When bad behaviour is detected within a police force, they don’t eliminate the “bad apple” they protect them. No other “good apple” speaks up against the behaviour. Thus — in line with the metaphor - the rot affects the whole barrel.
His comparison of how errors in policing are treated compared to how plane crashes are treated is very apt. I've used this lens to look at many situations since. The lack of impartiality displayed in the face of an "officer involved" incident is glaring.
Police officers and other people in that branch of government never display the kind of serious investigative interest that a plane crash investigator applies. They never approach it with fresh eyes, hoping to uncover and fix root causes.
In IT we talk about "the 5 whys" for trying to get past superficial reasons for an incident. But you can't expect to ever see that kind of approach when everything is quickly hidden behind a "blue wall of silence."
And the two aren't investigated by the same body of government NTSB investigates plane crashes in the US (federally created).
In some departments there exists Civilian Review Boards [0] IMO better than an internal investigations department and delegating to a federally created agency. But do they work in reality?
0: Civilian Review Boards https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_affairs_(law_enforc....
(And I think you misunderstood something I wrote, but I'm not sure what.
I didn't mean that the same body of government investigate both crashes and police misconduct...
I meant that very often police misconduct is investigated by groups that are adjacent to the police, not impartial.
Even if/when it is a separate group, the 'blue wall of silence' is an effect deterrent to investigation and there doesn't seem to be any interest in counter-acting this.)
The point I was making is that a federally created agency conducts investigations completely different than state police departments. (Not all state police departments are funded the same and share the same information about investigations especially internal) they aren't a single entity nor should they be.
The comedian takes two very different things and combines them as one and then tells the audience how absurd his creation is as if it is reality.
And to the "blue wall of silence", from the one study I scanned [0]. I think it exists, but not in all departments as the study finds too. And the only way to combat it (just like with civilians in gang ridden communities) is to have more transparency measures (body cams, anonymous reporting systems etc) and obviously more officers/civilians need to come forward with those experiences in their department/jurisdiction.
0: The Measurement of Police Integrity - National Criminal Justice Reference [PDF] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...