I can't claim to be more than an almost decent person myself. If you require the police to be angels, well, those are in short supply down here...

Note well: I am not saying that we should lower the standard of behavior that we expect police to abide by. I am merely saying that, in the real world, almost decent is probably the best we can actually find.

Yet in the UK unarmed officers will happily trap a man with a knife behind a shopping cart until he gets tired.

In the US people get shot for carrying a tiny razor blade...

You can train people to deescalate rather than shooting; to use minimal force; to remain calm while exercising force; to ask someone if they doing fine, while forcefully holding them to the ground. Or calmly explain to a hysterical individual being held down that things are going to be okay.

It takes training though.

It doesn't require an angel to turn in a coworker who executes a black man in cold blood.

Or they don't know. I had a coworker who was recently arrested for child porn. Despite knowing and working with him for years there was no indication that he wasn't "squeaky clean".

But we're talking about incidents that are public. When Eric Garner was choked to death by police, I don't recall hearing a lot of cops call for those detectives to be fired. Hell, when the Mayor of NYC said something about it, at the next event, cops turned their backs on him.

These are not "decent people".

> Hell, when the Mayor of NYC said something about it, at the next event, cops turned their backs on him.

> These are not "decent people".

I really don't think it's that clear cut. The cops who turned their backs aren't all, necessarily, bad people. The insularity of police culture generates significant peer pressure for cops to cover each other's backs and to protect their mutual perceived safety and self interest.

They respond to perceived attacks on interests in a similar way to what many subcultures do when they feel their interests are being encroached upon; they protest and grow more insular in solidarity.

This tends to lead to a bubble and allows otherwise decent people to, inadvertently or otherwise, overlook the shortcomings of "a few bad apples", in the interest of protecting people who they think have their best interests at heart.

I'm not saying this is good, it's just important to remember that cops are humans and behave like humans. Training is supposed to reduce the incidence of human misbehavior but I think that even just the fact that police wear uniforms tends to make them take the side of the "team" that they're representing.

An enormous amount of evil that has occurred in this world has involved peer pressure. And all evil has extenuating circumstances. I understand that to prevent evil we should understand the reasoning behind why people do bad things. But this doesn't make the people or acts less evil.

Peer pressure or not, protesting accountability for your group after a member committed manslaughter is a bad act.

>Peer pressure or not, protesting accountability for your group after a member committed manslaughter is a bad act.

I believe they were protesting the generalizations he insinuated about the entire police department. I found it distasteful, but the good cops had a reason to be pissed.

I don't know about everyone else, but until they start to step up and turn in the bad apples, I will personally continue to make generalizations. These people are police officers, it's their job to uphold the law.

Giving the benefit of the doubt, good cops could have turned in serious offenders, but we would never know about it because we only get our information from the news. I assume the PD would keep it internal.

Granted, that is an optimistic view.

I suppose it wasn't entirely clear as I didn't state it explicitly, but my point really was that a few bad apples spoils the bunch.

If you turn your back on a mayor asking for police accountability, and you side with those who wantonly murder innocent people, then you are a bad person. They are people, but they're also given quite a lot of power. I don't think it is a bad thing that they be held to a higher standard of accountability for it. That, and I also don't think that "don't take the side of those who murder innocent people" is a high standard.

> The insularity of police culture generates significant peer pressure for cops to cover each other's backs and to protect their mutual perceived safety and self interest.

If you are a cop and succumb to peer pressure to protect bad cops from the consequences of their actions, then I submit that you are also a bad cop.

We must hold the police to a higher standard than "they're just human; they can't help behaving this way".

History is full of murderous monsters who were nothing but kind to their families and neighbors. I recognize that these cops are not mustache-twirling villains but humans subject to various emotional pressures, but if they're enabling and protecting murderers then they are not good cops.

You should sprinkle some more "I think" and "I believe" and "I'm under the impression" when stating your opinions, because none of what you say is anything more than speculation and just-so stories.

When writing an opinion piece, at least in formal writing which has higher standards, writers are trained not to do that. At least in the writing classes I took ages ago.

Here's why:

https://preciseedit.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/in-my-opinion-i...

I agree, and of course there's an implied statement of opinion in screeds like GP's, but they set up such a tenuous chain of causality that I just couldn't help myself.

I don't know, if you ask me when in the field of public policy, this approach is a bad idea. When I encounter someone making proposals who is stating opinion as fact, I assume the person doesn't know the difference so I discount their opinion fairly strongly, because a lot if not most people in my experience genuinely don't know the difference.

Yes, journalism is a bit different, but typically opinion pieces either have OPINION written at the top of the article on the web, or appear in the opinion section of the paper. I generally stay away from opinion pieces because they deliberately try to convince me to a particular side of an argument, which usually excludes alternative information. I'd rather come up with my own conclusions.

I led the comment with "I really don't think it's that clear cut" - intending to indicate I was about to express an opinion.

I have a friend in the NYPD, who did not turn his back on the mayor in that incident.

This problem needs to be solved from the top down. Police need to be constantly reminded that their job is more than just being enforcers.

How wouldn't they know? They go 99% of the time in groups of 2 or more. (And part of the reason for this is precisely to avoid that 1 of them goes rogue when working alone).

Your co-worker didn't wank off to child porn at work with his workmates, I reckon. You cannot compare both situations.

People get arrested for CP all the time, even when they are completely innocent. Just being arrested doesn't mean anything. If they are sentenced, and serve time, that's something different.

You can get popped for CP just by downloading what you think isn't CP from a torrent client.

IMO you should only get arrested for CP if you are paying to access it, or producing it. As it is now, it's just a tool for the police to criminalize whoever they feel like.

>As it is now, it's just a tool for the police to criminalize whoever they feel like.

There is actually something to this. It's the latest moral justification for around-the-law searches. Last few decades it was drugs. Police can pretty much search anyone if they reasonably believe they have drugs. This can get stretched into anything, such has having a few hundred bucks in cash. This means police can stop and search just about any car.

Next it was terrorism, so police can warranty search anyone or anything at airports, bus stations, train terminals, border crossings, just about anything. These powers aren't limited to terrorist activities either, but terrorism was the justification.

Now, computers yield more information that vehicles, so police need a way to extend their powers to search anyone's computer. Enter child porn.

As a general rule, anytime the government prohibits or extends their power "for the children," it's a huge red flag. Child porn fits into this category. It's hard to object to expansion of power to battle this too. I mean think of the children (ignoring their dystopian future).

The difference here is that the bad cops are bat at being police. The criticism is not about something they do off the clock. Police should be able to ...police themselves.