689
Texas cops arrest 11-year-old honors student and put him in solitary confinement for three days
(www.texasobserver.org)
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
689 points (98.6% liked)
THE POLICE PROBLEM
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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
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Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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Growing up brown in red Texas
I thought the same, but after a bit of searching it looks to me like this wasn’t racially motivated. The town the school is located in is 95% Hispanic, as is the principal. My assumption at this point is the principal is a tyrant who considers any question of authority as an attack that must be squashed. The cops too, but that goes without saying.
Well, I'm going to go ahead and stick to my read of the situation. Systemic racism doesn't just breed hatred of individual peoples, it breeds thoughts, processes and procedures that become ingrained in people through training (brainwashing). The principal involved the cops, but the cops put a child in solitary confinement for 3 days. A CHILD. This is a punishment we shouldn't even be using on adults! And a punishment for what? Learning their place?
Your read being that a bunch of Hispanic people put a Hispanic person in jail because he is Hispanic? Ok.
If you're naive enough to think that racist and systemic racism is not or cannot be perpetrated by groups of people on their own people, well, I have some history books you should read.
Of course racism and systemic racism are alive and well. And yes, people can be racist against their own people. These factors are pervasive and can’t fully be separated from the situation.
That doesn’t mean that this was racially motivated. You seem to want to point to racism as the motivation for the principal and cops to do this. It’s only motivation in the sense that systemic racism underlies everything and is always there.