A Maryland police officer was convicted on Friday of charges that he joined a mob’s Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and hurled a smoke bomb and other objects at police officers guarding a tunnel entrance.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden heard two days of trial testimony without a jury this week before he found Montgomery County Police Officer Justin Lee guilty of two felonies and three misdemeanors. The judge, who also acquitted Lee of two other misdemeanors, is scheduled to sentence him on Nov. 22.
Lee, 26, ignited and threw a smoke bomb into the tunnel entrance on the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace, where a mob of rioters attacked a group of outnumbered police officers. The device struck a police officer’s riot shield and filled the mouth of the tunnel with a large plume of smoke, prosecutors said.
I’m an ex cop and the whole attitude is really reductionist and lacks any insight into how police organisations actually tend to work. Especially when it comes to large forces with tens of thousands of officers and staff - for example, by assuming that corrupt officers and cultures are evenly distributed throughout an organisation, which they’re not. It just doesn’t work like that and it’s a frankly juvenile attitude lacking in any nuance.
I’m saying this as someone with a degree in Criminology (in which my dissertation was on policing in ethnically diverse communities), a Master’s in human rights law, and several years of experience in a large force (which I left due to service related PTSD). I feel quite qualified to comment on it. ACAB is detached from how corruption actually works in the real world, discounts the good work of a lot of very good people, and offers zero solution or viable alternative. I can completely understand having a negative impression of the police given their media attention these days but ACAB is teenager-level critical thinking that does not acknowledge the complexity of the problem and spits in the face of many good people.
To be clear I’m not just bootlicking - I hated my previous employer (for separate reasons) and have no good will for them. There ARE problems with policing in 2024, as there always have been before, and they need acknowledging and fixing. But the ACAB narrative doesn’t work for me. And it’s more than a little ironic that you are using that narrative while simultaneously criticising an “us vs them” approach.
Thanks for literally proving my point.
I also said this:
It’s called nuance.
And the whole point of a catch phrase or saying such as ACAB is to boil a statement down past the nuance. I’m sure most people are willing to acknowledge that there are good cops. That’s not entirely the point. When you point out good cops, we can point out similar instances of a good cop being driven off the force for not falling in line or the “good cop” covering for a bad one.
Did you also rail against the phrase “black lives matter” because it didn’t address the nuance that other lives matter as well? Cause that misses the point. When a non-black person was killed, people weren’t trotting out that phrase. Similarly if there’s a good interaction with a cop, people aren’t going to start screaming ACAB. Those phrases generally get brought out when there’s a bad cop or black people are killed.
I have yet to see an instance of this that isn’t downvoted into oblivion. I don’t think the majority agree with you here.
I think there’s a pretty big difference between
If it’s not the point that all cops are bad then why do you use a phrase which states the exact opposite? How can you, with a straight face, justify a stance and narrative that intentionally removes nuance as you just said?
The whole black lives matter thing isn’t relevant to my country so I won’t comment on that as I quite simply don’t know enough about it.
Because while you drone on about the nuance from the cops side of things, you completely ignore the nuance from the victims side. There’s plenty of body cam video of cops blatantly violating laws and rights and facing no consequences despite literally doing it on camera that they had to put on and turn on themselves. That stems from either the audacity to flagrantly be a bastard as the phrase implies or that that mentality is so ingrained in them and/or the culture that they forgot to not fuck up on camera.
You’re completely dismissive of the movement behind the saying ACAB because you ignore nuance too. When you understand why you do that, maybe you’ll understand why that phrase is used.
And before you try to throw that back on me, remember the side you’re defending chose their job and were entrusted with a responsibility to serve and protect. The rest of us didn’t “choose” to be the chattel under their boots.
As I said, I wrote my dissertation on policing in minority ethnic communities. I specifically went out of my way to understand the sensitivities before I started the career. I also have a master’s degree in human rights law, and continue to work in the legal field dealing with these topics every day. I am far better placed than most to understand both sides of the situation (though I’d argue against the assumption that there are ‘sides’).
How can you say there are all these videos all the time when I haven’t even said where I’m from? Because in my country, incidents like what I see often from America are extremely rare.
I dismiss the ACAB movement because it is by definition reductionist. When you say ALL of something is anything in society then I will immediately raise my eyebrows to that claim. Society is not that simple.
I knew you weren’t American simply because you were WAY over-educated for law enforcement. At best you were in a Federal Agency but that was highly unlikely.
ACAB is admittedly more of an American phenomenon. Policing in other Western nations is generally far better, but imperfect, and this stark difference in education standards is a significant (but not the only) reason why. In the US high intelligence is considered an indicator the individual will find police work dull drudgery and greatly reduces the likelihood of, if not overtly disqualifies them from being approved to become a police officer.
