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I am not in law enforcement, but have spent 25 years dealing with/working with various law enforcement agencies--everything from school security guards all the way up to Interpol (they have wonderful accents, BTW.)
My observations:
The lower the level of officer, the greater the odds that he thinks he has/should have more power than he does. (I'm thinking about various school or college officers that seemed to think they were running Federal investigations.)
Most "regular" officers--police, sheriff, highway patrol, etc.--seem to have gone in for the right reasons and are just doing the best they can with varying degrees of realization that no, they can't fix the world, and yes, they did just arrest the same person for the 10th time because some judge keeps giving him time served.
These are most of the officers I talk to. They're fighting the criminals, they're fighting the public that thinks they should do "more" (whatever that is) and they're fighting politics/management/policies that stop them from doing their job.
Yes, I've talked to officers that were total jerks, that seemed to have control issues, or that just seemed to be horrible people--but after 25 years and probably thousands of various types of officers, they were a miniscule minority.
One of my jobs involves some work with law enforcement. They're people just like the rest of us. And most of them would agree that there are many members of the general public who act entitled and think that the laws of society don't apply to them.
While it is true that not every cop comits "overt" crimes against the people they are supposed to serve, it is also true that every cop is an accessory to those crimes because they are aware of them and have witnessed them without fulfiling their duty to arrrest their fellow officers who do comit them.
Every single person in law enforcement takes a solom oath to uphold the Constitution because the Constitution and not some State or local law or statute is the Supreme Law of the Land, and is superior to all other laws. Among them are the amendments of the Constitution which law enforcement refuses to enforce especially among their own ranks.
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Amen. The actions cop take due to the Blue Wall would result in arrests under RICO if private citizens did the same exact things.
I would not go quite as far as the OP when he says that there is no such thing as a good cop. A wise teacher once advised me that any multiple choice test question answer that contained words like 'always,' 100%, etc, would be 9 times out of 10 not the correct answer.
Nonetheless I agree with the gist of what OP says. We always hear the 'few bad apples' line, but that misses the point It's similar to the situation with education in an era of steadily declining test scores. We don't have a 'few bad apple' teachers. We have a systemic problem.
I had a friend who was a cop, and the town fathers wanted him to run sting operations on grocery/convenience store clerks for selling beer to minors. Typically this is a scam where you get the heavily-bearded 20 year old to see if he can buy a six pack. You hit 20 stores in a night, and if 10 fall for the scam, you rake in maybe $5000 in fine revenue. Cha ching. My friend didn't want to bust a bunch of under-trained store clerks, so he quit instead. That is the definition of a good cop. They are few and far between.
I am not even sure if I can agree with the statement "Most of these cops are bad."
In 2008, federal police employed approx. 120,000 full-time law enforcement officers, authorized to make arrests and carry firearms in the United States.[
I am not even sure if I can agree with the statement "Most of these cops are bad."
In 2008, federal police employed approx. 120,000 full-time law enforcement officers, authorized to make arrests and carry firearms in the United States.[
I am not convinced one bit that more than 60,000 full time police officers are all bad.
The vast majority of police nowadays are unionized, and unions are democratic organizations in which majority rules. Why does a rapist cop go on paid administrative leave? Because a majority of fellow officers have voted in union leadership that approves of such:
If my company orders me to dump toxic waste in a river, and I do it, does that still make me a good man even though I know its wrong?
Nearly all of the most massive crimes in the U.S., like poisoning the environment in the name of profits, profiteering from war a la Haliburton, the crimes of Wall St., racial discrimination, go unpunished or are even applauded.
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