We all hate cops here, but even still, even if it was a good and fair system having ‘quotas’ is not a good way to run it. It’s wild to us how any in cop land think this is a good idea.
Usually, holding citizens in prison is a negative on the economy. You’re taking a worker out of your economy and social spaces, and requiring the state to both provide for their needs, and monitor their behavior.
Private prison companies found a particularly devious way to flip this system on its head. A loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment allows them to use prisoners as cheap forced labor. Consider that a free labor force generally demands pay above the bare minimum of what it takes to feed and house all of them – and you see the issue. Mix economy of scale with a complete disdain for peoples’ desires, and you have an extremely lucrative business that politicians can write off as tax-reduction (though even that is questionable).
The private prison industry makes it beneficial for citizens to be found in breach of the law. The private prison industry depends on criminals, in the same way our military depends on generational poverty. We’ve seen this culminate in exploitation of underprivileged youth, the mentally ill, the unhoused, and we’re going to see this weaponized against queers, youth, and the poor. This is nothing new. The War on Drugs was an extension of this idea, as is the School-To-Prison pipeline. New “anti-school shooting” bills that allow unrestricted persecution of kids are themselves another front of the pro-prison industry.
Freedom is a fragile state when holding citizens in breach of the law is lucrative.
Yeah, that’s why we need to abolish cops, the injustice system, prisons, law, states, capitalism and all other forms of hierarchy and opression and move to transformative, restorative and preventative forms of justice instead.
My post is also why the system spends so much effort convincing the working class to Not want exactly this.
Yeah my first instinct was “fuck DUI just as hard as our uniformed, un-informed ‘friends’” - but you’re right the underlying mechanism is even more sinister. any idea of quota is just …
It’s a good idea for them. You just need to let go of the idea that US cops serve the general public.
Oh, we know. We are well aware of what the purpose of cops is. But it is a wild idea to give them quotas. We don’t get how anybody can see that and still think cops are good, even cops.
The bootlickers are OK with police brutality as long as they think it’s the people they don’t like who are getting brutalized.
Yeah, fuck punitive ‘justice’.
I feel like this should be unconstitutional but I can’t figure out how. I mean the state assuming citizens will break the law in future to a certain minimum and being willing to arrest innocents if no one breaks the law.
I guess presumption of innocence (which is not explicitly in the constitution but has supreme court precedent, however much that’s worth these days). if every person is presumed to be innocent, then saying “there must be at least X number of guilty people, go find them” is contradictory to that presumption
