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Sorry, your comment might make some good points but you lost me, your reader, when you made absolute claims about police officers.

There certainly exist police that just want to be tough guys and beat people up. But there’s plenty officers not like that.

You detract from your other points by taking such a black and white stance.

On one hand I agree. I’m sure the majority of cops are good people doing a hard job. But, at some point it becomes a loss of institutional control (to take a term from the ncaa). Everyone needs to be fired and the institution has to be restarted.

That could be. I haven’t given much thought on how to solve the problem. It could also be that we need to kill laws that are protecting police from the justice system.

It astounds me that people persist in this naive, ignorant, and destructive viewpoint even when provided with gigabytes upon gigabytes of video evidence to the contrary.

"Cop" isn't just a job. It's a social contract amongst the police and prosecutorial apparatus.

There are no police for the police. Police rape and murder with impunity. Did you know that cops beat their domestic partners at a rate 5x greater than the general population? Fully 40% of cops are wife beaters.

They can do whatever they want, and taxpayers end up paying the civil suit settlements that follow.

This isn't an issue with some criminal minority. Everyone who wears the uniform is either a criminal directly, or is actively engaged in the criminal conspiracy to hide evidence of the group's criminal activities. The ones that don't play ball are forced out.

Here's one from yesterday: they all somehow had their body cameras off when they murdered another black guy. https://www.npr.org/2020/06/01/867281529/louisville-police-c...

If people didn't stop being willfully blind when it came out that Chicago PD has a whole dedicated black site for kidnapping and torturing people prior to trial, they probably won't ever be.

There are no good career cops. The entire concept is rotten to its core, which was created and established specifically to address the risk of property damage by the poor and escaped slaves.

The first letter of ACAB is by far the most important one.

You got sources for those stats?

> There are no good career cops

I’ve watched a few videos of cops kneeling with protestors or cops laying down guns and walking with them. Are those bad cops?

When you say “there are no good career cops” that means there doesn’t exist one good career cop. It’s a ludicrous thing to say.

The way that cops support the thing that protestors are trying to achieve is not by kneeling, it's by taking off the uniform and the genocide flag.

There’s gigabytes of video of every cop in the US? And every one of them is a racist brutality piece of trash? Can you show me this archive?

Or are you saying that there’s hundreds of videos of piece of trash cops and you’re projecting that to all cops?

And yet none of those officers turn in the abusive officers, and in fact are often pushed out of the force, if not straight up fired.

So officers working side by side with abusive officers are absolutely complicit.

That doesn’t mean that all officers are bad. Good cops exist.

What’s striking to me is the stark differences in policing with the US vs other common law/Anglosphere countries, where policing is by consent.

I guess the other countries were still much more under British influence during the formation of policing?

US Police and the US public see the police as enforcers in a caste system where the public is at the bottom, the enforcers are on top of them, with the lords above them.

So the police aren't on the side of the public because they see the public as chaotic animals, to be managed lest they descend into anarchy. That's the general view and you can see that in The Thin Blue Line. In the UK, you can make fun of the policeman and he only wins by being better at banter. In America, that's something you don't want to do if you don't want to find yourself rapidly "disobeying a lawful order".

Ever since I moved to America I realized one thing that I really should have known before. Americans have a culture of strict legalism (see "refused a lawful order", "resisted arrest", "disobeying a police officer") and are consequently culturally strongly predisposed to following authority.

I really should have known this because it's sort of a universal human phenomenon where the thing that you protest that you have a lot of is often the thing you lack the most of. The City of Joy is likely one of sorrow, the City of God is likely one forsaken, and the Land of the Free is likely where you can't legally be in public the way you were born. Still, I do love America, but I have to admit to being disappointed to find that where I hoped to find free spirited people who find restrictions on their freedom unacceptable I instead found a place where the majority actually just wants strongmen and enforcers, just like anywhere else.

There are many corners of this country that offer what you describe but they aren't on a map.

Not even rural areas necessarily. The US remains a diverse and rich place, despite all efforts to distill its culture to a sound bite.

Well, hopefully one day I'll find those places, but so far across NC, CO, and CA it's all majority authoritarians wherever I look. It's not that life is hard for me. It's great. It's just that there are lots of authoritarians everywhere and that's harming my worldview.

If you don't want to spread it too wide, I'd welcome a tip. renewiltord@protonmail.com

If you feel like you'd rather not share, I understand that too.

I don't disagree with there being a majority of meddlesome authoritarians in the US. Largely there's a culture of strict rule-following whether or not there's a good reason for the rule.

I live in a little mountain town outside of Boulder, CO. The contrast between the anti-authoritarian libertarians, cowboys and hippies in my small community and the "yuppies" just 15 miles east in Boulder is palpable.

Rugged individualism is very much alive here. I have friends that live in small cabins without running water, who heat with wood and live very simply and freely. They just don't make as much noise as the authoritarians.

Come listen to bluegrass in Nederland some time!

Very cool, dude. Thanks for the tip. Looks like a lovely town.

The roots of policing in the US have it's origins in slave patrols. Very different from the rest of the Anglosphere.

https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...

"Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

> all lawsuits are settled with funds from police pension funds

I like it most.

> police go to jail

> officers who do not report other officers go to jail

> bosses/chiefs etc who are aware of abuses of power and brutality and do not arrest those officers go to jail

All these "go to jail" stops at the "qualified immunity". And no politician yet was willing to do anything about it. We need to demand to end this "qualified immunity". That's number one force, that corrupts police.

> police officers are required to get malpractice insurance. The tax payer should not be paying for criminal behavior.

And who is going to pay that "malpractice insurance"? Tax payer again.

But I heard opinion, and I agree, that some of police attitude "shot first, ask questions later" is caused by insurance. Here is how: 1) police is looking to buy life&disablity insurance for it's officers 2) insurance providers are demanding, that policies of the police force designed in such a way, so that likehood of the injury to the officers is minimal, which in practice mean: shoot first, ask questions later. 3) police implement such policies to get life&disability insurance.

> All these "go to jail" stops at the "qualified immunity". And no politician yet was willing to do anything about it. We need to demand to end this "qualified immunity". That's number one force, that corrupts police.

Justin Amash put forward an act today https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1267267244029083648

> all lawsuits are settled with funds from police pension funds

Wouldn't that hurt all the police officers in that area?

Yes. It's likely part of the point, so that they have reason to, uh, police each other.

Yes, because those cops currently choose to allow this behavior.

They can pay it from their own salary - officers who are subject to more claims will end up with higher costs.

Can you elaborate on the IQ restrictions?

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

> A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.

> The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.