- cross-posted to:
- thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world
A police officer has been filmed kicking and stamping on the head of a man lying on the ground at Manchester Airport.
The uniformed male officer is seen holding a Taser over the man, who is lying face down, before striking him twice while other officers shout at onlookers to stay back in a video shared widely online.
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said firearms officers had been attacked while attempting to arrest someone following a fight in the airport’s Terminal 2 on Tuesday. It said it had referred itself to the police watchdog.
Anger has grown over the video and a crowd of what appeared to be several hundred people protested outside the police station in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, on Wednesday evening.
How can we fight back against the police, when they never face consequences, but we do?
They just have to not reach for pots of boiling water after threatening to use it as a weapon.
That’s eems reasonable…
Just for context, this is in the UK so the officer WILL be prosecuted and punished accordingly.
It is worth noting that other officers at the scene had a broken nose and other injuries before this happened. It doesn’t excuse what he does but there’s certainly a lot more to the story here.
But will they really?
Here in Aus at least, 3 cops assaulted an autistic or downs guy in his yard one day. The court ordered them to apologise to the victim and do some bullshit “training”.
Yes. This is the UK. The officer is fucked. Exactly how fucked depends on the context which we don’t really have yet.
Can any other Brits confirm you actually crack down on cops? Have you followed their trials until the conclusion to see what ‘punishment’ they actually get?
I’m British, and I wouldn’t say so. In some higher profile cases cops might lose their job, and in extreme cases they go to court, but it’s really rare for the charges to stick. There was a recent case with a famous sportsman - a pair of cop tased him, beat him with a baton, and kicked him in the head until he died. That was the first time in over 30 years a cop had actually been found guilty of manslaughter, but the other cop escaped with no charges. The bastard that got sentenced will almost definitely be released within a couple of years.
So, yeah, if it’s high profile enough, maybe, to some extent, but otherwise, no.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/30/police-officers-in-england-and-wales-guilty-of-crimes-up-70-per-cent
This is a soft-left wing newspaper that’s generally quite critical of the police. The numbers of convictions amd sackings are quite interesting. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement but we’re starting from a MUCH better place than the US or even Aus.
The 70% increase in convictions does not mean there’s an increase in Police bad actors. It’s an increase in pursuing convictions against them.
Read your own fucking source.
Yeah but people complain about police all of the time. Just because only 1% of them were assessed does not mean that the others were legitimate. Sometimes it’s quite obvious that it is legitimate I really don’t think the police are a problem in the UK there’s definitely a few individuals that need their heads examining but mostly people aren’t afraid of them. Stop putting your own biases on everyone else.
And why do you think it’s acceptable that only 1% of complaints are even so much as looked into? I think you have your own, massive bias here that you’re completely ignoring.
They’re not superheroes…
I’m from the UK, and I can’t agree. Most likely, at worst, he will be dismissed from the police force. It is very rare for police constables to face criminal charges, and even rarer for those charges to actually stick.
Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man, was reading the newspaper on the London Underground. The metropolitan police shot him in the head seven times. No officer was held accountable.
Ian Tomlinson, a newsagent, was walking home past a protest. The metropolitan police beat him to death. A constable lost his job, but was found not guilty by the court.
A little kid with mental health issues went up to a metropolitan police constable to ask for help. The cop pepper sprayed and beat the child 30 times with a baton. He was dismissed from the police force, but did not face criminal charges.
And you claim that the officer responsible for this is “fucked”? Dream on. At worst he’ll have to get a real job like the rest of us.
Afraid that I have to agree. It’s nowhere near as extreme an example, there was a case brought against the West Midlands Police a few years ago where the cops intimidated a bunch of fans from Bristol, detained them, and forced them back on the train to Bristol. It took four years to settle the case, and the only way they were able to be taken seriously at all was because a serving policeman in Bristol felt inclined to back them, despite warnings not to do so by his peers.
It’s the classic “who polices the police” scenario, and sadly the charges are often so painfully low that it feels like the best way to commit a crime and get away with it is to join the police…
I think I’ve read recently about a serial rapist and murderer convicted in UK who was a policeman.
Our timeline is generally dark, but I simply admire how my instinct, feeling that there’s truth to the rule “all free people bear arms”, which I couldn’t justify in my childhood where it only had strange connection with dignity and fantasy\heroic stuff I would read, is being justified by life itself.
Same with the rule that one can’t build a legal system that is just, only that is competitive, and even in that evil may win so an honest man, or a group of honest people, or a whole oppressed people may have to fight the whole world indirectly. Well, that part I should have understood even back then, I have family in such a place.
The only one of those I’m familiar with is Menenez and the officers genuinely believed he had explosives. It was a fucked up situation and I do think they probably should have suffered more consequences. But honestly there’s room for a little nuance.
British cops are not routinely armed so shooting generally is a LOT rarer.
If I shot someone 7 times in the head, it wouldn’t matter how many people agreed with me that we all thought it was the devil himself crawling out of a portal to hell, I’d get charged and sentenced for manslaughter.
