Whenever I see police, I have the same fight or flight response as if I'd see someone in a dark alley. The police have become dangerous, and none of my friends trust them. They would be the last people I'd call if there was something happening. Too much of a risk they would beat you, kill you, or rob you.
Who does that sound like?
Yap pretty much.
I came from a country where cops would torture people to get confessions out of them. Basically chances were, if they caught you, and they were bored / were bribed by someone, or just had a bad day, they could make you "confess" to crimes easily.
One time my friend and I caught a pickpocketer. Pickpocketer's associate swiped my friend's wallet. There was a group of them, all scattered except one. We caught him and eventaully ended up with him at a police station. It was a quiet evening there. One cop even had his 1st or 2nd grader son there playing around in the hallway. So being bored, the cops decided to get this pickpocketer to tell them where his buddies are hanging out. They needed the wallet to officially to charge him so they could arrest him. So to get him to talk, they asked us to leave the room. Then proceeded to torture him. Holy crap! I can still hear his pleas for help. What started with us being happy we caught him and him getting some justice, turned into us feeling pretty sorry for him... at some point we signed some papers and just left.
Long story short, there is a good reason there to be afraid of cops. They are just like an organized criminal gang are are sanctioned to operate by the law. You never know what they'll do, they have guns, friends with guns, and could beat or torture you to death on a whim.
Now it is night and day to what is in this country, and I felt pretty safe in general around cops here. But in later years, the stories I hear, camera recordings of cops shooting people, the whole forfeture thing, I see things slowly start to nudge into a bad direction. I start feeling a little bit more like I felt there, in the old country.
Also, I can't decide if cops have started to do this more, or that they've always done but there weren't as many cameras around to record it, and only the poor people got to experience that side of the "law".
I don't know either, but Chicago had a police torture scandal that occurred in the 70s and 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge
I very much doubt that police treatment of black people is WORSE than before. Maybe we were briefly better in the 80s and 90s, but I don't see any reason to believe so.
The spirit of which appears to continue, in various guises, through the current day.
We might even say it's in their DNA:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-polic...