Individual police officers should have the integrity to resist police brutality and civil liberty violations. However, corrupt officers don’t get all the blame for today’s cop culture. Three entities also have blood on their hands: Prisons for profit, insurance companies and the brotherhood of police use their powerful lobbyists and persuasions to buy legislation that violates citizen’s civil liberties. They do this in order to glean more billions from the public. The more people police abuse, the more money these entities make. Period.
Corrupt officers fill prisons, provide surcharges for insurance companies and graft for the brotherhood. In the process, police kill on average 19 citizens each week nationally while maintaining the highest incarceration rate in the developed world. Armed with impunity and military weapons, officers receive points on their quota/tally sheets for each charge they file against citizens, whether those citizens have done anything wrong or not. This is how officers get promotions and even more money on top of their excessive salary benefits and retirement. This point/quota system is the motivation to charge innocent citizens with crimes, to file multiple charges for single infractions, and to have illegal double quotas.
These attacks on citizens civil liberties have greatly damaged the ideal of this country and they have caused the police to have even greater contempt for, and disrespect of citizens. Many officers actually want encounters with citizens to escalate, because they get more points and thus more money in the process.
If citizens are going to address police brutality and civil liberty violations, they will have to address the assault on our constitution by prisons for profit, greedy insurance companies and the corrupt brotherhood of police.
Citizens need to ask themselves: How many family members are you willing to have incarcerated, financially ruined, maimed or killed by the police so these entities can make even more money than they are now?
American Civil Liberties Union: 1-212-549-2500.
Department of Justice Civil Rights Division: 1-855-856-1247.
Tedd White is resident of Hawley.