainly not a poor state in EU. That's perhaps why they only shout about it and not do it: they look at the numbers and realize they'd be fucked without the rich states, which are almost entirely blue states.

Even UK, the richest country in EU, didn't do brilliantly due to brexit. So in their funny way, they made it quite a lot less likely that any EU country actually wants to leave.

I love the salty Euros downvoting clear historical fact.

Plus, it already did. In the 1930s.

Sir this is a Berlinese grocery

And then russian...the EU seems to forget the reason they can dump their own gdp into their civilians is because of our military protecting them.

Edit: there are countless articles and journals on why this is true. Seriously get over yourselves.

https://www.politico.eu/article/america-europe-burden-continent-leans-security-defense-military-industry/

Hard to call it a continuous democracy when we just has a historically fresh coup attempt.

Geographical awareness level = American

Congratulations 👏

Hey big man this one’s for you

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