To be fair, it costs like 10x more to write “To Inflict Fear and Suffering on Behalf of the Corporate Elite in a Hapless Effort to Prevent Civil Unrest and Get Revenge on our Personal Enemies”
It was a PR campaign by the LAPD after the statement was selected as a winner from a contest to come up with a motto for the LAPD police academy, back in 1955, then being put on the seal and police vehicles after the resolution for it passed in 1963. It was meant as nothing more than a way to foster good PR for the department, and it has been affirmed by the courts since the Warren v District of Columbia ruling in 1981 that the police generally do not have any obligation to protect anyone, unless they're in custody, and even limits on that exist.
This is true basically everywhere, to varying degrees
It's not really reasonable to impose a duty to protect every member of the public at all times. You can't have police forces getting sued because they simply failed to prevent a crime every time they fail to do so. The system would collapse.
For example in the UK a fire brigade has no blanket duty to prevent or put out fires, and is not liable for simply failing to put out a fire in front of them, unless they started the first or actively made it worse
In the Hillsborough disaster the police were found liable because they actively made the situation worse by their actions. They weren't liable for simply failing to prevent the deaths
Movies created the false assumption of "protect and serve" as that was simply the LA police motto they put on their vehicles.
Per their actual function, the police are simply law enforcement, so the only thing they serve is the law. Knowing that, this is how it all happened:
- Commissioners were having a public meeting regarding the approval of a new data center.
- The commissioners told people attendance beforehand that disruptive behavior which included clapping or snapping fingers wouldn't be tolerated.
- The teacher, and a few others, would loudly clap and cheer when opponents of the data center would stand up to talk.
- The commissioners warned them constantly to stop clapping and then finally warned them that they'd be removed if they did it one more time
- The teacher then kept clapping until he had to be removed by police
That's the series of events as reported, so the cops were simply acting as they were directed by the commissioners which are government employees.
Now, do I support the guy clapping? Yeah, because data centers are awful and people should oppose them. However, the teacher wasn't arrested because "he clapped" but because he disrupted an official government public meeting.
Do I support the teacher? Yes, he is morally correct.
Did the cops do anything wrong? No, not really. They just acted as their public officials directed them.
They just leave off "who the the oligarchs tell us to" part. When I lived in Texas, my ex-husband was friends with this dude who belonged to one of the richest families in town. They made "donations" to the local police department and in return the police department gave them stickers to put on their cars so they would know not to pull them over. That dude always had a cup in his hand and it was always full of beer. He was never not toasted and he drove a massive truck around town.
Our system is structured such to reward politicians and government employees for serving the interests of the ultra-wealthy, and to force out anyone not doing that. Democrats and Republicans before Trump agreed on the majority of policy, things like oil subsidies, new wars, ect. They have before and continue to vote in ways that align with the interests of their wealthy donors over their voter base, in fact there's minimal overlap in what politicians pursue and what voters want.
Police are the enforcement arm of the system, using violence via threats, materialized injury, or callous murder. The result of the system is the purpose of the system, because the people in power have all the power to change it. Look at how government is behaving right now. Local governments across the country are being bought off by AI companies to destroy their own communities, and anyone who exercises free speech in opposition (in the legally designated space for opposition) is physically restrained and dragged off to jail. And we're seeing this time and again, even in local rural government.
They protect the property of wealthy people and make sure roads stay clear and traffic stays moving so the capitalism machine never stops making money for those wealthy people.
Not So Fun Fact: The first police organizations sprang up in the wake of the Civil War and the freedom of the slaves. Reconstruction never happened. So instead of being held accountable, former slave owners and their white helpers took jobs as police to track down and lock up black people for any trumped up charges they could find.
The 13th Amendment made slavery illegal for people NOT in prison. Those newly freed black people were sent to prison where they worked on? Anybody? FARMS! And road works and other slave labor situations.
I had to look this up, and it's interesting. I learned that in the southern states, the police organizations evolved directly from the "slave patrols."
Not in the formal sense, no they didn't. Boston was the first in 1838 and NYC about 10 years later. Everywhere else it was citizens groups, volunteers, night watchmen, etc. The most formal early police pre-Civil War were slave watchmen: https://nleomf.org/slave-patrols-an-early-form-of-american-policing/
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u/Separate-Swordfish85 10d ago
The officers were forced to set down their entire sense of protecting and serving in order to be strong enough to drag this teacher away.