The police are very powerful voices in local governments. They have too much power. I consider the number of police officers to be inversely proportional to how civilized a place is.

On a police-per-capita basis, that would make US East Coast urban areas substantially less civilized than either Middle America or the West Coast.

https://www.governing.com/archive/police-officers-per-capita...

Trust me, a lot of them are not really that good of people. They’re often more broken and problematic than your random person. Substance abuse is very common and acting outside the law is also extremely common. I’ve seen many LEO’s beat their wives and drive drunk while having to go out and work on the same calls. Always a bit awkward when they have to respond to a call for one of their own - I should know, I was there.

As far as I can tell - most aren’t really that upstanding of citizens and the standards are pretty lax for what gets in. Some are genuinely nice and good people but I don’t see them last for very long because they move onto better things.

Unfortunately I still have experiences which prove to me that some police have nothing better to do than annoy otherwise law abiding people. It's like any group of people, there are good cops and there are bad cops.