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Luigi Mangione’s Life Hangs on Police Misconduct Claims — So We FOIA’d the Department
(www.hottaketimes.com)
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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THE POLICE PROBLEM
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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.
99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.
When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.
When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."
When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.
Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.
The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.
All this is a path to a police state.
In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.
Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.
That's the solution.
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Our definition of ‘cops’ is broad, and includes prison guards, probation officers, shitty DAs and judges, etc — anyone who has the authority to fuck over people’s lives, with minimal or no oversight.
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ALLIES
• r/ACAB
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INFO
• A demonstrator's guide to understanding riot munitions
• Cops aren't supposed to be smart
• Killings by law enforcement in Canada
• Killings by law enforcement in the United Kingdom
• Killings by law enforcement in the United States
• Know your rights: Filming the police
• Three words. 70 cases. The tragic history of 'I can’t breathe' (as of 2020)
• Police aren't primarily about helping you or solving crimes.
• Police lie under oath, a lot
• Police spin: An object lesson in Copspeak
• Police unions and arbitrators keep abusive cops on the street
• Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States
• When the police knock on your door
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ORGANIZATIONS
• NAACP
• National Police Accountability Project
• Vera: Ending Mass Incarceration
founded 2 years ago
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Fun fact: Anyone can file a FOIA request. You don't even have to be American.
I don't know why all of that information isn't just public to begin with.
Because it would cause too much societal whiplash to, all at once, we see a transformation from a world where information like this is closed away, to a world where it's all public. Often the accessibility of information depends on logistics like where data should be stored, and whether something counts as "public" if some information can only be accessed by, let's say, booking an appointment to see paper records only available at an archive.
FOI are a concession. Legislation that allows them is how we bridge the gap between the abstract political ideology of "this information should be public", and the pragmatic challenge of information infrastructure. That is to say that you're entirely right, and that information obtainable via FOIA should just be public info. However, submitting skillful FOIAs can be a powerful tool towards making more information free generally — more FOIA requests being made can encourage organisations to revamp their information management such that they can fulfill FOIA requests more easily (perhaps even making information available to pre-empt such requests). Repeatedly non-compliant organisations may be forced to comply, if held accountable by an effective information commissioner or ombudsman. (That's a big "if").
In short, they're a step towards pushing for more widespread, public information