remember, the police's sole purpose is to punish crime, not to prevent it. they don't care who they punish as long as they can add your number to their statistics. they are NOT your friends. that's just childhood brainwashing.
Around the world, the core job of the police is more: Restore the public peace. They can forgive transgressions in public if you demonstrate further disturbance of peace will cease.
They have to maintain a reasonable level of fairness, or they get overrun by vigilantes. But as long as the illusion of fairness holds good enough, they can and will crush powerless people in the wheels of justice.
America is fine, basically. Yes, cops are empowered bullies who do bad things. But that's been true for thousands of years. We're farther down the path to trying to fix that, not behind.
Wait, what? You don’t know if this is a Western European thing but you just took that “from the rest of the world”? I guess I could do the same: (1) I’m not from America (the majority here), (2) I haven’t experienced bully police asking for id, so (3) I’ll just assume that that’s an American thing. How funny!
> what I assume you mean by "around the world", since that's almost always what's meant
Were you just say “I’ll assume Western Europe based on nothing”.
> If you'd like to read about other peoples experiences with police in Western Europe
What do you mean “other”? I haven’t said where I’m from.
As I am above 30 and I look as I am now, adult, well off person, I most likely would not even have to have ID on me even when I am not in my native country.
That said, when I was 20-something and had short haircut not having ID even in my native country could cause trouble.
There are also places where Police is quite easy going like medium cities around 100k. Mostly they have enough work not to care for small infractions and are not overworked with amount of shitty people.
In small cities it might be bad because they might not have anything to do so they would hunt you down on some silly stuff.
In big cities it might be bad because they have so many shitty people to deal with so they just assume you are shithead as well and treat you like one by default.
There are also places where rich people live and if you look like you don't belong, guess what, even if you look well off adult they might ask bunch of questions and Id if you don't look like you belong in the neighborhood.
In the US the relatively recent shift to use of the term “law enforcement” both reflects and drives a self-destructive nature in the broad culture.
Your insightful point, “The police's sole purpose is to punish crime, not to prevent it” has several implications.
First is that even if you have a positive view of the cops (and if you are not in an “out group” you should) you still should follow this advice. If you’re not chatting with your next door neighbor the cop at a bbq, what you are is an unpleasant barrier to getting their job done with a minimum of hassle. Like you think of Jira or Confluence.
Another implication is to understand that their role, in cultural norm, in who it attracts to the job, and simply the cumulative impact of what they are exposed to, drives what I will euphemistically call “destructive impact”. We need cops like we need the weather, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take steps to deal with the destructive force of storms, and even to minimize storm generation.
Unfortunately the US is in a phase where they think the more brutality the better. In that the cops correctly reflect what they are asked to do.
From a game theoretical POV this is false; no good can come from speaking to them, and only bad can.
In the first case at least they are surely going to suspect you, so you should still be careful. But “no good can come of it”?
In the latter case, I would not call them at all.
What good would police contact do in either of those cases? In each instance they cannot help me.
The police (in the USA) are reactive and respond after crimes are committed, not before (unless they are responding to social disorder requests, which is generally unrelated to crime). Even then they choose which crimes they deem worthy of responding to (the classic example being rape victims being dissuaded from proceeding with making a police report).
Most people have a mistaken mental model of how police actually function. Most police officers are about as non-proactive as you can get (except near the end of the month when the traffic ticket quotas are due).
Except we're not talking about game theory here, we're talking about reality.
As for punishing crime - technically, the police is not supposed to decide whether crimes have been committed, nor to meet out out punishment for them. Really is a different thing, of course - but even then, the punishment is for police-undesirable behavior.
If the police have become a punishing force, or even make the rules, then something has gone very wrong. Now even in civilized societies things sometimes goes wrong, e.g. the parliament provides police with too broad a framework to operate within, in an attempt to be "tough on crime" or attempt to dictate the framework of the judicial system to ensure a minimum sentencing. It's just rare that the police force itself is to blame. Blame mostly falls back to the people writing the laws.