Yeah, no, fuck all cops. And please lets not pretend like shit isn’t getting mighty fasc-y all over Europe too…
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.
ALL cops you say?
While acab is probably too generalized a term to apply to ALL police forces in the world… Interpreting acab in absolutes is also kinda silly and needlessly pedantic.
If I were to say all Nazi are bastards… Would we be making the same arguments? Surely there were Nazi that were forced to join the party, surely there were Nazi giving years of their lives to serving their communities, risking their lives and health.
The point of ACAB is to highlight the inherent and institutional failures of policing actions native to the vast majority of western democracies. Where police are primarily utilized to protect property and institutional power, rather than protecting the most disadvantaged communities in our society.
Trouble with that theory is that I think regular people won’t hear something like ‘All Cops Are Bastards’ and immediately think ‘well they probably don’t mean all cops’. It literally says it there.
Maybe because I’m Scottish living in Scotland I’m separate from the US side of the movement/argument but knowing so many good people in the service who have probably done more for their communities than some people spray painting on walls it just sounds so blatant. If it was a different slogan then I doubt people would have an issue with it but not everyone hears all the details about what it apparently means online or whatnot, they just see the words.
No desire to be pedantic at all, just explaining why a lot of folk won’t get behind the message.
ACAISAETOSOOSBTNOTPI or All Cops Are Inherently Supporting And Enforcing The Opressive Systems Of Our Society By The Nature Of The Policing Institution doesn’t quite have the same ring to it though.
I mean I get it, “ACAB” sounds a bit like an over-reaction and I wouldn’t use that term to talk about Belgian cops, but within leftist circles like lemmy I think it’s an acceptable shorthand since 90+ percent of people already understand The Discourse™ on some level.
Haha that acronym gave me a chuckle.
Yeah I get it, I just don’t like when things are reduced to all x’s are y’s, think that kind of polarised thinking isn’t helpful when the world has a whole lot of grey in it. Equally if someone is happy to post a comment like that online I don’t think there is anything bad about chatting it through like reasonable humans.
Social meanings of words out weigh dictionary definitions, that’s just how being social works
I’m very left wing and I hate the ACAB slogan.
I’ve never heard a progressive, liberal or democrat call themselves “left wing” before
Thanks for expanding my world view!
I’m not American so labels like democrat and liberal mean nothing to me. Consequently I have no idea what you’re trying to insinuate
PEB
Policing Enables Bastards
Meanwhile, “ACAB” is obviously wrong and disrespect to anyone who signs up to get fired for being a good cop.
Don’t need to say literally wrong things that have to be re-explained, even if it is catchy. Be The Change!
AACABAL! (All ACAB’rs Are Lazy!) :)
See, that expresses that it’s a systemic issue and that consequently some cops are bastards without damning everyone who is part of a large diverse group. It’s even a simpler acronym. Brilliant
Must be the third time I’ve shared it in the past year or two… first compliment! :)
As a New Zealander, I feel the same way about ACAB as you. I definitely have issues with the Police and I definitely think they’re a racist institution (NZ stats back that up) but ACAB is a shitty slogan IMO
All Carsalesmen Are Bastards.
I say defund the dealerships!
Hey, all I do for a living is generate value for a group of people who harm others! I’m just feeding them and housing them! Is that so bad?
Yes, fuck them, and fuck you.
You choose to knowingly join the organisation that was literally created and exists solely to serve the rich and oppress everyone else to do it.
Cops are class traitors who can choose to leave their position at any time, the marginalised people they exist to abuse have no such luxury.
Your feeling are irrelevant.
ACAB
You’re a fucking idiot. I live in a small town up in the mountains in Europe, and some absolute fucking dimwits like you have been going round spraying ACAB on stuff
Our two policemen and two policewomen are the genuinely nicest folk you’ll ever meet and do loads and loads of good for the community. When they’re not busy they volunteer to deliver free meals to the elderly and help out at the charity shop
Tarring everyone with the same brush is something simpletons do, which is probably why they didn’t accept you into the police 😂
I don’t understand why nuance is so complicated for people.
Stupidity, blinkered world-view, inbreeding… I could go on…
You should purge all the white cells from your body. Not only are they extremely militant cops, they’re white.
I’m from germany and I’m scared about the future. The far-right is getting more and more voters. It’s not just the USA who is fckd.
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.
I am also from Germany. Political and cultural developments that happen in the US will in some form arrive in Europe with a delay of about 10 years, at least that is how I often felt.
Income inequality is not a huge problem in many parts of Europe. The distribution of wealth is. A fine, but important difference, because the effects of this are much worse.
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.
Also Europe:
“Let’s do this obviously good thing for the sake of the whole continent.”
“No, because it would help France.”
So? Where is Your punchline?
