Are the people to blame for the current police state?

[fstarcstar]

[Philly]

In a democracy the people are always to blame.

[The Comrade]

yes. electing sheriffs based on their 'tough on crime' attitude has led to this.

[eynon81]

yep.

[Saz]

What an absurd f**k thread. The cops abuse and murder people wantonly because they have to deal with the dregs of society? NO SHIT, THAT IS THERE JOB!! How is it that in Germany there can be ONE fatal shooting by police a year, meanwhile America cops gun down 400+ a year, and those are just the "justifiable" shootings. Are criminals in Germany just more relaxed and less violent than in the US?

Most American cops are borderline retards and we do not check their behavior in ANY way. What was the court case where they upheld a local police departments right to reject an applicant for scoring TO HIGH on an IQ test? These are the cops of today, dumb as shit and excited to have a firearm and some control over the day to day lives on individuals.

You know what the problem is. The problem isn't big government. The problem is stupid government. Have you ever looked around and realized that the dumbest functioning members of society generally seem to be employed by the government. The worse students end up teachers, criminals end up as cops, and sociopaths end up in the marines. Your run of the mill non-violent idiot will find a way into one civil service branch or another. This isn't to say all government workers are idiots. Fortunately, some of the brightest in our society dedicate their lives to government and miraculously keep the whole thing running. But on average, civil servants from cops to teachers to the TSA are getting dumber and dumber. This creates a huge problem for anyone on the receiving end of government "services" (Generally poors). Their teachers are dumb and inattentive, the cops are at best stupid and usually just abusive, hell, even the USPS is running itself into the ground to fuel the ridiculous pension demands of their employees. Public facing government work generally recruits the lowest rung of any given profession. And why wouldn't it? The pay is shit, you can't be fired, and you get some modicum of power over the average citizen. We talk about cops and teachers and the like as if they are professionals, when in fact many are dolts who wouldn't last a year in private industry. The smarts meanwhile, have to swim upstream to get anything done, and have their moral and ambition beat down by Byzantine organizational structures and rules.

You can't fix stupid. I have no illusions that competent and non-violent people will sign up to deal with criminals all day for $36,000 a year. I wouldn't do that either. But if we are giving these people the power of life and liberty over us, we should monitor them. How is it the government can read my gmail but it can't monitor the circumstances under which an officer shoots dead a civilian? Hell, idiots cops cost police millions a year in lawsuits. Any serious city spends hundreds of millions a year to settle claims of officer abuse. I'm sure there are tons of false claims in there, but we won't know because the police refuse to allow them to be monitored. This is something we should demand. We shouldn't be sending people to jail based on the word of some unmotivated, confrontational, low-iq douchebag cop. Let the video do the talking.

[fstarcstar]

Then why are most us always blaming the cops?

[jimmyz]

[The Comrade]

it's weird how you complain about big government yet you'd gladly sit on the fist of the apparatus that enforces it.

[fstarcstar]

[Medius]