A friend of mine explained his viewpoint as... Sure, there's only a few bad apples doing horrible things. But then there's a LOT of cops, and their union, that help/stand up for those bad apples. If you're not taking a bribe, but you are actively looking away when your partner is; you're the bad guy. There's the well known blue wall of silence, and everyone that makes up that wall is part of the problem.

Precisely.

Defenders of police misconduct tend to cite the "it's just a few bad apples" line without noting the full adage is "a few bad apples spoils the barrel".

Call me when the Fraternal Order of Police stops defending bad cops that were found guilty in a court of law, declaiming the “injustice“ that took place.

These guys are supposed to uphold the law, instead they prop up murderers and accuse the justice department of railroading “innocent” cops. See “Police union blasts ‘sham trial and shameful’ Van Dyke guilty verdict” [0]

0: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/10/5/18460941/police-union...

Why are you certain of this? I do not think Police deserve the benefit of the doubt at this point.

I don't know how many cops are there in the US but thinking most of them are psychopaths is absurd.

Nobody thinks that to my knowledge, or at least thats not the general opinion about cops.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, some jobs can’t have bad apples. No one would accept it if the Delta CEO said “most of our pilots are good people, some just like to fly into mountains every now and then.”

I'm not so sure: I think there's a cultural problem with American policing. I get the sense that US police expect immediate compliance with their Any failure to comply is met with escalation of force rather than with reason. This is the "Ask, Tell, Make" philosophy of policing.

Contrast this with the principles of policing by consent [0] that define the ideals (though not necessarily the reality) of policing in the UK and many other countries.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

You obviously don't live in america then. Police are heavily trained to DE-escalate the situation. I know, I'm a person of color and the few times I've had to deal with the police, they were polite, courteous and professional.

The thing is is survivorship bias often shows in the media. most police encounters are not reported in the media because it's common and everyday. But the very few that turn into a big production get reported because it gets ratings. So through survivorship bias, confirmation bias, and availability bias, the problem seems bigger than it actually is.

Are you a “person of color” or are you Black? How tall and big are you? I’m Black and 5 foot 5. No one sees me as a threat. My step son is s big guy who immediately is seen as threat until he starts talking - he’s lived in the burbs all of his life.

Ok, some are great, but when you see that the ‘bad guys’ in the police face no consequences for their actions, the police force looses respect in the eyes of the public. And that’s a normal reaction. But they can earn it back, though it seems, through their training and instructions, they quite often prefer intimidation over respect.

But you're going to hear a lot about "a few bad apples spoil the barrel" as if it's okay to talk about people like disposable fruit. Think for a moment, would those people be okay with letting the police use that reasoning?