Remember that's police sued to be able to discriminate against people with high iqs
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
And sued to not be required protect people.
ACAB.
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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pretty sure i read somewhere that if you excel in the academic portion of the academy youre disqualified for being too smart under the guise of some other excuse. critical thinking isnt something they want in the force.
Another example of why there are no good cops.
because good ones never get the chance to be good.
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Katie Sponsler @KatieSponsler Jan 28 2023
I have been taught to yell "stop resisting" and "drop your weapon" after firing a gun, because bystanders will remember you said it and their memory will automatically reverse the order of the events to make it make sense. Their testimony will support yours, because of this.
I have been told to "loosen up and have fun, it's fun! Why are you so serious?" When doing a shoot/don't shoot scenario training.
I have been told that deescalation techniques will get me and other officers killed and as a smaller LEO, I was justified escalating my use of force faster than my colleagues because I was always in danger so I should use it.
I've been told my only job is to go home at night.
been told all of these things in formal, controlled and regulated Police Academies. I have gone through 3. I have heard some of these things more than once.
When I questioned these things in my third academy, and stated that they were inconsistent with the ethics of policing, I was kicked out of the academy on my last day. I had completed and excelled at all the graded tasks, but was told "you aren't what we want in our force."
Looks like her Twitter account has been deleted, though, so there is no source anymore. Regardless, all of this is pretty damn well corroborated, so even if this exact take is fluff, the police very much do select for bastards.
I searched for "Katie Sponsler I have been told" found the thread but it had been deleted from twitter. Fortunately, someone had archived it
Ayyy, the real MVP.
Nothing surprising here. Violent enforcers of capital descended from slave patrols.
I can’t recall if it was in the Behind the Police miniseries or a more regular Behind the Bastards episode, but there was a breakdown of how even once you’ve completed the police academy, you have to train for a year (IIRC) under a training officer, and if the TO thinks you’re not cut out for the force, you are not permanently hired, and other forces will probably not give you a chance. TOs, by the bye, are typically drawn from officers who have been taken off normal duty due to numerous complaints, like the ones made by people who have been harassed or assaulted by cops.
It’s not just the academy, the whole system selects for bastards.
A year, lol. Most places have you on the street within a month of being hired, and you are placed with something called a field training officer, FTO. Any will laugh you out of the area as a poser if you're trying to infiltrate their social lives to gather intel to use if you use TO. The field training phase lasts for 4 months at most. Cops cycle in and out of the job so fast they would never be able to afford a full year of training.
They also don't use cops who have had tons of complaints. Those get given desk duty. The field trainers are the ones who know how to 'write good,' so they can criticize the reports that the rookies write. The rookies, mind you, are given all the shit cases that the others don't want to work on, allegedly so the rookies can get experience in writing a bunch of different reports.
The bit about other departments not giving you a chance if you're failed from a training phase is mostly true, but remember that the whole 'desperate for new cops' thing means the small places will hire you if you can breathe without wheezing, and sometimes even if you get out of breath walking to the donut store counter.
Remember kids, knowing is half the battle! don't use this info in casual conversation to shmooze a cop you meet at the bar or a party to pick up details on their agency >.> <.<
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I had a friend who went through a whole arc of wanting to be a cop. She had pretty much an identical experience I had to squint at the name and photo to be sure this wasn't a post she had made.
Being a woman was a huge setback from the get-go anyway, casual police brutality training notwithstanding.
She never quite got my criticism of wanting to be a cop (She wanted to fix policing by example) nor my lack of surprise when she spent a year wasting her time being tested and strung along by cops who were never going to hire her. (You have a master's degree FFS! You're not what they're looking for!)
(She wanted to fix policing by example)
Might be possible to whistleblow against one corrupt officer if you play dumb until getting hired? Which would be an acceptable use of time for some, though perhaps (or “super likely”, w/e) activism elsewhere has greater ROI
Edit: hey scale this up. Every Lemming plays dumb and gets hired. We each report one rotten apple. Wouldn’t this at least annoy some sleaze out there and cause a very slight delay as they reshuffle their cops?
(Obvy you need a despicable crime on video and luck etc)
We had this in our local, small town police department. Female police officer spoke up and blew the whistle on somebody that was accepting BJ's to let tickets slide.
The department "downsized", let her go, then re-upsized to hire a different person back. Then they said her allegations were just in retaliation for being let go. Then she sued for wrongful termination and I THINK she ended up winning.
I might have some of the details mixed up cause this was all going down JUST as I was moving into the town.
I'm not an anarchist looking for the abolition of police as a concept.
But the institution of policing in America needs a Truth and Reconciliation commission. Complete top to bottom scrapping and rework. And a lot of pigs need to go to prison for a long time.
This is just the "bad apples" take, repackaged. You think bad actors are to blame, and that if you weed them out the institution will be cleansed. You miss that the problem is the institution itself and it's very nature, not individual actors. If you reformed the institution to not be this way... Then you'd effectively be doing abolition, the thing you think that you're not looking to do. And it would likely be a much more radical change than you envision it to be.
