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Let's talk shitty policing!
The story starts back in August, when police (specifically, Adams County Sherriff's Department of Ohio) raided the home of Joseph "Afroman" Foreman on a warrant for narcotics and kidnapping. Perhaps they thought that the author of "Because I got high" would be a slam dunk, but they walked out with a couple roaches and a few grand in cash.
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/adams-county/rapper-afromans-ohio-home-raided-by-adams-county-sheriffs-office
When they discovered a grand total of jack and shit, they were forced to return most of the money, except the stuff they stole.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/adams-county-sheriff-comes-up-400-short-returning-cash-to-afroman-after-home-raid/ar-AA14IJPa
Reason covered the case here:
https://reason.com/2022/12/05/cops-return-cash-seized-from-afroman-in-bogus-drug-raid-with-400-missing/
And the man himself has weighed in with a music video that is all security footage of the raid titled "Will you help me repair my door?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oponIfu5L3Y
Down with qualified immunity, the legalized piracy known as civil asset forfeiture, and the self-funding militarized security state.
I despair for the cause of police reform. There was a window where it might have been possible, but anywhere past the 2000s I just don't see it happening.
Put frankly, nobody really cares about this man. Nobody really cares about the median CAF victims: poor people, strippers, general lower-class coded individuals. Nobody really cares about people jailed on bogus charges, put through the justice wringer for ill-conceived reason, or shot to death by trigger-happy psychopaths. It's the just world fallacy in full effect: they probably had it coming anyway.
The median voter has never in his life gotten in trouble with the police. You'd need a hundred Uvaldes to meaningfully dent this - the sorts of tragedy I wouldn't wish on any nation. The median voter is a middle-aged comfortable person with a steady job and living who thinks everything in society basically works as it should. Oh, sure, some politicians are greedy, the kids these days are bad, but the police? Protect and serve. They keep us safe and things steady and that's all we want. If they beat up or imprison or kill someone, well, I guess that's just what their job is.
I don't know what any one nation can hope to do about this, for as long as the median age in wealthy countries keeps rising. The people who vote don't care, the people who get elected have no reason to care, and the police have made more than clear they have negative interest in policing their own.
What's a downtrodden person to do? What is anyone to do? For as long as the median voter really loves the police, I don't know that I see a way out.
I totally believe you're right about this, but it still frustrates me. Even from a purely selfish perspective, this should matter to people. Holding people in prison or putting them through the justice system for stupid reasons is a waste of my tax money. Ruining people's lives by sending them to prison for no good reason means they're likely not going to be contributing to the economy (or, worse, become criminals and contribute negatively). We do this at a really large scale in the US, so this isn't exactly a small effect.
The blackpilling thing, to me, is that I don't think people are that selfish. They aren't without empathy. They don't have zero care for justice. I think it's the aforementioned just world fallacy: they really think they have it coming. If they didn't have it coming, why, the police might be wrong. The law might be wrong. Society may be doing wrong by them. Everything may be wrong. The lower classes may in fact not deserve their fate.
It's a lot to take in and figure out and, genuinely, I don't think normal people are really in a mood to consider if maybe the whole criminal justice system is that big of a dumpster fire. Better to insist everything is fine, everyone falling afoul of it is a Bad Person, and to try your hardest to ignore all the signs it ain't so.
To put it bluntly, very few of the people suffering from police misconduct are model citizens.
I know. I still don't want them to be at the justice system's cruel mercies.
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Sounds to me like you are falling for the unjust world fallacy. The mistaken belief that every misfortune is the result of undeserved oppression and victimization.
I don’t see why only one side should get to unilaterally create a “fallacy” to diagnose their opposition with.
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Plenty of people think that ruining life for strippers, drug addicts, petty criminals, and the homeless so that they’ll go do their thing somewhere else is a good use of their tax dollars.
Honestly pretty hard to think of a better one
If you want someone's life ruined, surely you'd prefer them dead? I get consistently down-voted for my 'kill all the drug dealers' policy proposal. But surely that's preferable to just ruining the lives of drug addicts, petty criminals and homeless. What if they don't do their thing somewhere else? What if their lives are already ruined? What if they strike back against you?
If we're trying to make things hard for people, why not just bite the bullet and kill?
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The problem is that these kinds of policies A) don’t work very well and B) wind up pushing terrible people into the same neighborhoods which turn from ‘poor’ to ‘festering shitholes of crime depending economically on drug and human trafficking, which then export maladaptive mores to broader society’.
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