I think it's a coping strategy formed in response to an absurd mission. Going by national stats on drug use, I would guess that most cops have, at least at some point in their life, been friends with drug users and tolerated drug use, if not participated themselves. But they now find themselves in a situation where they are ordered to oppose it. The psyche hates hypocrisy, so it constructs an alternate narrative: the war on drugs isn't about drugs, it's about violent drug dealers and drug users. That's a cause worth fighting for, and one that would make sense to fight using military tactics.

In other words, kicking doors down makes cops feel like righteous warriors, writing tickets in pot shops makes them feel like asshole tattletales. They pick the strategy that makes it easiest to live with themselves. It has nothing to do with the optimal strategy to counteract the violation of law.

This is way too deep of an explanation. I mean, for one, Freudianism is about a century dead at this point, "the psyche" isn't "constructing" anything.

Do you think the cop who said "I was about to kick her in her fucking nub" is constructing a deep narrative about how she's a just warrior fighting for righteousness and the American way?

I think the most insightful part of this whole video is when they use the battering ram (ineffectively) on the pull door in the beginning, TWICE, and then just open the door.

There is nothing deep there. They just want to feel dominant because they've long ago overcome the instinctive aversion to conflict humans feel. Human nature, or rather, human evolution and culture, is not predisposed to violence, and the only way to construct people like this is through extensive training, over the course of years, and continued throughout their career, to mold them into remorseless killing machines. This training takes away the nausea of seeing a human life extinguished and replaces it with the adrenaline of a successful kill.

This mindset is far from accidental -- do you think the people who run police departments would allow something that seems this uncontrollable just happen? It's not like there's a huge labor shortage right now or anything, police departments could easily fire enough people to make examples. But that doesn't happen.

No, this is not a quirk of psychology, this is not a coping mechanism. This is a conscious choice by your leaders to build exactly this world. This is the world they are voting for. A boot, kicking a disabled woman's amputated leg, forever.

Police aren't that philosophical about it. They divide the world into "us" and "them" like the rest of us (crudely, inaccurately, unfairly), and trip on the high-powered tools they have to attack "them".

Police abuse plenty of people even without "drugs" in the picture.

Bug guns are fun toys.

And they do this when the "them" is an unarmed 8 year old child. http://motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/kentucky-school-cop-...

That's psychology for you though, it doesn't require you to get philosophical about it. It's just fundamentally how your brain works.

They look like a bunch of kids pretending to play Call of Duty in real life. Wearing masks, guns drawn, breaking doors, and all of it is not even necessary. They could have sent one detective to go talk to them.

Sending a detective doesn't get a bunch of guys overtime pay.

I'm pretty sure the strategy hasn't changed. The change is that a broader segment of the public is now aware of it due to the new widespread technology to record and distribute video. It's similar to black American's experiences of policing, which has always been that way but now people who never would have seen it are (more) aware of it.

It's combination of genuine ignorance, willful ignorance (serving one's political agenda), and subconscious suppression of truth (cognitive dissonance, serving one's preferred ideas about who the good guys and bad guys are).

Video is helping with the first, but as can be seen by many people's reactions to all this stuff, doesn't work as well as it should for the latter two.

They do it because the paramilitary force strategy is fun for them and they get away with it under the guise that they are in huge levels of danger. When the danger level really does ramp up you end up with a stand off where none of them would dare kick down a door for a raid.

The problem is that the second the word "drugs" are mentioned the police think they are dealing with a colombian/mexican lord or drug Scarface by default. The "war" moniker needs to be dropped asap

That's an easy one, and you don't even need to be a cop to understand the answer: It's way more exciting and fun to kick in doors and rush inside a building with guns drawn.

They do it because they can. However, if you start killing cockroaches with sledgehammers, you are likely to leave some dents in the floor (i.e. collateral damage).