> Police officers aren't being judged or punished for the color of their skin, creed, religion, or sexuality but their choices.

No, many police officers are now being punished for being police officers.

You would just be doing your job properly - no racist actions anything unjust - and now these details leak out.

Yes there are police officers which are racist, I don't have data so I won't say few nor many, but there are. That doesn't justify this.

>No, many police officers are now being punished for being police officers.

That's a feature, not a bug; police officers are being punished because of the actions of police officers. Actions they choose to take responsibility for everyday they put on their uniform and step behind the blue line.

> being punished for being police officers.

Some of the logic is that bad police behavior is widespread enough that every "good" cop works closely enough with at least one "bad" cop, and yet via observation of outcomes, does not correct that bad cop's behavior (or doesn't correct it enough). They're thus complicit AKA bad cops themselves, and thus there are _no_ good police - everyone is sufficiently tainted.

The Godwin's Law version of this logic at work elsewhere is the German saying "if there’s a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis."

The folk wisdom encoding "a few bad apples spoil the bunch". Doesn't matter if they were good apples going in, they're all bad apples now: the bunch is spoiled.

(Not expressing an opinion on the correctness of this thinking, just explaining what I know of it)

Another way to look at this... not every natzi personally committed crimes. I would suspect that far less than 50% personally murdered anyone. But they were part of an organization that murdered millions, and did nothing to stop it. That makes them complicit.

There are 700000 cops in America. I can name maybe 200. I've personally worked with maybe 50. I investigated 1, and could find no evidence of crime, though he realistically was likely committing some.

Out of 700000 cops I guarantee some are the scum of the earth who should be locked away forever. I don't know where they are. I can't effect that

It's like getting mad at the manager or an applebee's in Chicago because the waiter spit in your food at an olive garden in Seattle.

What was your process for investigation? Given that process, what crimes, if any, would you have found in the cases of, say, George Floyd or Breona Taylor?

When a teacher is shown to be abusing minors, other teachers and the union doesn't drop everything to defend them, prevent investigation, and lobby for them to get a teaching job a few districts over.

A police officer can arrest you for something they think is illegal but isn't. In the US, they don't need a functioning knowledge of the law to cruise the streets armed to the teeth. They appear to be able to harass, attack, and even kill people in broad daylight without a judge and jury present let alone face punishment for it.

So yeah, the police as a whole are being punished. We can break that down to a push during the war on drugs to lock out public services like mental health care or support for vulnerable youths and families in favor of increased police budgets and using officers as a catch all. We can examine how an all or nothing union may have corrupt incentives for defending members. We can reject the whole 'Blue Line' thought process and recognize that police are still citizens (though even off duty they may get a pass) and not isolated from the rest of us (though they may attend training that explicitly state otherwise).

Police still see a hugely higher rate of domestic violence yet continue to defend their own. Police appear to be working with extremist groups (white supremacists, not the nonexistent national entity of Antifa). Police in the Us have been infiltrated by white supremacists to the point that often the FBI refuses to work with local police.

As a white guy, police have always been mostly fair to or avoided interacting with me. I've seen the opposite for friends and others in my city. Some cops are assholes. If other cops defend the assholes, they are too. It doesn't matter how important their job is to society as that is even less of an excuse for defending problems.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/03/how-the-suprem...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology

https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/cop-who-threatened-kill-... (I think this should be a much higher charge but he's police so what are you going to do?)

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/george-floyd-protests-po...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...

https://torres.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/torres-...

I don't think this logic is beneficial for humanity. If you take the worst parts of any organization or group and generalize it across the entire group, you end up with stereotypes, bias, and discrimination...the very things that led us down this path in the first place. There are better ways to approach this.

When the group in question does everything in its power to resist change and prevent charges and repercussions for the issue officers, it may be broken.

An issue teacher is jailed and ostracized by the entire industry. Why not for cops?

> There are better ways to approach this.

What do you see as some better ways?

Root Cause Analysis, and comparisons. There was a thread a few weeks ago about how the military doesn't have culture of the "blue-wall" but rather actively roots out bad-actors. The thesis was that this was due to to trust in the institution itself and that this was a relative difference to police in a variety of structural ways. Looking at police departments and cultures in other countries is also instructive, but we need to get the reason's why.

What if there was personal address doxxing of all software engineers claiming we're creepy hackers? Would such be justified because a number of us have had some small degree of indirect or direct contribution toward mass privacy violations?

What percent of software engineers have to be creepy hackers for the rest of us to be complicit in their actions? 50%? 75%? 10%?

If x% of software engineers are child porn peddlers, are the rest complicit because they can't stop them from storing it, sharing it, selling it, etc?

FTFY:

> If x% of software engineering work is making child porn websites

The issue prompting ACAB (as I understand it) isn't so much "how many cops are bigots" (personal racism) as "how much of the work cops do is racist" (structural & systemic racism).

There's still a degree that as part of a social group with someone, I'm complicit in who they are a person - the German "ten people and a nazi" saying.