Let’s not forget brexit. Americans aren’t alone in their dumbassarry
Or the recent wins of fascist parties in Europe.
I fear the outcome of the three “state” elections in Eastern Germany later this year.
The fascist parties that want to stop immigrants on the borders? Remind me who was the previous president in US and who’s controlling the house now…
Initial comment about dumbassery not in the USA.
Reply back about additional dumbassery not in America.
You: bUt WhAt AbOuT aMeRiCa?
I’m just saying that the “fascist” parties in Europe are no more “fascist” than American right wing parties. People support right-wing parties for different reasons. Calling it dumbassery is weird.
Why so sensitive?
Stopping immigrants at the border would actually be a horrendous policy and have devastating economic effects. Literally advocating for a terrible US policy that could be seen as inhumane and unethical.
Who’s advocating for it?
“I’m not saying we actually do it it’s the implication that we will do it”
Who’s saying that? Who’s we? I think you’re confusing mentioning something with endorsing it.
i hate these memes that group entire countries or continents into one homogeneous blob and assumes that one is inherently better than the other
It’s the best way to sow division. Put everyone into discrete groups and tell them that the other groups are bad.
Cops as a group is formalized by their own work choice.
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.
Also in Finland, on 6th day of December (2023), on our independence day, the bastards prohibited the Helsinki ilman natseja (Helsinki without nazis) protest, beating the antifascist protesters and ramming into them with fucking horses, but they welcomed the nazi parade with open hands. Interesting.
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.
France burns down annually hahaha
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.
Lol as if all of Europe has no problems of their own.
Like, yeah, I’m American and shit is really fucked up here in some specific ways… But let’s not pretend Europe is some sort of utopia.
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.
Thank you for sharing - I didn’t know the Dutch were getting hit with this crap, too. I always just think of it as a US and increasingly British experience.
As another European, I do blame the US’ hegemony for a lot of this, but yeah, we’re basically all getting fucked.
I think the root cause is the deregulation/privatisation of everything that started in the 80s. It slanted the playing field towards those with capital at the cost of workers and the cash has been flowing into their pockets and out of ours ever since
It’s a global phenomenon, caused by infinite growth based economic modeling (you know, where you base your whole economy on extracting increasing amounts of value from finite resources).
This type of modeling has been proven wrong and debunked early in the previous century, but it is still practised because it works very well for those gaining most of the profits.
You’ll usually hear the politicians promoting policies that help the larger companies argue that such policies directly create jobs and thus economic value for the people. But this is more of that trickle-down economics bullshit that doesn’t apply in the real world.
Because politicians worldwide have been so fixated on financial gains as a measure of the economy, they fail to measure and correct on (mental) healthcare, housing, education and equality.
Just some context on how large our housing problems have become: There is currently a deficit of 450 000 homes, which is projected to grow past 500 000 by the end of 2024.
The time we stop running countries like we do companies is when we’ll see things improve.
All about comparisons, man.
You gotta give credit to the fact that in the time the United States has had it’s 1 republic, France has had 5 of them.
Or the fact that Europe tears itself apart like every 50 years
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.
The French literally placed an emperor into power just shortly after a proletariat revolution. Let’s not go sucking their dicks just yet.
and Germany did that one thing…what was that again?
You talking about the time they decided to start a war with the entire world, or the time they decided to start a war with the entire world?
the one with the whole “there’s one acceptable phenotype and everyone else can be either worked to death or put to death” thing. Holly-something…
Whatever happens in politics, i will stay away from it – is the mentality of people. So no revolution or whatever we live the way goverment lets us
It’s probably because French citizens are smart enough to put their own well-being before their governing powers well-being.
In what way do they do this?
Chopping heads
“Everything is so bad. Yet they set nothing on fire? How do they expect to fix?” —some twitter lady’s french husband, commenting on the state of American politics
From this extremely boring Finnish perspective, you guys in America set things on fire all the time. If that happened here once, we’d give the event a name and would talk about it for decades.
fair, but we only set things on fire if the local american football team wins. or loses. or ties. or the game is cancelled. or at parades.
what’s wild is that we party like the french protest but we don’t really protest.
Guy’s, let’s put aside our minor differences and remember - fuck Russia.
In most European countries you need a 4 year university degree in criminology to become a cop. They have the same standards for average police officers as we in North America have for Federal law enforcement. So while it’s certainly true that some European countries have shitty cops, the ones with stricter barriers to entry have slightly less shitty cops.
Here’s an interactive map although it does seem to be missing a fair bit of data for Europe. The USA has the most abysmal Police training time at just 500 hours of training between being a civilian and being a Police officer.
edit: lol whoops I never actually posted the link earlier. Here it is: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-training-requirements-by-country
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.
