I'm not even American, I'm German. Our police are better than in the US, but still nowhere near the quality one generally observes in your police officers. IIRC, you Brits run a completely different, community-based approach, in contrast to almost anywhere else. And unlike even us Germans, there are barely any guns, which is a serious game-changer in how cops can interact with citizens safely.

> The British police (apart from the metropolitan police) are just fine thank you very much.

They are really not. The whole thing is dubious and the several recents scandals in local police forces show it (the latest example being the chief constable of the Devon and Cornwall police being suspended for misconduct a couple of days ago).

I do agree that it is still way better than in the US, in that you don’t expect to be killed just or having interacted with a cop and they are not vengeful thugs.

There is always room for improvement, but there is a generally good culture and processes with no obvious low hanging fruit for improvement.

> The British police (apart from the metropolitan police) are just fine thank you very much.

That the phrase "All Cops Are Bastards" originated in England suggests otherwise.

The British police don't do anything.

They arrest people for offensive Facebook and Twitter posts.

police behave essentially the same problematic way in france, germany and a lot more countries

English police are very much not fine.

Maybe you’re thinking of the fine upstanding members of the Greater Manchester Police who destroyed evidence and did not turn over evidence to the prosecution (to provide to the defence) which have cost Andrew Malkinson 17 years of his life: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/26/appeal-court...

Or are you perhaps thinking of the upstanding members of the South Yorkshire Police involved in the disastrous crowd control and subsequent cover up of said incompetence around the Hillsborough incident?

It seems unlikely that Northern Ireland’s police services are fine, either, given that sectarian violence and military involvement rampant in the Troubles (caused mostly by hard-liners and reciprocal incidents, and the Iron Lady’s stance helped everything as much as anything she ever did, which is to say not at all), but that may have changed since the Good Friday Accords took effect. It may also not have changed, given that sectarianism is still fairly rampant and the DUP are acting like spoiled children.

Maybe the Welsh and Scottish police are fine, but I am sure that a few minutes of searching could find examples of institutional issues for both of them.

What do you think listing exceptions proves?

When someone says X has Y property they don't normally mean it has Y property by definition or law of physics, they mean that almost all instances of X have Y property, to the point that you can effectively treat Xs as all being Ys and you're unlikely to run in to something in your life that contradicts this.

It's like saying "trans peoples aren't mass murderers". Yes, there may be an exception, but for pretty much all practical purposes it's true.

I think you misunderstand the exceptions that I listed. These are not examples of "bad officers", but entirely bad departments. Your original claim was that British police (excepting the Met) are 'just fine'.

They’re not, and pretending that they are is disingenuous. Compared to American police services, they may seem fine. And the nominal theory of policing in Britain (Peelian principles) is more sound than the theory of policing in America…but that does not mean that police forces in the UK are free from power-trippers, abusers, and even systemic bias against whole classes of UK citizens and residents.

Thats not an entirely bad department, that's a number of police officers in a department at a particular time who fucked up in a particular way. And honestly, "fucks up crowd control and covers it up" is, as far as examples of bad behavior, unimpressive.

UK police also tend to improve and institutionally learn over time as we get inquests and some of the recommendations get implemented.

If an attempt at a counterexample has to go back 18 years then for all practical purposes we can round that to fine.