Picture yourself in a train in a station
With Palestine porters with looking glass ties
To be fair, the (good) British cops are by far not as likely to assault an innocent person as many others. But they do love to stop you and have a chat if even the tiniest thing stands out. I once walked around London, 15 years old, with toy handcuffs on one wrist. Cop came up to me and wanted to know the whole story, like one of those super-chatty people. Where are you from, how old, name, where are the cuffs from, why am I wearing them right now at this moment, …
He seemed happy with the answers, and we both moved on.
Well, it’s still a bother, especially when you are not free to walk away at any moment.
Yeah before anybody spoke I was fairly clued in that this was not America by the fact that the cops were just standing there acting chill instead of holding him on the ground and screaming at him to stop resisting arrest.
It also helps that it’s in public and they are being filmed.
George Floyd’s execution was filmed in public. As were several other murders by police. In America, the cops don’t care. They will choke or shoot someone and no judge will ever let them be prosecuted for it.
If the toy looked like the real thing, You are 15, an underage with handcuffs, for all he know someone was trying to keep you captive and you manage to get out or you plan to cause damage and handdcuff someone. Good for him to make sure no one actually was hurting you…
Israel would never allow us to wear that in Australia
This guy got de-arrested
Hopefully everyone will buy these t-shirts just to take the piss
About five minutes later, the arresting officer approached him again. “He said: ‘I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.’ I said: ‘What’s the good news?’ He said: ‘I’m de-arresting you.’
“And I said: ‘What’s the bad news?’ He said: ‘It’s going to be really embarrassing for me.’ And then I walked free, while all the real heroes are the people that are actually getting arrested.”
The officer seems to understand his mistake at least
The poor copper lost all that time arresting a guy with Plasticine Action on his t-shirt only to have to de-arrest him when he could’ve been arresting an old lady with the words “Palestine Action” written down on a piece of paper for her to be prosecuted and maybe even get a jail sentence.
That mistake was making it hard for him to make his quota of arrests for that week, the poor bloke.
This is why I always imagine it’d be funny to ask a cop “so how many murders got solved this week?” whenever they’re wasting time on mundane shit.
I’ve never had an interaction with a cop where they didn’t make it unnecessarily intense.
Police solve something like less than 2% of reported crimes.
Even a libertarian can see this is fucking stupid, imagine a restaurant that gets 2% of its orders correct and served in a timely manner.
Police do not primarily exist to solve crimes.
They primarily exist as a goon/thug class to protect property and capital, all other behaviors and effects are ancillary.
If Police wanted to actually lessen crime, they’d either attack its root causes and use significant parts of their budgets to fund affordable housing and public schools, or massively reorient toward pursuing white collar crime, which is often of such a huge financial scale that it basically directly impoverishes society at a large scale.
That figure is a little misleading, but I understand how you picked it up because it’s everywhere.
Police “clear” crimes to be progressed for prosecution.
Prosecutors “prosecute” crimes. It’s this that the 2% figure is aimed at. The clearance rates (the job done by the police) is higher.
According to this article[1], 22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions. They then halve both of those numbers to account for unreported crimes. The article still uses the 2% figure in the headline despite the nuance in the article.
That might sound academic given the overall point you make still stands. I just thought it was worth mentioning.
1: https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes-143878
Ok then, so more technically, and more generously to police from a purely reactionary perspective of ‘they can only respond to reports’… they do an adequate job of clearing 4% of what actually gets reported to them.
I know that cops dont actually prosecute, I made that post before falling asleep, I was a bit loose with language.
Their role in the prosecution process is basically to be witnesses, to gather evidence for the trial.
And, unless I am misunderstanding this… ~82% of the arrests they do actually make … don’t result in convictions, and are thus ‘overarrests’ in some sense… as … you went to all the effort to make an arrest, and it turns out that no actual crime was committed?
Cops have an ~18% chance of making an arrest for a serious crime that actually sticks?
They have an ~82% likelihood that they are overpolicing, like by definition, when it comes to serious crimes?
Apologies if I sounded like I was lecturing there. I got very into the numbers.
I see the 82% figure you mention too. But I feel out of my depth now. An arrest requires probable cause (a low threshold), whereas courts require reasonable doubt (a high threshold). The gap between these two seems to be what should let police work function. Eg: attorneys examine or challenge the charges, plea deals, case dismissal / acquittal etc. But I’m skimming articles I don’t understand at this point.
82% does seem high to me too. But I also see too many cut-and-dry cases on TV. I don’t know what to think.
