Maybe one of these years that old chestnut about 'good guys with guns' will stop being total fantasy and actually come true.
The police right?
Oh.
To be fair, you generally never hear about the good police are doing. The good ones far outnumber the bad ones, for sure.
I'm not saying there isn't a police issue in the US though, because there is and there needs to be some reform.
Do we know this? Do we really?
If there are 1000 good cops and 100 bad cops, and the 1000 good cops do nothing to stop the 100 bad cops, then we have 1100 bad cops.
OK, so what's your argument? That policing is a magnet for people who want to hurt people, and/or turn the other cheek? My point was that news tends to focus on the negative, and that isn't just with regards to police.
People who hold this unshakable negative view of the police are just as much a problem as those who think they can do no wrong.
I like the police. They serve an incredibly important job, a job that's very difficult and where hard choices have to be made in an instant sometimes. Because of this, I tend to cut them a lot of slack and place significant amounts of trust in them. This is a pretty common viewpoint. It's part of why police officers are treated so preferentially in our legal system.
The above makes it more problematic when a police officer does something indefensible. A police officer who abuses his position should not have the support of anyone - especially not his department and other officers. On the surface it's fair to say that a police officer who supports another officer who has done something wrong, is a bad police officer.
The problem is that good police officers who do not support bad ones are often subtly or outright reprimanded by their departments - and this makes most of them fall into line eventually. My uncle is a police officer, and he reported a fellow cop stealing money from a drug bust. His report was dismissed, he was reprimanded for making the report by his supervisor because it 'made the department look bad', and he was harassed by other officers until he transferred to another precinct. With this kind of system in place, there isn't always a place for good officers to go to report bad ones. And that leads to bad police officers who are permeant fixtures of police departments.
Then there is the long and well documented history of other people in the justice system fudging things to protect bad police officers - techs losing or spoiling evidence, prosecutors not really trying all that hard, etc. This culture
has to stop if there's ever to be hope of reducing the numbers of bad officers on forces. Until it does, it's reasonable to expect that people are angry about policing.
Again, I don't hold an unshakably negative view of police (I hold them in very high regard). But the above is a serious problem, and one that obviously works to damage the credibility of policing. That's why it urgently needs to be fixed.
