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Comment by earlINmeyerkeg | Hacker News Reader

As an American, police in Europe seem to be more like "Beat you with a stick but keep you out of jail type" and treat citizens in a rational way according to how the industrial world works (as well as protecting workers from losing their jobs, especially when innocent until proven guilty). In the US, it's basically the lottery that nobody wants to win. Cause if a cop wants to ruin your day, month, or year, he absolutely can with 0 recourse.

That's why I'll always view the US government's approach to policing as repressionary unless they actually give workers rights preventing them from being fired, and actually funding the legal system to be more efficient. They run it like a business and intend to keep it that way.

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There are these things in the US, we call them "lawsuits", that compensate people for abuses they may have suffered at the hands of the police.

* (disclaimer) for people who have the time and money to actually go through with a lawsuit.

* (disclaimer) cops almost never get convicted so it can be a fruitless, expensive waste of money and years of time.

We had to waste a lot of money and years of our time just to get an offense stricken from my mom's record: a sociopathic dick of a cop in a rural area made up trumped up charges to place on my mom in an escalation with a local school district. Compensation? Haha, good joke! We were lucky to have the money to fight the charges, but that cop received no punishment. Furthermore, my parents run their own business so they had no problem with the amount of time needed.

Lawsuits may as well not exist for a large portion of the population.

I can jump in on this bandwagon a bit. A cop, not on active duty at the time, took a retired German Shepard police dog as a pet. He lived near a college and had his dog running around in his backyard. An event was going on at the college so there were large crowds. The cop didn't watch the dog and it jumped out of his fenced in yard and started attacking the students. My brother got bit pretty bad and had nerve damage in his arm.

It's been 2 years since this happened and the cop has not admitted fault, hasn't had to put the dog down, hasn't been written up, or had to pay a dime. Although the city has agreed to pay because it was their officers fault, the funny thing was, no lawyer would take the case if my parents wanted to sue simply because they know suing the city is impossible (which is frankly ridiculous), and because it involved a cop not on active duty. I mean the city is still dragging their feet paying for his hospital visit and everything, meanwhile my brother is basically in collections for something he isn't supposed to pay for.

If anything the event has really taught me to despise the US government and cops more than ever. Cops individually may be nice people, but that badge and union suddenly turns them into some of the biggest repressionary forces to regular lower income people.

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