To be honest.. if more children were shown from birth that they are loved, cared for, and listened no matter their gender we might not have some of the problems we have now.
Because of the Fifth Amendment, no one in the U.S. may legally be forced to testify against himself, and because of the Fourth Amendment, no one’s records or belongings may legally be searched or seized without just cause. However, American police are trained to use methods of deception, intimidation and manipulation to circumvent these restrictions. In other words, cops routinely break the law—in letter and in spirit—in the name of enforcing the law. Several examples of this are widely known, if not widely understood.
1) “Do you know why I stopped you?” Cops ask this, not because they want to have a friendly chat, but because they want you to incriminate yourself. They are hoping you will “voluntarily” confess to having broken the law, whether it was something they had already noticed or not. You may think you are apologizing, or explaining, or even making excuses, but from the cop’s perspective, you are confessing. He is not there to serve you; he is there fishing for an excuse to fine or arrest you. In asking you the familiar question, he is essentially asking you what crime you just committed. And he will do this without giving you any “Miranda” warning, in an effort to trick you into testifying against yourself.
2) “Do you have something to hide?” Police often talk as if you need a good reason for not answering whatever questions they ask, or for not consenting to a warrantless search of your person, your car, or even your home. The ridiculous implication is that if you haven’t committed a crime, you should be happy to be subjected to random interrogations and searches. This turns the concept of due process on its head, as the cop tries to put the burden on you to prove your innocence, while implying that your failure to “cooperate” with random harassment must be evidence of guilt.
3) “Cooperating will make things easier on you.” The logical converse of this statement implies that refusing to answer questions and refusing to consent to a search will make things more difficult for you. In other words, you will be punished if you exercise your rights. Of course, if they coerce you into giving them a reason to fine or arrest you, they will claim that you “voluntarily” answered questions and “consented” to a search, and will pretend there was no veiled threat of what they might do to you if you did not willingly “cooperate.” (Such tactics are also used by prosecutors and judges via the procedure of “plea-bargaining,” whereby someone accused of a crime is essentially told that if he confesses guilt—thus relieving the government of having to present evidence or prove anything—then his suffering will be reduced. In fact, “plea bargaining” is illegal in many countries precisely because it basically constitutes coerced confessions.)
4) “We’ll just get a warrant.” Cops may try to persuade you to “consent” to a search by claiming that they could easily just go get a warrant if you don’t consent. This is just another ploy to intimidate people into surrendering their rights, with the implication again being that whoever inconveniences the police by requiring them to go through the process of getting a warrant will receive worse treatment than one who “cooperates.” But by definition, one who is threatened or intimidated into “consenting” has not truly consented to anything.
5.) We have someone who will testify against you Police “informants” are often individuals whose own legal troubles have put them in a position where they can be used by the police to circumvent and undermine the constitutional rights of others. For example, once the police have something to hold over one individual, they can then bully that individual into giving false, anonymous testimony which can be used to obtain search warrants to use against others. Even if the informant gets caught lying, the police can say they didn’t know, making this tactic cowardly and illegal, but also very effective at getting around constitutional restrictions.
6) “We can hold you for 72 hours without charging you.” Based only on claimed suspicion, even without enough evidence or other probable cause to charge you with a crime, the police can kidnap you—or threaten to kidnap you—and use that to persuade you to confess to some relatively minor offense. Using this tactic, which borders on being torture, police can obtain confessions they know to be false, from people whose only concern, then and there, is to be released.
7) “I’m going to search you for my own safety.” Using so-called “Terry frisks” (named after the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1), police can carry out certain limited searches, without any warrant or probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed, under the guise of checking for weapons. By simply asserting that someone might have a weapon, police can disregard and circumvent the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches.
U.S. courts have gone back and forth in deciding how often, and in what circumstances, tactics like those mentioned above are acceptable. And of course, police continually go far beyond anything the courts have declared to be “legal” anyway. But aside from nitpicking legal technicalities, both coerced confessions and unreasonable searches are still unconstitutional, and therefore “illegal,” regardless of the rationale or excuses used to try to justify them. Yet, all too often, cops show that to them, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments—and any other restrictions on their power—are simply technical inconveniences for them to try to get around. In other words, they will break the law whenever they can get away with it if it serves their own agenda and power, and they will ironically insist that they need to do that in order to catch “law-breakers” (the kind who don’t wear badges).
Of course, if the above tactics fail, police can simply bully people into confessing—falsely or truthfully—and/or carry out unconstitutional searches, knowing that the likelihood of cops having to face any punishment for doing so is extremely low. Usually all that happens, even when a search was unquestionably and obviously illegal, or when a confession was clearly coerced, is that any evidence obtained from the illegal search or forced confession is excluded from being allowed at trial. Of course, if there is no trial—either because the person plea-bargains or because there was no evidence and no crime—the “exclusionary rule” creates no deterrent at all. The police can, and do, routinely break the law and violate individual rights, knowing that there will be no adverse repercussions for them having done so.
Likewise, the police can lie under oath, plant evidence, falsely charge people with “resisting arrest” or “assaulting an officer,” and commit other blatantly illegal acts, knowing full well that their fellow gang members—officers, prosecutors and judges—will almost never hold them accountable for their crimes. Even much of the general public still presumes innocence when it comes to cops accused of wrong-doing, while presuming guilt when the cops accuse someone else of wrong-doing. But this is gradually changing, as the amount of video evidence showing the true nature of the “Street Gang in Blue” becomes too much even for many police-apologists to ignore.