Appealing for nuance where the problem literally is they are too uneducated to appreciate nuance is unreasonable. The solution requires bold and blunt ‘enough is enough’ statements that clearly declare society is done with the concept of law enforcement as it stands and wants the return of classic peace officers.
Think the following question over yourself. Don’t bother answering it here.
As the enforcer of the law, how many times have you casually broken the law and felt ok doing it? How many times have you seen a fellow police officer break the law and failed to hold them accountable or even helped them cover it up? In your experience, these events may have only involved minor crimes - not murder or rape or anything - but you almost certainly still operated in an environment of willingness to break the law and fraternal duty to protect your colleagues at any cost. The same situation is too common with serious crimes, as we see in the news on a regular basis.
Good cops don’t help cover up the crimes of bad cops.
I will reply, because I don’t agree with your perception and the implications of your comment.
In work? Literally never. Not once. Everything is recorded in BWV and is disclosable in court. Documentation and usually a statement is required for the exercise of any legal power. It’s all auditable. We even had community engagement groups who watch videos of incidents chosen at random by a computer, and I’ve had several of mine pulled up for feedback by them.
Putting aside the obvious ethical reasons why I haven’t done that and wouldn’t want to. Why would I risk my career and income anyway?
Never. Not once. I have reported multiple colleagues in the past for doing things which I thought were questionable, and those concerns were always appropriately actioned by management. I faced no consequences from my peers or the organisation for doing so.
Your presumptions are incorrect. Maybe they are correct where you live, I don’t know, but they’re not my experience at all. For what it’s worth, I’m not American.
I’m not saying these things don’t happen and as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not saying modern policing is without issues. As someone who has worked in the criminal justice system for years with multiple degrees in the area, your perception of how things actually work in real life and how those problems manifest are not correct, and your judgements towards individuals (including myself) are totally unfair and without nuance.
I’m not sure how things work in your country. You’ve helpfully neglected to even state what country that is (which conveniently makes it difficult to find examples of the state of policing in your country).
This article is discussing American police and so that’s the context of my statements. We don’t do police accountability or oversight here, so your counterpoint doesn’t lend much weight.
I’ve intentionally left my country ambiguous to highlight that saying ALL of any group is a ridiculous statement, because I could be from anywhere in the world and somehow you think you know enough to apply that statement to me and my former colleagues.
So you’ve waded into an article about the criminal behavior of an American policeman, found a comment calling for police accountability in the US and posted some unverifiable anecdotal “evidence” that only qualifies their statement in the vaguest sense, but is aimed to plant uncertainty and doubt in the sentiment that police as a whole are bastards and need better oversight and accountability…
You very much appear to be one of the “good” cops that will do anything to minimize the crimes of his bad brothers. I would say that maybe ACAB only applies to the rotten societies like ours, but you are falling over yourself to cast yourself in the same lot as the bad cop in the article and to defend the profession. That’s not making the statement you think it is.
Well, the first A in ACAB stands for “all”. Meaning the claim is not limited to America. It’s a statement about policing as an institution in general, and so I think it’s perfectly reasonable for me to contribute to the discussion even though I’m a foreigner.
I don’t think my view can be dismissed as anecdotal. A person basing a view off of one anecdote is anecdotal. A person who has worked in the field for years and has multiple degrees in the area isn’t giving anecdotal evidence, they’re giving expert and specialist insight. Furthermore, I was specifically asked about my individual experience.
I defend the profession because it’s my opinion that policing CAN be a force for good. I don’t have direct experience with America so I won’t comment on that. But your accusations that even “good” cops are complicit in corruption by turning a blind eye or defending it is simply not true across the board and massively unfair towards people who sacrifice a lot for a very difficult job for selfless reasons. The organisation I worked for had tens of thousands of officers and staff so I’m obviously not going to claim it had zero issues and zero corruption, but it tended to be isolated to specific teams with their own internal culture that outsiders are rarely even aware of. I know this based on both my own experience and my studies of police corruption as part of my first degree.
I can honestly say with my hand on my heart that corruption was extremely rare in my professional experience. And when I saw something questionable (which was almost always down to incompetence rather than malice) I raised it and it was dealt with as appropriate.
I haven’t seen any comments qualifying their statement with “ACAB but only America” so I don’t think I’ve “waded in” at all (even putting aside the fact that this is a public forum anyway). All means all, and I object to such a blanket statement. I want to reiterate that I’m really not just trying to bootlick. As I said before, I have no good will towards my precious employer (for totally separate reasons) and I do agree that there are issues in modern policing that need to be addressed.
Dude, logic won’t work but I appreciate the attempt. I think people are angry and need a group to let it out on, tale as old as time. Bad cops are too vague of a topic, it’s easier to hate them all and justify it by a “bad system” which just makes it worse. Hate all cops and paint them as the enemy while asking them to change. Don’t ever acknowledge good cops and encourage that behavior. It’s childish.