The issue isn't there are good or bad cops. In any large organization there will be "bad apples" (malicious actors), that just statistically will happen. What is very important is how misconduct is handled, and how these "bad apples" are handled.

Due to the legal concept of qualified immunity, it is very difficult to sue the police for civil or criminal liability. I understand the intent of qualified immunity. The idea is that a police officer did the best they could knowing what they know, and it is very easy to look at things after the fact (hindsight is 20/20), so it makes it easier for a police officer to do their job without constant worry of lawsuit. However, it has been abused to the point that it is next to impossible to sue for criminal/civil liability.

Additionally, there is wide conception that police do not police their own (look up "blue wall of silence"), and police unions are very strong, so it is extremely difficult for an outside organization to police them.

Case in point, it is argued that if it weren't for the cell phone video of George Floyd, the police officers would not have even been charged with misconduct and would still have their jobs, much less criminal charges.

If you have an organization that has a monopoly on violence and there is not a good way to keep that in check, THIS WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE PROBLEMS.

The question is not only about how "bad apples" are handled, but also what techniques are taught, what kind of leadership is given.

If you stick cops in heavily protected gear this gives them stronger feelings.

If you have a President (who isn't directly responsible for police) cheering to be "tough" ("Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over? Like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody — don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/07/28/t...) and then not have a leadership promoting other values you encourage to be like the "bad apple" not like the good apple.

If you then also often have cops alone on duty or with fixed partners, thus no rotation you have less internal checking.

If you are then also in a country where the police officers have to assume that the citizen they pulled over might be armed you certainly don't help them to relax.

The list goes on - true, most cops certainly want to be good, but there are systematic issues emporing the bad ones.

> The list goes on - true, most cops certainly want to be good, but there are systematic issues emporing the bad ones.

No, I would say that most cops will follow whatever the culture is in their organization. If the culture is rotten, then they do bad things.

Yes, the culture has an impact, but do people these days become cops to be on the "bad" side or for being the "good" cop? I hope it's still the later. But maybe I am wrong.

Important is: Culture and leadership matters. Whatever is encouraged by culture and leadership will flourish.

The other point that's often missed is the phrase last three words of the sentence "A few bad apples spoil the bunch."

Allowing the "bad apples" to remain in the "bunch" means that the entire "bunch" goes bad.

The analogy is accurate. There were a few bad officers. They were allowed to remain. Now there are now a majority of bad officers.

Without a speedy and public process to remove bad behavior, including disciplinary action, retraining, firing, and criminal charges (depending on the severity and number of offenses) the police have become corrupted from within. Until such processes are in place that corruption will never be removed.

I think you may have confused qualified immunity a bit. It has nothing to do with criminal proceedings and is only talking about civil penalties.

The reason it's such a big deal is that it can be very difficult to get prosecutors to charge a police officer that did something wrong, and then it can be difficult to get a conviction even if they are tried. In a civil trial you can win by a preponderance of the evidence. So if you go after a cop criminally, where you do a have a lot of evidence and fail, that's it, no further penalties, the cop walks. On the other hand, you probably don't want to loosen it too much or cops will be sued at every opportunity. I don't know what the right answer is, but it's not to make it nearly impossible to hold a cop civilly liable.

I mean, that's how they got OJ, he was found not guilty in the criminal trial, but was found guilty in the civil trial brought by Nicole Brown's family. So allowing cops to get avoid the civil courts is wrong.

A look into American popular culture is rather revealing in this aspect. Consider the currently running series "SWAT", which portrays the rise of a good-cop SWAT leader. That's the lead "good character" of the series, and he and his team are brutalizing suspects, some instances of which may actually be torture, commit various felonies on a "dime a dozen" basis, constantly abuse police powers, lie to superior officers, frequently recklessly endanger civilians and commit morally despicable acts like blatant entrapment and much more.

Those figures are the good cops in media. This is the popular media idea of "policing done right" in the US. While just one particular example, but if you look around in American media the "good cops" exhibit at least some of these aspects the grand majority of the time.

I remember SWAT from way back. I guess this is a reboot. Ugh.

The other show that comes to mind is "Cops" which seems to promote a deification of the police. That's guesswork because I don't have the stomach to watch it.

I remember watching Cops as documentation of police brutality before social media was rampant

The problem is a lack of accountability for the bad police.

If good police are standing by while the bad police are abusing their power, they aren’t really good police. If the bad police are walking away without repercussions or, in some cases, even retaining their taxpayer-paid pensions, we can’t trust the police force as a whole.

The job of police is to maintain order, not to protect their own.

You're absolutely right but I don't think holding someone's retirement account over their heads is a good move. Let them keep their pension for the number of years they actually did serve. Strip them of their right to serve sure, but don't go back in time and pull their paycheck.

I feel there needs to be some form of individual accountability. With a 99.87% acquittal rate, mostly due to dismissals, and an immunity from civil suits, it's currently impossible to actually punish any individual officer for wrongdoing. If they were opened up to individual civil liability, sure, we can let a jury decide how much damage they caused.

i am OK with them having the money they put in themselves prior to their abuse of power, as long as any litigation is settled from it first. However i don't think they should get a pension that includes any monies from other parties like taxes.

I would say most American citizens are fearful(or at least shy of) of the police, avoid interacting with them if possible and generally have a disdain for how they operate. Not to say they are not recognized as necessary, most just don't like their tactics and their "code" of protecting one another. Basically you never know if you are going to get a good cop or a bad one, so you just avoid them all. Likewise anyone supporting them is seem as possibly supporting their questionable use of force and other bad practices.

What the police are supposed to be is determined by local culture.

Here's a police recruitment ad from Georgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIgt8pmh7CU

Here's one from California: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk

(The original blog post that highlighted the difference between these is down, but here's an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20140209085808/http://www.theagi... . I pulled the youtube URLs because the archived page doesn't appear to work.)

I've seen videos of unjustified force by PDs in not just my hometown but my college town as well. Surely there are good police departments, but there are far too many police departments ending up in this GitHub repo that tracks police brutality https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality

Honest native answer: it depends on which side of the political spectrum you are on. Plenty of citizens are defending the police's actions, even their current actions during the protests, as completely justified. The POTUS doesn't make his fiery speeches in a vacuum; his base completely supports that attitude.

Edit amendment: Folks, OP wasn't asking whether or not the police actions were justified or not justified. He was asking about whether association with them would be interpreted as inherently "stinky" in the future. Whether good or bad, a prospective employer's feelings about a prospective employee's work history with US law enforcement is strongly coupled to their political views. That's true for military service, its true for ICE, and now its true for local police as well.

Most police forces and sheriff departments in the US are small and go years or decades between controversy.

I suspect any police force that is sufficiently large and has militarized and "riot" gear will tend to have similar problems. I'm sure that small town police departments have much more variation in their patterns of behavior.