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.

    • @bestagon
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      106 months ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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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.

      • @[email protected]
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        -16 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
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          46 months ago

          a gang with enough violent power to control others.

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

        • @[email protected]
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          36 months ago

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

    • @Bertuccio
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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.

      • @[email protected]
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        56 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

      • Zorque
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        36 months ago

        Assuming that that’s the only way people become worse.

      • @masquenox
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        16 months ago

        It doesn’t make them worse - the police just gives the worse people a gun, training, and next-to-complete immunity from the law.