22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions
So what I’m reading is that police are wrong or bad at what they do ~82% of the time.
78%, but yes
Their job is not to solve crimes, their job is to get people convicted, the subtle difference being that they’ll turn non-crimes into crimes (for example, they’ll chose to legally interpret things which can go both ways as crimes which require prosecution, which is why one often sees kids criminalized for childish bullshit) and it doesn’t matter if the person convicted is innocent, all that matters is that somebody got convicted (so, for example, they won’t try and find exonerating evidence).
This partly explains their tendency to take an adversarial posture towards people who aren’t from their group, also partly explained because that posture itself indirectly feeds back on them (people are weary of them because of how act towards the general public, which in turn makes them feel apart and suspicious hence they behave even more so) and partly because they do tend to get exposed far more than most people to the seedy side of humanity all with a judgemental mindset and an aim to see crimes, so even a lot of the stuff they see which most people think is just silly fun (say, most drunkenness), they’ll see as crimes.
Pickering has made copies of the T-shirt, which he is selling through his own website to raise money for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. It has sold in 28 countries already.
I reckon the T-Shirts need some artwork as well to reduce confusion. Maybe some 1980s Plasticine Claymation TV show characters like Gumby and Pokey.
No. It’s supposed to cause confusion. It’s supposed to allow people to legally skirt the law.
Start a glassware company called Pal-3 Steins, sell merch for your new sale: Free Pal-3 Steins!
Not fans of claymation, I guess.
Not fans of AI, actually. Under the Plasticine Action, it says “WE OPPOSE AI GENERATED ANIMATION”
We need the Pingu version of V for Vendetta.
Noot noot!
I swear to god Pingo used to speak English. I have very clear memories of episodes with dialogue. I think I may have somehow transferred from another universe at some point.
Palestinian Faction is still allowed, no?
Would have also taken Pleistocene reaction.
Scot Squad in action
What’s going on with the guy with a plaid shirt and baseball cap?
Jus chillin’
Might be undercover.
Could be a friend or a member of the public joining to observe, get contact info, identify where the guy would be taken, coordinate jail support, etc…
Idk if that’s a thing in the UK tho.
Could just as well be malicious. Can’t know without further evidence.
I’m sorry, I just see a bunch of people standing around.
They are holding his arm, so he is at least detained.
I didn’t see that. I was busy looking at his shirt because I didn’t even know what it meant.
Are you sure it’s the T Shirt and not those socks they’re arresting him for…?
combining words of the pleistocene and Palestine.
Pal,It’sTime for Action
Oh sorry didn’t see you there officer, I was just saying its time for my #sick dance 🕺 moves, is dancing a crime, officer? 😏
Why do these deep-fried rectums need to be in quasi-military garb and high-visibility vests?
I’m all for saying fuck the police, but what are you talking about with quasi-military garb and why are you bashing them for wearing high-vis vests?
These look like the worst equipped cops I’ve ever seen. I’m from the USA and I’ve seen Italian Police look harder than these guys, they at least had cars and sub-machine guns. These guys have boots, handcuffs, pepper spray, a fucking belt mounted medkit, a collapsible billy club, a baseball cap, cheap-ass-commercial-laundry-uniform-contract cargo pants, a black t-shirt, and a stab vest. The pigs don’t even have guns and they are wearing “please-don’t-run-me-over” safety vests.
The guys on the street have the right reaction, there’s obviously no threat here.
Dude, the Carabinieri are fucking SCARY. I’d rather face a US state trooper and a Canadian Mountie at the same time.
I’d definitely rather deal with Carabinieri, they’re usually just twenty-something year olds from anywhere in the country doing a little military service and that give varying degrees of a shit. Maybe not at airports and landmarks. American cops are jumpy and hyper aggressive always. You can get that from the Carabinieri but it’s half-hearted, not baked in to their identity.
That’s a British police uniform, standard issue.
All black with a high visibility vest, arresting people for words. Nice country.
It’s not just the two we see - they are apparently in radio contact with additional tax fraudsters / wasters, probably of higher rank or even with a law degree.
Never let them tell they need more funds. Could defund plenty without affecting any actual service one bit.
I mean at least they are actually discussing if this is arrestable, in the USA, cops would just shoot you.
You have the right to free speech…as long as… you’re not dumb enough to actually try it.
I’m giving hope by the fact that the police clearly don’t know what to do with the situation. So they’re not automatically arresting everyone in the street for disagreeing with them. Probably because they realise they get lynched if they tried that
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