You gave as an example
If you have an arsehole cop, then that’s admitting to driving without due care and attention (or your local equivalent).
It’s going to spoil your day even if you get found not guilty at court.
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Note that this is how a middle-class white lawyer is treated. Now consider how this might have gone if she had been a minority, without any connection to the legal system.
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Ok. Again. I am not assuming every cop is out to get me. A state trooper lives behind me. Two local cops are on the two adjacent streets. Another statie coaches my youngest sons soccer team. None of these four men are evil or out to ruin someone’s day.
Trust is a two way street. As is honesty, respect, decency, and a whole host of other things that make our lives better.
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only if the right to remain silent isn’t a right.
Since the right to bear arms seems like a great way to get murdered this week, I’m unsurprised that the guardians of our rights are actually the ones to challenge and nullify them on a daily basis.
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That may be a bad assumption. The job of the police is to arrest people (and often, increase revenue through traffic fines). Guilt or innocence doesn’t come into it for them.
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No. The job of the police is to serve and protect.
I am happy to not live where you do.
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I wish we could change the world by believing that problems don’t exist. My preferred strategy is to start by fully acknowledging the unpleasant reality, and then figure out how to deal with it.
That said, the “ignore it and it’ll go away” strategy does seem to be far more popular. To each their own, I guess?
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Neither do I, but it only takes one for things to go bad.
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I used to see things the way you do. I wish I still lived in that world, it was a better one, but the facts I’ve observed no longer support that view.
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rookies since 2014? They don’t seem to have learned much outside of how to harass the public.
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… each other, too much of the time.
I’m glad you live in a utopia from which you can declare that LEOs job description magically matches their capacity to perform it, as well as their track record of having done so.
Any officer who looks the other way at violence when it’s a citizen in uniform doing it, is an awful cop. That’s a god awful lot more of them than most folks think, or are willing to see (or are willing to just sit by and allow other people to talk freely about without reflexively offering a contrary or accidentally invalidating opinion, just because their own experience has not matched that of the person they stopped listening too and started telling about their actual experince), Pangloss
In other words, The job of the police is to protect and serve. Yes.
Some of them are frauds. Some of them ‘just’ look the other way and don’t say anything when they see a fellow officer out of line. That’s enabling, and it is EQUALLY a problem as the violence. You cannot have the extreme escalation and violent outbursts as such a constant presence without a team supporting and protecting the violent from consequences - which is 180 degrees from the job description.
You cannot have the people who are there to protect rights BEING THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CHALLENGE THEM EVERY SINGLE DAY and call that positive, can you?
If you really believe the cops are mostly on your team, I think you may have an overly rosy view of human nature. I believe people will do the right thing when given the chance. These cops are not given the chance. They’re rewarded and protected for doing it wrong. Over and over and over again.
We need to send them to jail, same as anyone else, when they commit crimes. Period.
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Sure… to serve and protect the state and capital.
I’m guessing you live somewhere relatively wealthy.
I’d be happy too!
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Well really, it takes several. One to go bad, and the rest on the shift at that time to go into “oh crap, harvey did it again” mode and cover his ass like he was their alcoholic parent.
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That’s a deceptive bit of perceptions management. Police say that they are serving and protecting the community, as a way of eliciting cooperation and avoiding scrutiny. But officially, they serve and protect only the government itself. So if they feel a need to arbitrarily stop people to “make their presence felt” (encouraging authoritarian responses and control), and hope to generate revenues by way of fines and forfeitures, this can be perceived as serving and protecting the municipality/state/etc.
Saying that there are institutional problems in police culture is in no way the same as suggesting that individual police are “evil”. But when they disproportionately bother the poor and minorities, or bend the rules with citizens to make their own jobs easier, the effect can be the same. FWIW I have personally overheard quite a few cops discussing amongst themselves how everybody is guilty of something, there need to be ways to squeeze people, and that life would be better if some people simply died. And this was in the liberal paradise of New England. I can only imagine how much worse it is in other areas.
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No. That’s their advertising strapline.
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There’s how cops behave when off-duty, and then there’s the ‘other thing’. And it’s the ‘other thing’ that hits the news. I’m not sure if off-duty behavior can be used as a good predictor of how they behave when they’re out on the street, or of how things would go out on the street if a cop on the job happens to stop someone he knows.
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I used to live across the river from P-burg in Easton. Those coords are actually a few miles north of Phillipsburg. She’s not in the city.
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Unless you actually do know why they pulled you over, in which case “No, I don’t” is a lie, and lying to an officer is against the law, in which case you just screwed yourself.
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Calling them compromised is not calling them evil. It’s not that they’re bad people, and to reduce what is being said to such a caricature would risk changing the subject away from the unacceptable behavior.
We can do something about the behavior. i don’t care if the cops in your hood ARE evil, so long as they aren’t violating peoples rights on the regular. Which you would TOTALLY know all about, being their neighbor, riding shotgun occasionally, and also in regular touch with their supervisors the way you are. Oh, you don’t do those last two things? Yeah. Keep telling yourself stories. They’re saints, I am sure!!
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