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All right, let’s do this. Police are America’s largest organized criminal enterprise megathread.
Police have unlawfully seized over $35 billion in property, disproportionately from low-income people, without convicting or in some cases even accusing them of a crime. https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/no-drugs-no-crime-and-just-pennies-school-how-police-use-civil-asset-forfeiture
Police pulled Phil Parhamovitch over for a $25 ticket. They also took his entire life savings, over $91,000. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/1/16686014/phillip-parhamovich-civil-forfeiture
40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, compared to 10% of the general population. Of officers convicted of domestic abuse, more than half kept their https://kutv.com/news/local/40-of-police-officer-families-experience-domestic-violence-study-says
Reassigning police officers with a history of misconduct makes it more likely that their new peers will also misbehave. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/police-misconduct-peer-effects/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-the-data-say-about-police-shootings/ In the United States, police officers fatally shoot about three people per day on average, a number that’s close to the yearly totals for other wealthy nations.
Findings suggest that (a) police sexual violence is a “pattern prone” offense that often involves recidivist officers who victimize multiple persons and (b) that a striking number of police accused of sex crimes manage to escape appropriate penalties. https://www.bwjp.org/assets/documents/pdfs/webinars/dhhs-police-sexual-misconduct-a-national-scale-study.pdf
Law enforcement officers in the U.S. intentionally or accidentally killed more than 6,800 civilians between 2013 and 2018. An officer was charged with a crime in 1.7% of the cases. https://time.com/5628206/police-shooting-trial-knowlton-garner/
The increased spread of police militarization, where officers are equipped with armored vehicles and advanced weaponry, does not reduce violent crime or make officers safety. Instead, it siphons money from communities to arms manufacturers. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/police-militarization-fails-to-protect-officers-and-targets-black-communities-study-finds
I gotta go to bed but contribute links and I’ll RT in the morning
Good morning! Great reminder here that the very root of policing in this country was the desire to strip Black and Indigenous people of their civil rights https://twitter.com/gibsonjareds/status/1266713866760851456?s=21 https://twitter.com/gibsonjareds/status/1266713866760851456
That starting point informs how police still behave centuries later. Police are twice as likely to threaten or use force against Black or Hispanic people than white people. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/10/12/policing/
The entire criminal justice system is biased to protect police. In a study of 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from 4/2009 - 12/2010, only 33% were convicted and only 11.8% served prison sentences - about half the rate of the general public . https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938234/police-shootings-killings-prosecutions-court
In many places, police departments routinely ignore state regulations about who can become an officer. In one Alaska town, every single cop has a domestic violence conviction. https://www.propublica.org/article/stebbins-alaska-cops-criminal-records-domestic-violence
Police argue that abuse of power and criminality only happens among younger, less experienced officers. That is not true. Nearly 20% of police-perpetrated crimes discovered in a single study were done by officers with 18 or more years of experience. https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=crim_just_pub
