(Raymond Chandler, 1943)

By the time he retired, he was broken by the things he'd seen and dealt with that nobody should ever see or deal with. He got a nice pension, but he earned it.

He once commented that ever since he helped investigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587, the smell of jet fuel has made him sick.

Once there was an offhand comment about Soylent Green, and he said, "I've seen the stuff." It was in a bottle that the murderer kept in his fridge. If the police hadn't thought to do a DNA test on the liquid, they wouldn't have realized what it was.

Every Spring NYC has "floaters". These are people who died and were thrown into the river. Often with weights attached. As the water warms slightly, the body starts decomposing and eventually bloat from the gas makes it buoyant so it comes to the surface.

He once commented, "I don't think that there is a way that one human can kill another that I haven't seen." He then began giving a long list.

Good enough?

That's a bit harsh. Standards (and holding to them) varies considerably by jurisdiction (and sometimes by precinct).

And before anyone accuses me of making a "Not All Police" argument or anything similar, I'll point out that, generally speaking, poor enforcement of such standards (and harsher responses by officers) seem to be associated with communities that are poorer or have more minorities.

There are also issues with 'problem officers' getting shuffled off to departments in other cities or states without adequate record keeping or sufficient scrutiny, which can result in them tending to collect or concentrate in certain places (and predictably, that makes it more likely that such officers will have like-minded colleagues that are willing to cover for them).

This is definitely a "wicked problem".

A common misunderstanding. The police in the USA are regarded as above the law; rules don't apply to them.

You'll never find a prosecutor willing to address criminal behavior like this by police.

If you want to fix this, do a five whys on that, not some idiot cop waving his gun around at children.

News at 11.

This cop almost certainly was in fact willing to destroy whatever he pointed his gun at and whatever might be behind it, because that's how he was trained.

Second, we won't fire the cops who don't follow basic gun safety - we will at most fire the ones who get caught on video as part of a story of national importance. This cop isn't the one bad-trigger-discipline cop in that department, let alone the country. Fire him without figuring out how to systemically fire them all, and cops will dismiss it as politically-motivated persecution, have some protests about #BackTheBlue or maybe even a work stoppage, and then go back to business as usual, with the same trigger discipline.

And the fired cop will get a job in another department.

I agree you can have both. I just think you can't have one without the other.

(Not disagreeing with your overall point, just saying that it would be (IMO) laughable for a cop to try to make those arguments, even considering their training.)