I am looking for a reform of the institution.
Complete top to bottom scrapping and rework.
What I mean is that I am rejecting the anarchist notion that there should be no such thing as law enforcement, reformed or otherwise. Because they reject the notion of a state at all.
You think you're looking to reform it, but I think you're actually looking to abolish it and you don't yet realize that. If you understand that the problem is institutional and not individual, and you intend to reshape the institution to correct this, if you are actually effective and complete in those efforts (And sensitive to why a law is enforced rather than merely the act of doing so for it's own sake) you will probably wind up with something that looks like community defense. Which is fundamentally different from policing in both form and mission.
Why abolish fundamentally violent and corrupt organizations when you can collaborate?
Most privileged take.
Only the most off-kilter revolutionary would consider that suggestion "collaboration."
And I suppose I'd be shot as a "collaborator" in your ideal upheaval of society?
Start by removing Qualified Immunity.
While this is definitely needed, I don't think it's a starting point.
IMO, a good place to start is instituting policies requiring LEOs/PDs carry liability insurance. Similar to doctors and other medical practices (in the US). An officer is found guilty or misconduct or violating a citizen's right? Penalties are taken out of their insurance and their premium increases. Can't afford the premium? Guess who's looking for a new job?
The way I see, the pigs can keep their criminal immunity, but civil matters will have a more direct financial incentive for them to behave like they have morals.
Police have unions (They function as professional organizations, but legally they are labor unions) largely to block legal changes like this. To defeat them, you'd need to somehow pass legislation on the state and federal level that mortally undermines the power of all labor unions in the USA. This would have knock-on effects for all US workers, as unions fight for and uphold labor protections that benefit those outside their ranks. For instance, two day weekends and 40 hour work weeks.
It seems clear to me that ending QE - Which is merely a judicial policy, it's not even law - Is by far the more potent, simple, and safe avenue of attack. But I'm interested in your thoughts on the above proverbial gun that police unions hold to the head of every US laborer.
No, you can have selective limits, tied to how much risk the job imposes on the surroundings (like universal regulation on any job requiring being armed). Unions are supposed to be about worker power against the employer, not against society.
Well unfortunately in the case of US police unions, it's an anti-labor force using a labor organization as a disingenuous hedge against accountability. And also at the end of the day a police union resisting insurance requirements for it's members actually is a case of workers (Class traitors, but workers all the same) organizing against their employer.
That's another "market economy" solution.
Maybe start with the training. It's ridiculously short in the US compared to European countries where the training takes usually multiple years, before you're allowed to go on your own
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Fight police with capitalism!
I mean, if it works, it works. We've addressed a lot of societal problems via liability-based approaches. ADA ramps and disability access come to mind. It's not a perfect solution, but it's often a lot more tractable than trying to change the culture of an entire industry or profession. Activists spent decades trying to persuade architects and building owners to make their spaces accessible. But they simply didn't want to change. Designing public buildings with ramps and elevators can have real drawbacks, both practically and aesthetically, and the building industry didn't want to change. Congress could have made it illegal to not have ramps, a misdemeanor or felony, but who is legally responsible for a non compliant school? And does this sound like a law police would spend a lot of time enforcing? Are they going to devote resources to cracking down on inaccessible buildings?
In the end, it was simply easier to empower disabled people to be their own advocates. Let them sue building owners who won't make their structures accessible. No need to convince a prosecutor or bureaucrat that disability access is worth their time. The people most affected can lead the charge instead.
Overall, the approach has worked quite well. While not perfect, it has radically changed the degree of accessibility for disabled people to public buildings and spaces.
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Imagine a world where the top priority of the police team (not “force”) was to help and support the people. “Help” includes stopping confirmed bad guys but also includes finding the homeless a safe place to sleep.
Send all police trainees to social work school.
What a world that would be.
IMO finding the homeless a safe place to sleep shouldn't be the job of the police. You don't call the police when there's a fire, you call firefighters. You don't call the police when someone's injured, you call an ambulance. Why would law enforcers be involved in helping a homeless person find shelter?
Maybe in this case you could expand the scope a bit. Police are responsible for public safety, and it's unsafe to sleep on the streets. OTOH, policing is law enforcement, deterring and investigating crime, etc. Homeless people are often committing crimes, either trespassing, loitering, using drugs, etc. It would almost certainly be better for them to be helped by someone who doesn't care about that part, and just wants them to get a safe place to sleep and a warm, healthy meal.
Instead of giving more jobs to police, shrink the police budget and hire new people to do those non-policing jobs.
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They also don't want people who are too smart:
9/8/2000 (!)
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
What about the roles where intelligence is required, like investigation, forensics etc. Are there no Sherlock Holmes fans in the police?
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I went to a technical college that had a police training program. Technical colleges sometimes have the reputation of being glorified high schools. That's mostly unfair, but there were three guys in some of my classes who were determined to make it that way. Give you one guess as to what program they were in.
I wouldn't trust those three to be security guards at a shopping mall.
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