Who is Leo? You capitalized it like you intended the abbreviation of "Law Enforcement Officers", but there are none of those here. Just a gang of lawless thugs in costumes.

I mean, for all the attempts to mock them, they are law enforcement officers. They do have legal rights of ones, they do have power and they have different set of laws that applies to them. They are not in costumes, those are really uniforms and they are really real cops.

It just so happens that real cops are real people. And real people don't create pristine pure organizations straight from Hollywood movie. So what happens when the organization gets too much benefit of doubt and too little accountability is descent toward abusing power more and more.

It's not mocking, but rather pointing out that they're doing the exact opposite of what they claim authority for, and are thereby false. We have to stop contributing to this idea that these crimes are some exceptional behavior apart from their norm - they've chosen the Punisher as their symbol because violating the law is the straightforward way to obtain what they perceive as justice.

Only the ones who speak up against (or ideally arrest) their corrupt coworkers deserve to be called Law Enforcement Officers. If the rest stopped existing, law and order would actually increase.

I think that such comments do opposite. Because of this implication:

> Only the ones who speak up against (or ideally arrest) their corrupt coworkers deserve to be called Law Enforcement Officers. If the rest stopped existing, law and order would actually increase.

This sort of thinking is what prevents real steps to stop abuse of power. Because it assumes these are individual issues, that those doing something bad are different and apart from the rest. That if we removed bad apples, all would be good.

In fact all are law enforcement, including bad ones. Being named law enforcement is not badge of honor that makes you better person then everybody else. It does not make you less prone to abuse power, to act on peer pressure or to act on irrational fear. As long as people assume that law enforcement is or should be composed of better people, they wont be able to implement proper limits on their power nor proper checks on what they do.

I see where you're coming from, but what are you thinking could be "proper limits on their power" ? The original cases of murdering cops could be solved by prosecuting the specific murderers and the system would likely hold, and I agree we need that kind of accountability nation wide.

But this mass action is different. Here, they are acting together to defy a court order as well as the Constitution. Even the mayor is powerlessly criticizing them with "gassing is not a human way of policing". The entire organization is in open rebellion against our civil society. At this point, it seems the only things that could contain these lawless thugs are actual "law enforcement", the national guard, a citizen militia, or maybe cutting their funding.

And one of the necessary steps to doing any of those is to delegitimize this group of goons. They're no longer called "law enforcement", because they've chosen to not respect the law. They're wearing those uniforms to fuel their own ego, not because they're granted any authority by our society - their abuse should bother all legitimate law enforcement. And they need to be treated like any other lawless paramilitary force.