One of the biggest realizations with dealing with cops for me was the fact that they CAN lie, they are 100% legally entitled to lie, and they WILL whether you’re a victim of crime, accused of committing a crime or anything else
Everyone needs to reblog this, it could save a life.
Important
Seriously if you ever find yourself in custody don’t say shit until you’ve got some counsel with you. No cop is your friend in that situation.
Somehow, you will always be in the wrong. Facts and events get
twisted and you will always end up being the guilty party. Nothing they
do is ever their fault. They will have one set of rules for themselves
and another set for everyone else. They do not take responsibility for
their part and trying to get them to own up to something will leave you
disappointed and frustrated.
2) They blame others
As previously mentioned, emotional abusers are never to blame for
anything that goes wrong. They will somehow always be the victim. They
will steadfastly refuse to apologise for their actions and blame anyone
else,anything else to get off the hook. You are wasting your time if you
hope that your emotionally abusive partner will apologise and work hard
to change his/her ways. Why should they when it’s not their fault?
3) Gas-lighting
This involves making you believe things that didn’t really happen or
aren’t really there. For example telling you that they have told you
about an upcoming party that you are 100% sure they never told you
about. They will never doubt themselves. Instead they will roll their
eyes and insist they told you leaving you to doubt your memory. They
will push their version of reality on to you and you may end up feeling
as if you are going crazy, not knowing what is true anymore.
4) They are critical of others but do not apply the same rules to themselves
Emotional abusers often have low self-awareness. This is often
because they are more tuned in to others in order to control them and
manipulate them. Apart from being quite controlling characters, they are
known for their constant put-downs.
Hi! A Zine I edited/illustrated/contributed to just came out. It’s a spin off frm an online magazine of the same name my friend runs, featuring essays by women about film and visual culture, including topics like Gendering Cyborgs, reclaiming Millennial Pink, ordeal cinema and mental health in horror
Digital copies start at £1 (GBP) with options to donate more, if you’d like! 50% of profits will go to local housing charity Changing Lives, who work w homeless youth, DV survivors and they’ve have been heavily involved in working w survivors of sex trafficking rings – so it goes to a rlly good cause! And a good zine!
I did the first lot of donations from this the other week! Thanks to everyone who bought the zine, we were able to donate about £20!
£11 pays for a week’s worth of meals for service users, so that’s rlly great!!
the other 50% of the profits are basically My Pay for making this, so you also paid for like a week’s worth of meals for me. So thanks for helping to keep the lights on over here 🤗
a lot of people i’ve interacted with still think the whole chiquita death squads thing was only a rumor so I wanted to point out that they owned up to it and got fined.
so a corporation literally funded right wing terrorists to kill innocent people and only got fined. $25 million. chiquita has annual revenues of $3 billion. that should really have been a wake up call to anyone thinking corporations are treated unfairly, but it wasn’t. this is capitalism.
Pepsi is also directly responsible for the coup of Allende. Allende was actually supposed to win the 1963 election, but was unable to bc corporations like Pepsi poured millions into his opponent’s campaign. In return, his opponent promised to protect their investments. In 1970, when Allende finally won, the CEO of PepsiCo explicitly demanded President Nixon stage a coup against Allende bc as a socialist, he would threaten Pepsi’s and other foreign investments. Pressured by these corporations, Nixon eventually took action https://www.theguardian.com/business/1998/nov/08/observerbusiness.theobserver
speaking, uh, as a formerly-trafficked sex worker, it’s extremely difficult to come forward as a trafficking victim in countries where sex work is criminalized; you just… get criminalized under those same anti-prostitution laws. of course reported trafficking would increase when the sole fact of coming forward as a sex worker at all no longer endangers you.
This line of argument is the same one that you see with conservatives who point to the increase in divorce rates as proof that making divorce safer is endangering marriage, while ignoring the massive drops in domestic abuse, murder, and suicide.
It’s a shot argument with them, and it’s a shot argument here.
In WWI, when they introduced helmets, they saw a sudden spike in head injuries.
What the casual observer may miss was that they were seeing the increase because of a dramatic decrease in deaths from head wounds.
@seananmcguire and everyone else reblogging this: if you care about us at all, i’m fucking begging you, you need to stand for us. there are 22 thousand notes on this right now. there were maybe 90 people at the int’l whore’s day protest in my city this year and that was a much higher-than-expected turnout.
we’re dying. i cannot stress this enough. we are being killed, we are being attacked, we are being raped, and the same is for trafficking victims, trafficking survivors, and wholly “consensual” sex workers. and as much as i see posts like this go viral, at the same time i don’t see allyship. nobody’s standing with us. half the notes on this are “lol op’s a terf”, half the comments are about autism or divorce, and all i see is more people who don’t find us worthwhile on our own.
here’s a fact about criminalization: when you’ve got a prostitution rap—which, to reiterate, you’ll get whether or not you’re “consensually” in the field, and often even if you’re a minor—you’re “tainted”. you’re damaged goods. you might be on a sex offender registry by default.
good luck getting an apartment. good luck getting an above-board job. criminalization is a vicious cycle that more often than not keeps us in sex work, whether or not we wanted to be here in the first place and whether or not we want to be here now.
we don’t have other options. the government is the most efficient pimp there is.
so, please, i’m literally begging you, if you care about us at all. if you think my life has any value at all, if you think my siblings’ lives have any value at all. fight for us. show up for us. call your local politicians. support local organizations fighting for sex workers and trafficking victims. volunteer in harm reduction campaigns. attend protests and sit-ins. there’s a bunch.
the international day to end violence against sex workers is december 17; i hope to run into some of you there, if i’m alive to make it.
rip tumblr 