A Maryland police officer was convicted on Friday of charges that he joined a mob’s Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and hurled a smoke bomb and other objects at police officers guarding a tunnel entrance.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden heard two days of trial testimony without a jury this week before he found Montgomery County Police Officer Justin Lee guilty of two felonies and three misdemeanors. The judge, who also acquitted Lee of two other misdemeanors, is scheduled to sentence him on Nov. 22.
Lee, 26, ignited and threw a smoke bomb into the tunnel entrance on the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace, where a mob of rioters attacked a group of outnumbered police officers. The device struck a police officer’s riot shield and filled the mouth of the tunnel with a large plume of smoke, prosecutors said.
I think ACAB is too simplistic. Lack of accountability attracts and nurtures evil, certainly. But the opportunity to be evil isn’t the only reason people become cops, and there’s certainly a long difference between the cop who’s just keeping their head down in a corrupt system and the one who’s relishing and thriving in it. If reform is to ever succeed, it will have to be by society supporting the cops who actually believe in just and honest policing, and mustering the political support to throw out/lock up the bad ones. Otherwise who’s going to do the locking up, a street mob?
Once police throwing out/locking up the bad ones starts to become the norm, instead of circling the wagons and covering up each others’ crimes, we’ll start to see that distinction. In our universe in the present, however, the police, their unions, the prosecutors, and the judges all act almost in lockstep to prevent police from ever being accountable for any of their actions in almost all situations. Thus ACAB.
ACAB is short for “I hate it and I’m doing nothing about it.” Nothing positive or reformative, anyway. It’s the dismissal of a toddler. When the worst offenders have risen to the top, change can only come from outside political authorities removing them and uplifting those who’ve been shunted into powerless positions because they won’t participate. And getting robust actors into those political positions that can institute change is the job of the electorate.
(I mean staunch reformists, not Hugh Jackman, although he’s welcome to run for Mayor!)
Get out of here with your sound logic and reasoning!
It is simplistic, but until cops start policing themselves, they can cope. Keeping your head down in a corrupt system only reinforces it. Citizens can’t tell from a distance the difference between a good cop and a bad cop.
The point of ACAB is that even if someone goes in with the best intentions, the entire system is set up to identify and exclude any good cops who would refuse to protect the corrupt. So eventually, the only cops remaining are the corrupt and the ones who are tacitly supporting corruption. Even the “good” cops who aren’t directly corrupt are at least implicit, because they wouldn’t be able to stay on the force if they tried exposing the corruption. Thus, ACAB, because all cops who make it through the probationary period are at least complicit.
Fuck that. Power-tripping bullys are the only people I’ve known that wanted to be cops.
TF kinda “real” cop keeps their head down in a corrupt system?
Maybe they didn’t know that’s the system they were signing up for, cause they’re fuckin dumb… like a cop…