My freshman year roommate at university (who was a random assignment) ended up dropping out of his science major our first year and decided he wanted to pursue being a cop. When I asked him why he said "I just want to be able to fuck with people", sort of jokingly, but also you could tell he meant it.

He was a nice guy if he knew you, but he was also brash and arrogant. If you put someone like that in an environment with other people that are also there for the power trips, these sorts of situations are the outcome you get.

>He was a nice guy if he knew you, but he was also brash and arrogant.

This is how most humans are. My tribe:friends, Everybody else: enemies, let kill them.

It's Jekyll/Hyde.

Luckily, not in my case. Most people I meet are more friendly than even neutral.

But, that's probably true in mid eastern and western countries.

>Most people I meet are more friendly than even neutral.

It's generally true when there is no competition or pressure of some sort, when there is competition it's start to bring out the latent evil in most people. That is how authoritarian groups evolve.

Some, agreed. All? How are you quantifying that; feelings and anecdotes from your own experience or some hard data?

I can see both sides. Anyone with a basic understanding of History should know that police abuses of power are nothing new. Bad cops have always existed and are well documented. Just think of some cops beating up hippies and beats in the proposed golden age of neighborhood policing.

On the flip side, there's been a definite trend in the militarization of the police forces and other public facing groups. The first big wave of this I personally saw came from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans joining the public service. Is not unreasonable to think that individuals with a background occupying a country with a hostile population transferred norms from that into their new job.

I literally said "most". Where did you see "all"?

If you’re a “good cop” on a force with a single “bad cop” and do nothing about it, in this day and age, you are also a bad cop.

telling that no one has dropped any hard data in rebuttal to show that "most" officers are losers lusting after power.

I love the idea that things were different once...

They are different even today in first world countries. Where I live, becoming a police officer is a three year education (equivalent to a bachelor's degree) and it's not easy to get accepted to the programme. Training on what the law actually says, de-escalation, handling mentally ill people etc. is an important part of this.

As a consequence, most cops are good human beings who care about their community.

This is also my personal experience, including a good friend of mine who opted for policing for these reasons after completing a degree in philosophy. He has been a beloved small town cop for many years.

Being a cop in the US has become vastly less dangerous which changed the dynamics around who becomes cops.

This would suggest that trend is reversing: https://nleomf.org/memorial/facts-figures/officer-fatality-d...

This website breaks down by cause and almost all of the difference is explicitly covid. https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2021

Covid is the #1 cause of death three years running.

Only if you ignore the size of the US police force, and more recently COVID. By far the #1 risk is the amount of driving police do, but policing in the US is nowhere close to as dangerous as being a truck driver.

We're they? Perhaps if you are white. Cops used to just harass minorities. Now they have decided that all non police must be punished and made to understand their place. Not saying it was better when they just harassed minorities, saying cops have always been power mad narcissists. Now they just have armored cars and better weapons

I believe he is being sarcastic.

If the cops wanted to protect their communities, they would have spent 15 minutes keeping an eye on the kids, see they're buying donuts, and go about their day.

Instead they made their community less safe by creating even more doubt and distrust in police, in their community, and psychologically injuring the parents and children.

This mentality is dangerous and only drives the thing you are getting at.

I'm no fan of cops but I blame the system as much or more. Police are designed to arrest evict and cite, and little more. Make the rewards revolve around protection rather than punishment and the people currently police would go back to a more suiting pursuit for their personality which is likely violent crime.

The cops are the system. The people deciding in the moment what to do are cops, the people deciding who is going to be in those positions are cops, the people deciding the consequences for the decisions are cops, the people investigating abuses are cops. The people in oversight positions for the entire process are cops. The civilian government might be able to dismiss the top ranking leadership, the DA's office can choose to prosecute especially egregious behavior, but they have very little if any direct influence on the incentive structures for rank and file cops. Institutions like police unions typically have more control of the civilian government than the civilian government has on the police. This is a system that the cops both individually and collectively choose to participate in, and those who would seek to see it changed from the inside are forced out. Of course you can't place the blame on any one individual, and probably every person involved would like to see some change or another, but there is no shadowy cabal who designed the police to be what they are, they have done it themselves.