You all need to read this, seriously...

[MrScorpio]

Link to tweet

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.
But enough is enough.

The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.

American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. It's a long read and every paragraph is worth excerpting. Everyone should read it.

FTP. ACAB. K&R.

[Layzeebeaver]

50. Absolutely.

Read it. Comprehend it. And follow his advice.

[jb5150]

2. This should be required reading for everyone ...

.. very powerful

[abqtommy]

3. I like your analogy of the "thick blue tumor". Well done!

[llashram]

4. bout time

[Martin Eden]

5. Definitely worth reading the entire article

Thanks for sharing!

[CaptYossarian]

6. A cop with a conscience--very rare.

All I know is there was a cop I knew who was totally racist, sexist, and pretty much hated everyone. His career lasted almost 40 years. His more even-tempered, tolerant son was fired from the local Sheriff's Dept. for undisclosed reasons.

[liberalla]

7. Confessions of a former bastard cop - Bookmarking to read later

[DoubleDeuce]

8. Thank You

Thanks for sharing, I just sent it to all the women in my life......this is essential reading for every citizen in the US.

[theaocp]

9. Oddly enough, he doesn't seem to have a problem with defunding, nay

abolishing the police and prisons. Doesn't he know messaging is so important?

Worth every fucking second to read and re-read. This is important.

[wryter2000]

10. K&R

Spot on

[mountain grammy]

11. This would seem unbelievable

if we didn't see it right in front of us..

That last section, wow. Read it 3 times.

[Six117]

12. I read it and shared it. Thank you!

It gives me hope....

[SamKnause]

13. Disgustingly truthful !!!

They are not here to protect and serve.

They are here to bully and make our lives miserable.

I fucking hate them !!!

[AllaN01Bear]

14. they are only here to protect the rich.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

39. The rich and thier property

Innocent people die when cops chase stolen cars for instance,and to the cops it's collateral damage those people that get hurt or die. They protect property and the rich..

[questionseverything]

48. ...

. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

[ancianita]

15. These bastards of qualified immunity are ruining America. Blue America knows it. Red doesn't.

[Roc2020]

16. The most enlightening thing

I have read this year. Extremely revealing explains and makes a lot of what's happening on the streets makes perfect perfect sense.

[PatSeg]

17. Here's a link to the actual article

for those who don't use Twitter:

https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

[crickets]

19. Thanks, PatSeg. Unfortunately, Medium links always break at the @.

It's annoying, but all you have to do is remove the symbol and they work fine.

https://medium.com/OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

[PatSeg]

23. Thanks

That really IS annoying.

I'm reading the article right now and it is very powerful. I've shared it on Facebook at a couple of groups. This guy should write a book, though that might be dangerous for him, if for any reason he can't keep his identity anonymous.

[MrScorpio]

24. Hence, why I used my Twitter link.

[crickets]

25. 👍 That works too. nt

[crickets]

18. Unflinching and brutally honest appraisal of current policing.

The author addressed how to change the system with many of the strategies that have been discussed here. It's not a short read, it's not pleasant, but it is spot on.

[1plus1equals1]

20. Highly recommend reading the entire essay and some of the best is towards the end.

[Eyeball_Kid]

21. Terrific read. I've an extended family member who's a cop.

And his immediate family is gung-ho for elevating police officers' stature in the community. That's okay, IMO. But if they support law enforcement unconditionally, that's a problem, because abuse of power is a problem.

[Jon King]

22. Wow, amazing article.

The entire police system is rotten. I remember my father telling stories of his brother in law cop. Total quiet little coward most of the time, but would go upstairs before his shift and put on his uniform, come down like he owned the world. My sister married a mall cop who became a local police officer. Biggest jerk ever to walk the earth. Thankfully she dumped him.

Just a month ago I drove past a deserted local park where police were doing motorcycle training in the parking lot. We drove down the road and pulled over into a wide open area outside the park entrance that was closed due to Covid. Literally in the middle of nowhere with no one else around. My daughter just got her learner's permit and I was pulling over so she could take the wheel for a lesson. I get out and a motorcycle cop pulled up next to us and he was on fire. He yelled, "Park is closed, what are you doing?" I said, "Just giving a drivers lesson to my kid, we are not going to the park." What?, he yelled. He was sputtering and mumbling, stared at us for 20 seconds, then drove away.

Even when he realized he was dead wrong he drove away incensed. He was totally angry for zero reason. And we are the most suburban looking white people you will ever see, in broad daylight, on a sunny day, in a beautiful area, doing absolutely nothing that anyone would take a second look at. We could have pulled over to make a phone call or for any reason. But he had no interest in anything but finding a reason to look for trouble.

And for a few seconds there, seeing his crazy eyes and his obvious wanting to find something to act on, I was worried. I can not even imagine the sheer terror black people feel when cops stop them.

[greytdemocrat]

26. I'd remember this pile on

If your house/apartment ever gets robbed
or you need help on a rainy night.

