At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.

Finally, after curling up with the dog on the floor, Perez broke down and confessed. He said he had stabbed his father multiple times with a pair of scissors during an altercation in which his father hit Perez over the head with a beer bottle.

Perez’s father wasn’t dead — or even missing. Thomas Sr. was at Los Angeles International Airport waiting for a flight to see his daughter in Northern California. But police didn’t immediately tell Perez.

  • Dreizehn@kbin.social
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    6 months ago

    Watch “Power” on Netflix and one get the gist. Society needs the police, but there are plenty of sick sadistic mofos in their ranks.

    • Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Society needs the police

      So why the fuck aren’t they held to a higher standard than the rest of us?

      • mjsaber@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 months ago

        This is what I don’t get. I’m a nurse, and since I (ostensibly) have people’s lives in my hand, we are checked and double-checked, have to do continual education, and literally everything we do needs to be documented and audited.

        And our goal is always to prevent harm to the patient. Why do people who can legally end someone’s life not have the same, or much more strict, standards (I’m asking this rhetorically, I don’t really want an answer).

        It seems like adapting medical licensing and reporting requirements would help get us on the right track, or at the very least help hold police accountable.

        • SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 months ago

          Same here. I’m in a position where I’m liable for over a thousand people if any become hurt or die due to my negligence. If I fuck up badly, I could do serious jail time and never work in my industry again. Plus I had to attend university for eight years.

          People can waltz in with no education, complete a training course of just a few months, and become police officers, able to kill or harm others with significant impunity.

      • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        It’s funny - I live in a neighborhood where I routinely need to call the police. They don’t show up.

      • Astongt615@lemmy.one
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        6 months ago

        If there are bad people in the police, there would be bad people without the police.

        • bestagon@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Some people are bad. Why give any of us more power and less oversight than the rest?

          • CaptnNMorgan@reddthat.com
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            6 months ago

            Well that’s the real issue, the oversight. It’s not that they exist, that’s retarded. It’s that they have very little oversight, training, or personal accountability. Those things need to be added to the police force.

            How anyone wouldn’t see that “no police” would lead to either complete chaos, military controlled or a bunch of tiny dictatorships being controlled by the citizens who already owned guns before the police got defunded, which is pretty damn close to chaos, is baffling. The only argument for how getting rid of the police could be a good thing relies on the assumption that only good people will have guns.

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            Centralized, overwhelming military power makes the formation of alternate military power structures impossible.

            The idea of a police force is to prevent the formation of a gang with enough violent power to control others.

            • masquenox@lemmy.world
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              6 months ago

              a gang with enough violent power to control others.

              Sooo… the police exists to prevent the existence of police?

            • sudo@lemmy.today
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              6 months ago

              I think you mean the formation of a different violent gang. One that doesn’t extrajudiciously represent the owner classes interests.

        • Bertuccio@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          People think the police do a lot of things they don’t actually do, and aren’t required to do.

          Police don’t – and don’t have to – protect anyone, prevent crimes - even if they can see someone committing a crime and can stop it - Chase down criminals running from them, go find criminals that have been reported, bring criminals for court dates, and more.

          Basically all police are genuinely required to do is file a report when someone reports a crime. And I think that society could get away with not having that.

          Basically everything about the justice system that you probably care about and that supports society is done by someone other than a cop, or just isn’t actually done at all and people presume it is.

          • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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            6 months ago

            I was standing on a corner in downtown Seattle and someone standing next to me wanted to sell me crack. I crossed the street and a cop pulled up to a red light. While crack dealer still standing there, I tell the cop and point at the guy. He tells me to call 911 and then drove off.

            That’s the time it dawned on me that they don’t really care about crime happening in their face

        • masquenox@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Well I do for a start.

          You do? Unless you’re a capitalist… no you don’t.

          The history of policing is no longer hidden from us like it was in the days before the internet. It’s not society that “required” police - it’s capitalist parasites that required police to protect them from society.