That depends, the gendarmerie in France is part of the military, but there is also regular police which isn’t. European cops aren’t perfect, but it varies a lot by division and country and overall I’d say that your typical every day police you encounter as a normal citizen is fine, they’re usually at least somewhat polite and won’t shoot you or your dog for no reason. Some of them might go on ego trips now and then with some youth or something.
Where you see more issues is with riot police which is starting to look like a RoboCop army in some countries just smashing into protesters, or some other anti-crime divisions where they act like cowboys and leads to some events where some kids get killed or something like that, but it’s much more rare than in the US.
In some countries like in the Netherlands they are next level and you basically don’t see them or when you do they’re always super nice and polite, using positive tactics and just generally doing public service work which is what all police should be.
Civilian means varied things in the US.
The police are civilians, but they’re also not, because they’re law enforcement.Legally they’re civilians, but colloquially they’re not, because there’s a vague separation of public service workers from the public.
Firefighters are the same, because they can also legally order you to do something. You just don’t think about it as much because the fire department isn’t intrinsically fucked up.
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.
No, they just write death threats to people like Martin Luther King, Jr.
They find mentally unstable people and use undercover agents to convince these people to commit acts of terror, often even giving them the tools to succeed… And then they swoop in to stop the attack and yell to the media “SEE WE SAVED THE DAY AND STOPPED TERRORISM!!” Nevermind that this person would have never been in this position without the FBI’s backing. It’s a lot easier than stopping real terrorism and gets them the budgets they want.
I mean COINTELPRO, the villification of black panthers, the railroading of Bruce Ivins in the anthrax attacks…
You must be living under a rock if you think the FBI is any better.
EDIT: made links inline instead of separated.
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…
highest standard in north America
Uh, not saying much there old chap 😅
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.
In developed countries they serve the people instead of just the ruling class. Get out of your country sometime. Not everywhere is as bleak as yours.
I wonder where you think I’m from…
Either way, you’re the one who needs to expand their narrow view, not me… Here are some links I happen to have to hand, feel free to look things up for yourself in your own time (lol, as if…)
https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-you-federal-court-affirms-yet-again
Well, that’s a product of capitalism not the US. It’s more blatant in the US, but it’s how any capitalist society is organized.
It’s a structural property of capitalism, not any nations specific implementation of policing.
Pretty bold for a region that can’t last more than a generation or two before devolving into a police state so severe that it plunges the entire globe into armed conflict.
“How the fuck have they lasted this long as a country?”
Applies to Belgium far more than the US.
We’re younger than the US though.
We got nukes first and WW2 barely touched us. That’s about it. We started the game in the easiest mode.
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
I don’t know, what does “we” mean here? A lot of people colonized America prior to the creation of the united states of America.
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.
French cops are perfectly normal, just don’t google “ici on noie les Algériens” and why it keeps being graffitied on a specific bridge in Paris.
What, you think acab vs notallcops is a usa thing ?
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.
So the rise of authoritarian policies in OECD countires mean nothing and aren’t being enforced?
Sure they do, and sure they are. But most people in functioning democracies with decent to good police forces understand that they’re just the messengers and hate the politicians that came up with the policies instead.
The policies of politicians and the humanism of police are not the same thing. A new party in power will also not change the culture of the workforce of an established service overnight, such a thing takes time. Time that those politicians usually don’t get in a functioning democracy, because in far less than a generation, another coalition of parties will be in the majority.
You wish. I don’t know where you live, but go ask your local queer militants or racial minority, you may have a different answer. Also, yeah, they are here to defends the system, they’ll be nice only as long as the system isn’t too challanged. Which won’t last for much longer anymore, with climate change, rarefaction of resources and all that.
I live in Belgium. There are police officers who are racist, which is to be expected since a lot of Belgian non police officers are racist too. But they are not allowed to be openly racist on the job, because that can have consequences for them.
Are our police fed up with the inner city street youth in Brussels, who mostly have an immigrant background? Definitely, but that doesn’t mean they are any more racist than the immigrants who are also fed up with the with thay inner city street youth. The root cause of those persisting problems is also a failing judiciary, not cop culture.
But the thing is, the conditions, that make it so that “acab” is a thing with many police agencies, are not present in Belgium.
Our police does not have qualified immunity, there are no no knock raids, there is no “we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong”, there is no systematic omerta to protect each other when crimes are committed. People aren’t even afraid of dying or getting their dog killed when they call the police.
There are isolated scandals obviously, police people are human after all and there are all kinds of humans and all kinds of circumstances.
There have been a few police scandals in recent years, but unlike with the USA police we keep reading about, those had consequences for the police officers involved. There is a very recent one of a group of police officers sharing racist memes in a private Whatsapp group and guess what, they got reported by colleagues and after an investigation, several police officers were fired.
Is the Belgian police perfect? Far from it. But are all Belgian cops bastards? Certainly not. Our cops are not a gang that stands apart from society, they are very much part of it.
