the number of stories that I read per day about bad police officers is insane.
there are too many people in law enforcement positions because they want authority and power over others.
lately I find myself believing that anyone who desires to be in law enforcement should be forbidden from ever having authority over anyone, in any form.
Do you ever read stories about good police officers? Are such stories so scandalous they can sell advertising space en masse?
I think that your wording implies an accidental oversight.
I could do 10 nice things a day for you all week long, but if on Saturday I rape your whole family you're not going be happy with me. This isn't about "keeping score" it's about making sure that things that should never happen don't and that when things do go wrong people are held accountable for those actions and steps are taken to prevent it from happening again. Cops don't get to save up enough "nice points" that they still get our support after they murder someone and get away with it again, and again, and again.
Once the problems that allow abuses by police to persist are addressed trust between the police and the people they've been abusing will improve, but until then, the "good cops" sitting in a barrel full of rotten apples will just have be patient with us.
Practically no other profession gets such exceedingly positive and prolific press for doing the most charitable version of their job description. You never see stories like “trash collector relieves neighborhood of unwanted refuse without crushing anyone in the compactor”, even though their job is more dangerous and much less controversially beneficial to society.
The reason there’s even an appetite for “stories about good police officers” is specifically as a counterpoint to the continuous story of cops behaving badly, either by their direct action or pointed inaction, or by their collective activity to protect other cops from scrutiny when they directly do harm.
If cops want a better rep, they could be more deserving by not doing bad things and protecting other cops who do the same. If they don’t want to do that professionally (understandably! actually good cops are afraid of retaliation, or become afraid when they exercise their principles and find out what the consequences entail), they are always welcome to leave the profession.
Admittedly there should be a better support system for cops who want to change careers for these reasons. But there isn’t a lot of demand for that so
We can both have a perception bias AND have the system be corrupt. I'm pretty confident that this is the situation we're on. If you want to get nuanced, let's. But comments like these are swinging too far in the opposite direction, hand waving away objectively terrible things. If it is bad, it is bad. Doesn't matter if 1% of officers or 100%, the incidents are still bad and should be dealt with accordingly.