It's easy to jump on cops because of
a letter you don't even know is really true.

What if it's all made up?

[MrScorpio]

28. This excerpt is quite relevant:

DO THE BASTARDS EVER HELP?

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people.

During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.
It’s also important to note that well over 90% of the calls for service I handled were reactive, showing up well after a crime had taken place. We would arrive, take a statement, collect evidence (if any), file the report, and onto the next caper. Most “active” crimes we stopped were someone harmless possessing or selling a small amount of drugs. Very, very rarely would we stop something dangerous in progress or stop something from happening entirely. The closest we could usually get was seeing someone running away from the scene of a crime, but the damage was still done.

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started.

Armed, indoctrinated (and dare I say, traumatized) cops do not make you safer; community mutual aid networks who can unite other people with the resources they need to stay fed, clothed, and housed make you safer. I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.

[PETRUS]

30. Just the one skeptic so far... not bad.

Great essay. Thanks for posting it.

[greytdemocrat]

45. That...

Might tell you something.

[PETRUS]

54. What do you believe it indicates?

I can think of a variety of interpretations.

[Stuart G]

37. Thank You for posting this..and especially this part above this post...K & R ... #28

[srose58089]

27. Thanks for sharing.

MrScoripio thanks for sharing

After reading this essay I posted it to my facebook page . I will see in a day or two what kind of comments are generated.

[Snackshack]

29. Interesting read.

The writer is 100% right about Police Unions being way too powerful. As a child I remember riding with my mom and her and I being pulled over by cops several times because the cop was interested in my mom...so yea the writer is right about that too. I am sure he is right about everything else. There was a podcast I listened to with a ex-police officer from Baltimore (I think) and in the podcast the ex-officer said basically the same thing this essay said.

Anyone willing to put themselves in harms way on purpose, deal with the dark side of humanity everyday has earned a measure of respect but doing these things is still a choice made by the person who decides to be a cop. I can see how after years of dealing with the bull💩 humans do to each other day after day one would lose their ability to be objective to each new call for assistance. Once a person looses that ability they should no longer be police officers and certainly not trainers for new hires at the academy. Teaching from experience is valuable but not at the cost of why they are there in the first place. Being a LEO is a hard / dangerous job. Not one I would do voluntarily but those who do it, do it voluntarily. Police officers are humans...hired to protect other humans from... humans. They are as capable of being a crook as they are a cop.

[DSandra]

31. It's not going to be easy reforming evil people...

[BComplex]

32. Ok. Always the contrarian...I have to ask

You really believe this was written by a cop?

Also contrarian (sorry):

donald trump and vlad putie poot are not poor, and they're huge criminals. They have armies supported by armies of less rich, supported by armies of less money and power, all the way down to the ones with nothing to lose. Trumps and putins, AND THOSE WHO OWN THE PRIVATIZED PRISON SYSTEM, are the people whose lives and property the police have been trained to work for.

As long as there are powerful egos among the poor and less educated, they will be wanting to serve the trumps and putins of the world, and even lessor charismatic leaders, or at least be in their ever growing money pits, and no amount of community help will change some of those egos. It's often just a chain of big egos. Poor people, middle income people, and wealthy people are all subject to having a big ego or a bullying bone.

I know I'm probably going to be mightily hounded for the above, but as an independently minded liberal, I believe in calling what I believe to be true. You don't have to agree, but I'd appreciate it if you will listen.

The first thing, in my opinion, that needs to be done is one of the things suggested in the posted essay:
we need to stop allowing police to be able to kill people with impunity....their law protecting them needs to be abolished immediately. They need to be held as accountable for their actions as any other citizen holding any other job.

The second thing I agree with in the essay is that police unions need to be busted and made illegal.

The third thing I agree with is that many duties of the police need to be handed off to social workers and young lawyers, or some such, who also need jobs!

And above all, every member of the police force should be required to wear body cams. Any dispute or arrest where the body cam is not recording, by law, leans to the victim or the person making the complaint.

The thing that I did not see is the thing I feel most strongly about: there needs to be a huge investigation of the infiltration of the police by the white nationalists and neonazis. Every police department needs to be investigated, the web searched and the DARK web searched, to determine which police officers, from any tiny town to any huge city, have any connections to these domestic terrorist groups, and those officers need to be arrested and tried immediately for any past killings or violence, or arrests that brought jail time against any person of color, or minority or immigrant.

Since small communities often protect their own, there needs to be a federal law enforcement agency (not local) that investigates charges coming from townspeople who have been harmed or shaken down by local criminal law enforcement.