The police are able to get away with literal murder and people will come out of the woodwork, wringing their hands about all of the nuances of the situation.
No, fuck that, and fuck the police. They’re a legalised criminal gang that exists to be the fist of the ruling class and nothing more. If I could click my fingers right now and make the entire institution no longer exist I’d do it faster than you could blink.
But then who would who call if someone broke into your home and didn’t even bother shooting your dog?
To be fair, while he will see more consequences than would be likely if this had happened in the US, it’s still pretty rare for police officers to be successfully prosecuted in the UK. More likely we’ll be looking at an IOPC investigation and internal disciplinary procedures rather than criminal prosecution.
I guarantee you that his career in the police is over. It’ll be interesting to find out more about the context, there’s clearly already been a lot of violence happening to the cops before the video starts. I’m certainly expecting criminal prosecution against him.
police prosecutions in the UK are done very quietly, I’m not sure why but you’re lucky to get one small story in the newspapers for even quite horrific crimes. There are perhaps not enough, but they do happen more than people generally think.
Woah there nelly. That be bringing any of that “logic” and “real world understanding” here
No one can hold you accountable if you overrun all the cops.
Just once, I want to see a video where the cops are beating on someone and the crowd actually intervenes and turns the table on them.
I would love it if we could make the police feel afraid to do this shit. Not scared of losing their job or having to do paperwork, but scared of the actual people there on the street. Scared that they might not have the monopoly on violence that they thought they did.
At least this one deserves consequences… unlike that unfortunate shooting in the states.
Wow, you just cannot help yourself, can you. Did the boiling water lady break your brain or something?
This is the third comment you’ve left under a story that has nothing to do with her.
Oh we will be. There is video evidence they can’t really get out of this one.
What they never really need to do is stop hiring criminals. And when there are warning signs (there are always warning signs, this is never their first offense), they need to be fired, immediately.
If they lose their job, but otherwise don’t suffer any repercussions, would that shock you? What would you propose that we should do, if we can’t get justice through the system?
What are you talking about. That hasn’t even been a case yet calm down.
I’m asking you, when this inevitably doesn’t go anywhere, will you care?
Will you care? Will anyone care? Nothing ever seems to change no matter how bad it gets.
Mavics with homemade grenades.
Molotov cocktails (can be dropped from copters too).
Also longbows and crossbows with arrows, rock-solid time-proven tech.
You just have to drop this part
because something like this exists in every conflict. The defending side usually gets punished for the resistance alone.
Maybe actually train them? In Quebec it takes 3½ years in school before you can become a cop and usually you won’t be able to do the last ½ right away, they’ll only let you in once you’re in your mid 20s so you’re more mature and it forces you to acquire related experience to build a better resume for when you send your application.
Yeah, I just googled “police brutality quebec” and it doesn’t sound like that’s really working out for you.
Just like if you do the same search no matter where you’ll find examples, it doesn’t mean there aren’t places where the situation is better than others and that they shouldn’t be used as an example.
You’ll never get rid of it completely, just like you’ll never get rid of bankers committing fraud completely, just like you’ll never get rid of criminals completely, you can still try to improve things. In the UK cops don’t have guns, in Quebec the selection process is much harder to go through, what is the US doing? 6 months of training, take pretty much anyone, militarize the police force… Well buddy, what do you think will happen?
What if I told you that we can get rid of police brutality? We can get rid of bankers committing fraud. We can get rid of crime.
The main thing that stops us from creating a better world is refusing to believe that it’s possible.
If we work together and dismantle the existing power structures that oppress us, then we can solve all of these problems. They’re fundamentally problems of inequality and capitalism.
Tell me, how do you eliminate nature?
Do you think violence didn’t exist where capitalism wasn’t a thing? You might need a trigger warning if you start reading on first Nations and their pre-European colonization history…
That’s like saying ‘boys will be boys’ to explain away sexual harassment or extreme hazing.
It is not, and never has been, a valid excuse.
No it’s not, accumulating resources is natural (heck, our body does it without us intervening, that’s what fat is!), you’ll never prevent 100% of the population from doing it or trying to do it, we’re animals that are good at throwing rocks.
Co-operation is in the nature of humankind. Violence will tend to occur when there is competition for resources. We have the technology and philosophy necessary to create a world where everyone can live a comfortable life without any need to compete for food, water, shelter, medicine or education.
If we work together and prevent people from forming unequal hierarchies, then the few people who still try to impose their will on others can be stopped by the rest of us.
It’s in our nature just like fear of strangers is and that means our nature is to see people as being either in or out of our group and wanting to protect our group from the other group.
It’s very nice that you can imagine a utopia but that’s just a dream that will never become true because of our nature.
We’ve proven quite successfully that we are able to overcome our fear of strangers successfully enough to create civilisation. There is no reason that we can’t overcome any part of our nature to achieve a better world. Your beliefs are holding us back - the major thing blocking us from taking decisive action is because people don’t believe that a better world is possible. It is. We just have to be bold, take the opportunity and leave capitalism in the past where it belongs.