If you’re in the US, yes, you’re famed for all the policing issues you mentioned. I can only go off of conversations with my friends dotted around the EU but the perception we have is that police here are different because of circumstances rather than innate qualities. They’re generally not armed, they’re slightly better educated and at least on paper, there are institutions providing oversight.
But the same problems exist here to one degree or another, especially racism. But also excessive force, using their position as an officer to protect themselves from accountability around issues including domestic violence … and while lie detectors are rarely used they are starting to use AI at border control to detect if people might be lying: https://peopleofcolorintech.com/articles/ai-lie-detectors-at-borders-who-does-the-eus-ai-act-actually-protect/
So I don’t know how we really compare. I see some crazy videos from the USA of people’s interactions with police. It seems like another world completely compared to here in Ireland. And ICE seem like domestic terrorists rather than law enforcement.
But we also have institutional corruption so bad that the force tried to frame a whistleblower (Maurice McCabe) for child abuse. The most senior people were replaced with someone who wasn’t Irish (Drew Harris), essentially given the job of draining the swamp / reforming the institution.
I think I generally agree with everything you’ve said, yes I am from/in the US, I also have had many EU internet friends over the years… yeah, policing problems exist everywhere, but they’re a lot worse here tham the EU generally.
We have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, of any large, developed country.
We imprison more of our population than commonly referenced authoritarian states like Russia and China.
We have more total prisoners than Stalin had in labor camp gulags at the height of the gulag system, we have more people incarcerated than China does, and their population is roughly 4x larger than ours.
We treat way, way too many problems as crimes to be jailed or imprisoned for, not social problems to be solved at the root cause, and we have a neat little carve out in our Constitution that explicitly allows slavery, forced labor, for imprisoned people… we have a massive industry of private, for profit prisons, that exploits this slave labor.
Oh and also police are nearly never actually prosecuted, convicted, or sent to prison, we only very recently even began to attempt to have meaningful data on much of that… cops are literally above the law in a wide range of scenarios, allowed to violate their own rules routinely, you have to really, really fuck up hard as a cop to actually be convicted…
And then going to prison, as a cop, is often a death sentence… because the other prsioners fucking hate cops.
Even if you are not a cop, basically you should just expect to be raped in prison, thats how common it is, everyone acts like this is a funny joke though.
And all those figures and facts were true for years, decades, long before Trump and MAGA just went full fascist, and decided to bring back WW2 style internment camps, but for undocumented migrants, and the homeless.
We’ve already got disease outbreaks running through these concentration camps, which are largely being blacked out of the media, I will be entirely unsurprised if we just progress as the Nazis did to ‘work till you die’ camps and outright death camps, in just a few years time.
I didn’t realise how high the prison population numbers are. I first became aware of the issue when System of a Down released “Prison song”.
Those numbers you shared are really abhorrent, and explains why my lawyer acquaintance finds the prison system there shocking (he visited the US a few times). He absolutely would not want to see something “so inhumane” here.
I wonder how to interpret the 82% non-conviction in the context of over-conviction.
We have people in prison that are as much victims of poverty and undiagnosed problems like ADHD / autism. So if we have people imprisoned who would be better served (including society) elsewhere, I can imagine it’s pretty bad there in the U.S. Ifs a genuine tragedy, but an injustice against human rights too.
Counter-nitpick accepted 😄
If you’re in the US, yes, you’re famed for all the policing issues you mentioned. I can only go off of conversations with my friends dotted around the EU but the perception we have is that police here are different because of circumstances rather than innate qualities. They’re generally not armed, they’re slightly better educated and at least on paper, there are institutions providing oversight.
But the same problems exist here to one degree or another, especially racism. But also excessive force, using their position as an officer to protect themselves from accountability around issues including domestic violence … and while lie detectors are rarely used they are starting to use AI at border control to detect if people might be lying: https://peopleofcolorintech.com/articles/ai-lie-detectors-at-borders-who-does-the-eus-ai-act-actually-protect/
So I don’t know how we really compare. I see some crazy videos from the USA of people’s interactions with police. It seems like another world completely compared to here in Ireland. And ICE seem like domestic terrorists rather than law enforcement.
But we also have institutional corruption so bad that the force tried to frame a whistleblower (Maurice McCabe) for child abuse. The most senior people were replaced with someone who wasn’t Irish (Drew Harris), essentially given the job of draining the swamp / reforming the institution.
I think I generally agree with everything you’ve said, yes I am from/in the US, I also have had many EU internet friends over the years… yeah, policing problems exist everywhere, but they’re a lot worse here tham the EU generally.
We have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, of any large, developed country.
We imprison more of our population than commonly referenced authoritarian states like Russia and China.
We have more total prisoners than Stalin had in labor camp gulags at the height of the gulag system, we have more people incarcerated than China does, and their population is roughly 4x larger than ours.
We treat way, way too many problems as crimes to be jailed or imprisoned for, not social problems to be solved at the root cause, and we have a neat little carve out in our Constitution that explicitly allows slavery, forced labor, for imprisoned people… we have a massive industry of private, for profit prisons, that exploits this slave labor.
Oh and also police are nearly never actually prosecuted, convicted, or sent to prison, we only very recently even began to attempt to have meaningful data on much of that… cops are literally above the law in a wide range of scenarios, allowed to violate their own rules routinely, you have to really, really fuck up hard as a cop to actually be convicted…
And then going to prison, as a cop, is often a death sentence… because the other prsioners fucking hate cops.
Even if you are not a cop, basically you should just expect to be raped in prison, thats how common it is, everyone acts like this is a funny joke though.
And all those figures and facts were true for years, decades, long before Trump and MAGA just went full fascist, and decided to bring back WW2 style internment camps, but for undocumented migrants, and the homeless.
We’ve already got disease outbreaks running through these concentration camps, which are largely being blacked out of the media, I will be entirely unsurprised if we just progress as the Nazis did to ‘work till you die’ camps and outright death camps, in just a few years time.
Shit’s really bad over here.
I didn’t realise how high the prison population numbers are. I first became aware of the issue when System of a Down released “Prison song”.
Those numbers you shared are really abhorrent, and explains why my lawyer acquaintance finds the prison system there shocking (he visited the US a few times). He absolutely would not want to see something “so inhumane” here.
I wonder how to interpret the 82% non-conviction in the context of over-conviction.
We have people in prison that are as much victims of poverty and undiagnosed problems like ADHD / autism. So if we have people imprisoned who would be better served (including society) elsewhere, I can imagine it’s pretty bad there in the U.S. Ifs a genuine tragedy, but an injustice against human rights too.