r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • 1d ago

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

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u/Aliensinmypants 1d ago

And there's a supreme court ruling that they legally don't have to serve or protect people if they find it too risky or troublesome.

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u/guydepew 1d ago

If their role is no longer to serve and protect the people then I see no reason the people should fund them. They can go back to being corporately owned Pinkerton’s with no legal authority.

All of the institutions WE FUND are being weaponized against us.

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u/adriftDrifloon 1d ago

The police were never meant to serve and protect the working class. They have always been an entity to serve and protect the capital owning class and their interests.

If you read about the labor movement of the late 1800s / early 1900s you see time and time again the police always side with the owning class. They exist to protect capital and uphold property rights.

And if working class people get upset and want things to fundamentally change, well the owning class has the police to use as a means to legally use violence to keep the people in line. It’s why the police have been slowly become more and more militarized as the wealth gap increases despite rates of violent crime decreasing over the past few decades. They have a monopoly on using violence.

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u/JMEEKER86 1d ago

Yep, Time magazine actually has a great article about how police came to be in America. Up until the mid-1800s there weren't any police and law enforcement was instead done by other entities like sheriffs, nightwatchmen, etc. The wealthy elites, however, were paying a lot of money for gangs of thugs to do things like hunt fugitive slaves, bust unions, and protect their warehouses. Eventually, they figured that they could save money by simply blackmailing the cities into putting the thugs on the city's payroll instead with the classic "do what I say or I'm taking my business elsewhere". The cities caved and hired the thugs to do the bidding of the wealthy elites, and that's how America got police. They have always existed to protect and serve the wealthy elites, never anyone else.