What leads you to believe this at an empirical level, though? The inciting incident of course sadly shows yet another example of detestable police and policing, and the reaction shows additional instances of cruel and overly aggressive policing (arresting and assaulting peaceful protesters and reporters in some cases), but the reaction also shows instances of officers standing with the protesters and treating them appropriately.
I don't know how many law enforcement officers in the US are fundamentally moral or not. I really have no idea if this event makes me think there are more or less of them than I thought there were before, if looking at all LEOs in the country. How can you, I, or anyone know any of the true statistics?
Since we can't, I think the most important and most practical task is to try to improve and fix the system and the systemic issues as much as possible, and to try to decrease the odds that shitty cops will be hired or promoted and increase the odds that shitty cops will be quickly identified, removed, condemned by their former peers, and, if appropriate, prosecuted.
The huge number of officers that surrounded Derek Chauvin's house, for example.
https://nypost.com/2020/05/29/officers-protect-home-of-derek...
The video is actually just creepy. But that's empirical evidence that you can verify by observation of said video.
> How can you, I, or anyone know any of the true statistics?
We actually know that the US ranks as high as many 3rd world countries when looking at the murder of black people by police. Even the murder of white people is staggeringly high compared to other western countries. The statistics are there.
> Since we can't, the most important thing is to try to improve and fix the system and the systemic issues as much as possible, and to try to decrease the odds of hiring shitty cops and increase the odds that shitty cops will be quickly identified, removed, and, if appropriate, prosecuted.
I agree. That's actually what we all want. And that's not happening now.
Because the leadership at any level could not address this so we are obviously left to destructive behavior on all sides. But that conversation doesn’t attract eyeballs.
Honestly I'd rather be surprised if there is any street cop who do not show up.
Yes, this sort of thing is of course very troubling. But this isn't anything we don't already know: many cops will support each other almost no matter what. If you try to think from the perspective of being an officer in a police department for a moment, you can see how it becomes like any other sort of politics. America does something shitty; some other country criticizes it; lots of Americans rise to America's defense. Democrats/Republicans do something shitty; Democrats/Republicans come to the defense of their team.
People with strong group identities can be very biased and have trouble attributing bad intentions or actions to their side. Their judgment is completely clouded, and they often literally will not see or accept the same facts. (This is very evident in current politics.) Many of those cops may have genuinely and truly believed that Chauvin was not responsible for George Floyd's death, for example. (Rather than holding some malicious belief like "that black guy deserved to be killed by him".)
That doesn't defend their actions or their incorrect or shitty beliefs, but it shows how the police are probably just like a country or political party or whatever. Humans are often pretty useless when it comes to neutrally and impartially evaluating their own side/tribe. And if rumors of some police departments trying to filter out applicants who have too high of IQs are true... that would exacerbate that issue, probably. And there's probably an overrepresentation of tribalistic personality types, and people working together in risky situations often develop tighter bonds, etc.
Also, it's possible some of those cops did think Chauvin was in the wrong and deserves to be fired, convicted, and imprisoned, but were there just to prevent a mob from going to his house and killing him, and possibly were ordered to go there.
And in terms of empiricism: this is still anecdotes, not really data. Even if you assume every one of those cops is an irredeemable shitbag (which I think is highly possible; it's not really provable or disprovable, though), this is 20 - 50 cops or something. Even if for the sake of argument we say it's 100 cops in front of his house, that number is tiny compared to the number of all LEOs in the country. It doesn't necessarily give you an accurate assessment of the average police officer in every town in every state.
>We actually know that the US ranks as high as many 3rd world countries when looking at the murder of black people by police. Even the murder of white people is staggeringly high compared to other western countries. The statistics are there.
Yes, this is true. I utterly agree that the situation is completely fucked. It's just a matter of, I guess, how one should think about individual LEOs at the scale of the nation. I'm not saying this is true and have no idea if it's true or what the real numbers could be, but hypothetically if it were the case that most PDs had like 10% terrible cops and 90% good cops, it might be possible that that could be enough to cause these horrible national policing statistics. Or perhaps the same could be also true if there were some PDs with like 80% terrible cops but most PDs had under 10%, or something like that.
>I agree. That's actually what we all want. And that's not happening now.
Yes, for sure. I completely support the protests and protesters. I just think people shouldn't necessarily vilify an individual law enforcement officer without additional supporting evidence about that person, basically.
Then, after the cops who nearly killed the man got suspended, all 57 people on that particular team resigned "in disgust because of the treatment of two of their members, who were simply executing orders,"[2].
Since you want empirical results, that is 0 good cops out of the 57 people on the force. We can employ the rule of 3 to establish an upper bound good cop rate as 5.2% (95% CI).
This isn't to say that the cops are by nature bad. Rather, the institutions and norms that exist in many police departments ensure that nearly all cops become bad cops.
[0]: https://news.wbfo.org/post/graphic-video-two-buffalo-police-...
[1]: https://www.investigativepost.org/2020/06/05/police-unit-res...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(statistics)
I feel the response to this movement shows that there are fewer good cops that anyone would have expected. They protect their own at the cost of citizens they should be protecting. They lie. They cheat. They assault and murder without consequence.
> Even if there were 1,000 police brutality related deaths a year (there aren't), police would still be a huge net win for society, no? Am I missing something?
Yes. You're missing the fact that it doesn't have to be this way. That police don't have to work entirely without consequences. They don't have to militarized. This is not required for them to do their jobs. And it can be changed.