Luckily they make up for all of this by unfairly punishing individual citizens....without connections and who can't afford a good lawyer.
Exactly. This is my mentality and has been for years. People like to complain about the "few bad apples" that make everyone look bad. Yeah, I'll acknowledge up front that overall in the country the majority of officers probably do their job fairly well and try to obey the rules and not violate people's rights. But my real problem is that their coworkers don't do shit about it when they know those people violate the law. They don't speak up. They don't stop them. They don't want to testify or offer up any evidence. And yet how many times have we seen these big public cases where the officer in question has a history of complaints and disciplinary action against them?
The difference between me and my coworkers and the police is that neither I nor anyone I work with has sworn an oath to uphold the law. So I'm not legally obligated to turn anyone in or do anything if I find out someone is breaking the law. But they are. And not only do they not do their job in that regard, they actively try to protect those people. And then they turn around and claim that the public is against them and that there is all this "us vs them" tribalism. Of course there is - they've made it that way. Do they honestly think that the general populace changed their view of the police of the past 50 years at random?
A personal anecdote. I got pulled over around 2 years ago for having a headlight out. Fair enough. But the officer proceeded to make up some bullshit about how I took too long to pull over, which was nonsense. I took 20 seconds to turn over (I went back and timed it) and that was because it was a one lane road with no shoulder - I pulled into a strip mall just up the block that I knew so we didn't block the street. He used that to then claim I used that time to hide something under my seat and suspected me of drug possession. Ordered me out of the car and tried to get me to let him search the car. I refused to grant permission. He said if I didn't give it to him he'd be "forced" to call the dogs and we'd have to wait around 40 minutes because they were far away. I didn't change my tune. We waited. The officer quietly talks to the dog's handler when they show up, deliberately away from me so I can't hear him and then the dog magically indicates/hits on my driver door. Which is interesting since I don't use drugs and only my immediate family has ever been in that vehicle and none of them use drugs. They toss the car and by now I'm both irate and afraid that they might plant drugs since this is clearly bullshit. I start to tell them how I know there's no drugs in the car and it's really interesting that the dog hit on the car considering I know for a fact that there are no drugs there and they will soon find out the same. I also openly and politely ponder what a lawyer might say about them forcing me to wait 40 minutes for dogs to show up since this was after the latest ruling from the supreme court about how long reasonable stops can be for things like that. I see one of them start to think things through and realize I don't actually have drugs in the car. The search completes and they don't find anything. But they also never cite me for the headlight being out and send me on my merry way 75 minutes after being pulled over. Now the real kicker - a friend of mine is in a relationship with a state trooper. I relayed this story to him and he flat out said he would have searched my car as well. When I asked why he said "you are a white male and you were traveling in the direction of a mostly minority town with drug problems (the next town over from where I was). They probably figured you were either going there to buy or you are a seller." To which I responded, "how the hell could they conclude that since I live like 3 minutes from where they pulled me over and I was going home?" And he just said that it wouldn't have matter to him either and he would have searched my car as well.
People who use this phrase to complain about poor treatment of police officers drive me nuts, because they're completely ignoring what it means. The saying is, "A few bad apples spoil the barrel". As in, if you don't immediately get rid of the bad apples, it causes the rest to rot. Which is exactly what has happened with most police departments.
It's because the grocery store removes the bad apples.
They--or at least the grocery businesses around here--do not take proactive measures to remove bad fruit of any kind. That is why I frequently see mold on fruits that have been purchased earlier in the same day.
I have seen enough of this to know not only that one bad apple will [eventually] spoil the whole bag, but also that one bad orange will ruin its bag, and one bad strawberry will embadden all the strawberries touching it, but that melons, potatoes, and pomegranates are still mostly good after you remove and throw out all the moldy parts.
Cops are more like oranges than apples. They go bad a lot faster in the presence of corruption.
You can't expect such a person to know anything about Bobby Peel's 9 Principles. [0] If anybody on this site knows a US cop that can name even a single one of them from memory, I would be very surprised, even though they form the ethical foundation for the entire profession of modern policing, along with some of Jeremy Bentham's work.
Peel organized the Metropolitan Police in 1829. Boston copied it in 1838. New York City followed suit in 1845, and Chicago in 1851. It spread fast to all northern cities (southern policing being largely based on the slave patrol instead). The "thin blue line" that seems to be endemic among professional cops in the US is a blatant violation of number 7, and severely undermines number 2.
That cultivation of an "us versus them" mentality, and the erosion of public trust and cooperation with the police, makes the force a decidedly non-modern police force--more like that military occupying force Peel wanted to avoid.
The problem is a lot of legitimate issues do not end up documented. For example, an officer in a nearby small town was ordering drugs to people's houses and trying to pick them up. Did he have delusions of grandeur, and wanted to stage some bust? Did he want to sell them himself? Did he want to plant them on the teenagers at the local highschool?
We'll never know, because somehow what he was doing was never documented, he was never charged, and he "left of his own volition" for another department.
How many local cases are tainted because of this cop? Every drug charge years back is now suspect and should be thrown out. But it wasn't documented or reported.
You need a better friend.
I'd care a hell of a lot less about them not ratting on each other for breaking the law if they didn't prosecute normal people for not ratting on each other when we break the law. I don't really care which they go for, just be consistent. The double standard is BS. If we don't get a pass then they shouldn't get a pass. If they get a pass we should get a pass.
And that's not even counting the massive double standard when it comes to lethal force.
This is important to note as it makes it easy to diffuse responsibility for an act. The courts have more or less made it so that you must prove someone knew an act was outside of their commission and knew the act was illegal to get anywhere.