Why is the nature of being a cop unethical? I agree there are abuses of the power but from what I've seen in real life it's important work.
I realize this answer is lacking, but I've had this argument so many times and it drains hours out of my day to pursue it - because the supporting data is complicated and people are correct to provide counter arguments (and then I have to respond and it goes back and forth for a while). I encourage you to do your own research on statistics regarding police officers in the US. The one everybody likes to cite is how many police officer's beat their wives - 40%. And even this data point is very complicated and requires a lot of nuance and so on.
But since people enjoy stories, here's one egregious example of a sheriff's department abusing their power. Even I think this is exceptionally awful and most police departments aren't this bad, but it's well researched and makes for a good read.
https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history...
And the people that I think are those who most want to help those in need and are compassionate, careful, and would take accountability seriously are those who don't want to do the job.
There is also a kinship/bond that grows, which is hard to break. It's natural. You see it among sports fans, school alumni, console fan boys, company workers, etc... You see things through exceptionally biased glasses. Try to find a sports fan who feels like their team tends to be FAVORED by refs? You won't find them -- they all seem to think the refs are against their team -- every team's fans feel this way. Every team's fans feel like the fight on the field was instigated by the other team.
Given these things, how do you mitigate against them, and construct a police force that is reasonable? I personally think it has to be external oversight, but this hasn't been easy to implement historically.
Not discounting your point at all, but the best response when someone says this is to point out that the saying is "a few bad apples spoil the bunch". It's very literal- an apple that's going bad releases fumes that cause other apples nearby to spoil. So it's very important to find them and get rid of them before that happens.
Completing the analogy is an exercise left to the reader.
[0] - https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-can...
[1] - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/deadly-force-police-...
Show me a group that doesn't do this.
In Seattle's 2020 cop-free zone CHOP/CHAZ, the self-appointed "security forces" killed an unarmed 16-year-old. It's all on video, and the statements made by the assailants in the aftermath are heinous. Plenty of people were there to see it, but nobody's talking, and at this point it looks like they'll probably never catch the killers.
I don't excuse or accept bad behavior by cops. But I can't call policing unethical by nature unless you can show me an alternative that is more ethical. Seattle got an experiment in the alternative, and it was not good.
The 16 year old was Antonio Mays. He drove a car through the occupied park and at a group of protesters. It's all on video? Not only parts of the aftermath? Where?
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/seattle-police-carried-...
It is within this context an average intelligence, perhaps even above-average moral person enters after 6-weeks of training. This person likes watching football and drinking beer. They help their elderly neighbors with the trash. They are a "normal" man who will stand up for himself, physically, in extreme cases. Now give him a gun and a badge and a martial law bubble. How do you think this normal, average man will evolve when he realizes his power? When he sees his friends on the force us it, daily, to get what they want, to make their jobs a little easier? When does he learn to enjoy that feeling of power, for itself, the way it feels to beat someone and put his knee on someone's neck because they talked back to you, and know that no-one can do shit about it? And you can even rationalize it - they shouldn't have been rude, they should know how much power I have and that I'm only human, its really just punishment for being stupid. Plus, the public still loves me and is grateful to me, considering me in high esteem as a moral upstanding citizen - so we must be doing something right!
So I take all of these "cops are evil" claims with a grain of salt and seek out more context clues to what would initiate an interaction with LEO in the first place.
> So I take all of these "cops are evil" claims with a grain of salt
No need to take any "claim" as fact when there is tons of actual evidence in the form of recordings, law suits and more. I simply do not understand how someone is able to have a positive view of police with the access we have to information. Police are not your friend, they do not serve you and they should not be trusted.
And also, consider the impact of being wrong here. Like, if your opinion is taken seriously, then there's nothing wrong, then why? Is it that my basic assumption that power corrupts is wrong? Or do you disagree with the premise that cops aren't held accountable when they abuse their power? In either case, surely you see enough evidence that police, both here and abroad, are constantly struggling with issues of corruption and abuse, sometimes directed at one ethnicity, but always at non-officers.
The obvious problem I see seems to be that cops exist to lock people up. When locking people up is often an inhumane and ineffective solution to the problem at hand.
Laws are equal for all people.
Order is a set of subjective social rules that keeps everything in its "correct" place.
Maintaining order often requires not enforcing the law equally. This is the essential moral difficulty of the police. If you have people who appear poor in a rich neighborhood, they are highly likely to attract law enforcement attention at a minimum. Not because they've broken the law, but because they are out of place and "disorderly".
We really really like order, by the way. You can't just do away with the maintenance of order, although a strong argument could be made that we should not enforce it via state-licensed violence.