Even if it is a criminal offense, a prosecutor still has to bring charges. No prosecutor is ever bringing charges against a cop unless there is an absolute media frenzy that pushes it beyond the point it can be ignored.

Prosecutors need cops. Cops bring them cases. Cops testify in their cases. If they piss off the cops they can't do their job.

This is fixable. Many jurisdictions have a provision for outside prosecutors appointed by courts.

They do, special prosecutors, but the court has to appoint them. The bar is extremely high for getting a judge (80% ex-prosecutors) to appoint a private attorney or outside-jurisdiction prosecutor as a special prosecutor.

Again, sadly, almost never happens.

I have to agree it almost never happens. It needs to be normalized among the public and institutionalized in governments.

What really bothers me is how an independent investigator made a compelling case that identified a member of the DC metropolitan police as the suspect who placed a pipe bomb on Capitol grounds. Then after years of inactivity, the FBI suddenly broke the case and arrested a mentally unwell black kid.

The whole apparatus is shameful.

The "compelling case" was all based on gait analysis which is heavily debunked and while making the case they quoted from reports about gait analysis but left out all the parts about it being an extremely inexact process prone to false matches.

Ironically, gait analysis is considered iron clad scientific evidence when used against impoverished black guys like in the Taylor trial.

Just kind of displays the. corruption and duplicity of the US legal system.

There's a lot of junk "science" used in trials because there are plenty of experts available to back it up for the prosecution and fewer funds to pay for the countervailing defense expert available to present the problems with it. Usually it takes a particularly bad case making it to a supreme or appeals court for that kind of evidence to be disallowed.

So they railroaded a guy on some crap and the problem was the officers' dank memes groupchat?

This sort of character based BS is exactly the problem. The amount the victim got screwed is completely tangential to how upstanding the cops are/were. Justice is supposed to be blind. Punish them for their actual material conduct.

Their actual material conduct was coordinating with other dirty cops which is how their phone got seized and entered into evidence.

Are you saying people need to put up with racist POS cops?

>Are you saying people need to put up with racist POS cops?

Nice strawman.

I'm saying that the hand wringing about racism is counterproductive because it's implicitly saying "you can be crooked but just don't be racist" and it distracts from the question of just how common this sort of crookedness is by asking same question of the racism.

By all means go after them for whatever policy they violated. But that's tangential. Same as if embezzlement was uncovered. Some rando who's out four figures because some cop needed an extra DUI that month to make the numbers work is out no more nor no less based upon the racism of the cop.

If anyone actually gave a shit about police racism, or any other -ism, they'd prioritize making the cops less crooked because the undeserved screwings cops dispense is concentrated among those least able to screw back. The general case solution solves the specialty problem (racism, or whatever) here.

Sounds like you hang out in racist, sexist, antisemitic dank memes groupchats yourself, and don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Given the anodyne content some folks will label “racist” and “sexist”, such claims ought be taken with a very healthy dose of skepticism.

Not that I have any idea what the content was in this case, but that’s the point. If you’re impugning someone’s character, you need to be a lot more specific than simply parroting vague moral accusations.

Sounds like you've got a lot invested in redefining "exposed for sending extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts to fellow troopers" as "anodyne" without any evidence.

Please give me an example of what you consider "anodyne extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts". Just because you agree with extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts and send stuff like that yourself as blithely as Trump tweets doesn't mean it's "anodyne".

The word you're looking for is "normalized", and that is the problem with today's society, not a justification for extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts.

> If you’re impugning someone’s character, you need to be a lot more specific than simply parroting vague moral accusations.

>Recently a Massachusetts trooper who engaged in railroading a fabricated suspect was exposed for sending extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts to fellow troopers. But the names of those troopers and their own behavior remains opaque to the public. That's crazy! Nobody should put up with that.

What does sending "sending extreme racist, sexist, antisemitic texts to fellow troopers" have to do with cover-ups? Anyways my guess is that it's general policy for police/courts to not release evidence unless it's part of a trial, similar to how the Epstein files weren't released across 3 administrations and took an act of congress to get released.

>took an act of congress to get released.

I guess?

I mean you go ahead and call that a release.

If it brings you comfort.

The US government is just corrupt from tip to tail. Why everyone continuously acts surprised about these things is genuinely a mystery?