In my opinion (again, these are just my opinions, not the gospel) the things I have enumerated above, and proposed changes in the laws, should effect certain changes just on their own:

(a) It would expose and get rid of some really bad cops, who are identified with ANY ties to domestic terrorists,

(b) it would make any cop think twice before using force, knowing he/she would be held accountable without the laws giving them impunity,

(c) people who are attracted to the police force for purely ego, bullying reasons would be more discouraged to apply, and more apt to be outed as bullies if they got in, just by their body cams, and

(d) We need to totally eliminate for-profit prisons that serve as the money source of a lot of these problems.

After a few years of seeing how this worked, we would know which changes to make next, if any were needed.

All that said, I think the issues about helping out communities heavily occupied by disenfranchised people need to be addressed. Reparations funds need to be funded and invested to bring the members of these communities UP, and out of the depression (economic and emotional) that have plagued Black Americans since slavery, and oppressed immigrants and people of color for generations. Barriers to upward mobility need to be identified in each area, and addressed and corrected with long-term funding and support.

Elizabeth Warren HAD A PLAN for this, and she is gladly sharing them with the Biden/Harris team whenever asked. The plans already exist. They just need to be elevated, and broadcast, and funded and administered. That can be done in the first 100 days of a Biden/Harris administration.

[Mr.Bill]

33. I read every word of it.

It could easily be about the Silicon Valley city I grew up in. So much so that the article could have been written by one of my high school friends that became cops and are now retired.

He emphasized clearly to never talk to the cops. I'll take it one step further. Don't even call for their help unless it's your absolute last resort. They seldom make things better for anyone involved when they arrive. I know I wouldn't feel good if I was the store clerk who called the cops on George Floyd over a suspected counterfeit $20 bill. The sad thing is that clerk probably feels worse than the cops who killed Floyd.

[RussBLib]

34. Is it verified? Really written by an ex-cop?

I'm suspicious of so many things I read these days. It rings true, but is there any real verification of "A. Cab"?

The mere fact that it confirms my pre-conceprions makes me suspicious.

[grantcart]

36. Good points. Also the point about harassing homeless can scavengers because of

A contract with the disposal company is just laughable.

The state imposes a fee for redemption and in CA there are centers and machines to pay out on return of cans which are used by most families that use large number of cans. The percentage recovered by the homeless is miniscule and the idea that a police department would rouse homeless people on that issue because of a contract with a disposal company is absurd. The contract for refuse pick up, recycling and maintaining landfills would be in the tens of millions while the revenue lost because of homeless cashing in on deposits would be in the thousands of dollars.

While some of the charges ring true some of them sound like inventions by somebody who wants to make claims that sound like something but are not based in reality.

[oldsoftie]

51. I wondered the same as soon as I saw him blame "capitalism"

Does anyone think of Capitalism when you see video of a cop abusing someone on the side of the road? In their own house? No. It has nothing to do with it.

[RussBLib]

55. the writer is correct about that to an extent

Some of the earliest police forces in this country were created to protect property, the factories, and the wealth, of the business, upper class. They were also used to keep slaves on their owner's property. So, in these senses, yeah, they were created to protect capitalism, in shorthand.

[FakeNoose]

35. Wow! K & R This needs to be shared everywhere

Shocking and very difficult to read.

But we need to make all the good-guy citizens aware so that the system can be fixed.

Edit to add: this confirms everything I've thought about Police Unions. They need to be banned.

[alwaysinasnit]

38. Thanks MrScorpio. This is one of the best writings I've ever come across, from start to finish.

[czarjak]

40. Now make atonements. You, the Christian thing?

[DSandra]

41. They are indoctrinated to think like a Republican

That people are inherently bad, that people are out to get them, that you must protect yourself at all costs, even killing, also maybe even that you have to strike them before they strike you. No wonder why they support Republicans, including Trump.

[radius777]

42. Essay started off good then veered into utopianism.

Thuggery and crime will always exist regardless of class/economics, and we will always need some form of police to handle it.

But I aree that most things cops do should be replaced by social workers, psychologists, etc.

Busting the police unions and rehiring based on true ability and merit would drastically improve policing.

[muntrv]

43. You don't need the bastards. Nice!

[Aussie105]

44. Simple explanation is . . .

that if you are a White Supremacist, inclined to see violence as some sort of solution, and want to be legitimized in your attitudes, you join the police force.

Then you are with like minded people who give each other permission to act out their basic instincts.

It's quietly approved of from the top on down, and those that see the wrongs in that and complain have a short and hard time in the force.

"American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities" indeed!

[live love laugh]

46. Worst part: the media never discusses the ramifications of qualified immunity.

The length of the article attests to the need for discussion and context by the “5th estate.” The defund the police issue is complex but the article explains it well.

[Bettie]

47. I like that he offers actual suggestions for improvement

at the end.

It is a good article.

[Iggo]

49. Cops. That's who they are. That's what they do.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

52. Read all of it. Excellent article!

If they have an "us vs. them" mindset now, they'd really hate some of my ideas. If the bullies got convicted more often, more of them would quit!

[GoneOffShore]

53. That was extraordinary - and saved and shared.