2dimes wrote:I believe Duk that several police officers on earth are jerks, dishing out unreasonable beatings for little to no reason.
Let's be real, videos of police murdering black guys exist. It seems unbelievable but I reluctantly watched one. That's not ok.
Unlike the folks Koolbak is talking about, if police officers are near by abusing innocent people dumb enough to wander into a particular place. I don't think. "I'm going down to get me some of that."
Doesn't matter one fucking bit your skin color, sexual preferences, religion, political vent, number if extremeties. People are either decent or they're not.
I believe that's true for police too.
KoolBak wrote:Of course it's true for police too. And tailors. And bankers. And truck drivers. I said PEOPLE
I was working with some of my favourite cops today, which reminded me that I hadn't gotten around to responding to this.
Yes, there's good people and bad people, and that includes good cops and bad cops.
It isn't about the cops being bad people. It's about the fact that there's nothing to reign them in.
ALL of us are corruptible. All of us, from time to time, face a temptation to do something that we know is wrong. Our conscience is our first line of defense. Most of our evil deeds get stopped in their tracks because Jiminy Cricket pops up in the back of our heads and says "you don't want to do that." But when we're angry or stressed, sometimes our conscience isn't strong enough. That's where the law steps in. It's our second line of defense. When the temptation to beat the shit out of someone grows strong enough that our conscience alone won't hold us back, the thought of going to jail helps hold us back.
The cops don't have this second line of defense. When they lose their temper and beat the shit out of someone, they say "resisting arrest" and four times out of five that will end any investigation right there and then. In the unlikely event that a deeper investigation takes place, they face only a 1/3 chance of actually being charged. If they are charged, they face only a 1/3 chance of being convicted. If they are convicted, they face only a 1/3 chance of being incarcerated.
If you or I lose our temper and beat the shit out of someone, our chances of going to jail are about 25%. If a cop loses his temper and beats the shit out of someone, his chances of going to jail are about 3%.
This isn't a condemnation of the cops as people. As people, they are neither more nor less perfect than the rest of us. It's a condemnation of the system, which does everything possible to prevent them from being held to account. Police departments and police unions work together to prevent cops from being charged or convicted. The normal management versus union stance doesn't apply here -- the unions want to protect their member, but the department also wants to protect them, because if it's proven that they acted wrongfully, the department might have to pay a settlement. The prosecutors pull their punches and play nice with the cops, since they depend on the police for assistance in other cases. The judges are more likely to believe a cop, especially if his victim was some lowlife. But even if the victim was a normal citizen, the judges still give the benefit of the doubt to police testimony. So everybody in the system -- the cop, his buddies on the force, his union, his five-star attorney provided by the union, his superior officers and the police commission, the judges and even the prosecutor himself -- is lined up to either help or at least not hurt the cop's defense.
Add to that the fact that they are being trained with an "us versus them" mentality, and armed with military-grade hardware, and it's a prescription for a pogrom.
Most of them are not bad people, but the system is set up to indulge the bad ones, and it does nothing to hinder the good ones when they too yield to their worse impulses. You'd have a lot more bank tellers stealing if the banks worked as hard as the police departments at preventing prosecution of the bad apples!
