Obviously they aren't all going out and committing crime, but by not policing each other, they are colluding with those who do.
Police simply don't face the same consequences for violent crimes that ordinary citizens do, and that is because of the culture of policing that all police are to some degree responsible for.
When was the last time you heard the officers who are 'doing the best they can' calling for jailtime for fellow officers found to have abused their authority?
Depends on how you define crime? I see cops who park illegally, speed without turning on sirens, turn on sirens because they don't want to stand at the light, idle their cars for hours at a time, and make illegal right-on-red turns every single day. And guess what? They'll write you a ticket in a second if you did that.
And yes, the fact that they refuse to police each other, as you mention, is the primary cause of this. And of course, we can't police them. That would be a joke, right?
When police officers become more than citizens, when they become things like men in uniform, first responders, etc. then it becomes a problem. They are us. No better and no worse. Until we see them and treat them like us, these problems will just get worse.
"What is to be done" is a question facing all of us who see the growth of these unaccountable systems in an era of plenty and, lacking straightforward answers, it is a quite rhetorical one. Physically moving, generational change, violent revolution, economic collapse of the infected systems, nonviolent civil disobedience, eventual threshold of enough-being-enough, agorism, building new institutions to eventually usurp the broken, and the most important: ________________ (you fill in the blank). All of these things are less than half-answers, but only by letting the indictments and subsequent question stand can we ever hope to find some workable path forward.
Civil disobedience is as good as it gets at the moment, I'll do my bit and I take it lots of others do too. Disney, Sonny Bono and the rest of the good old boys can go jump in a lake as far as I'm concerned.
But I make myself no illusions that there will be a time in our near future when we will abolish copyright because it's for the better. The numbers simply aren't there. It's also not the disaster that it is made out to be, there are far worse things happening than a lack of copyright reform.
Sure that doesn't mean that we should ignore it, and it definitely doesn't mean that Sweden should get a free pass for what they did here (those judges ought to be in the docket themselves for undeclared conflict of interests in the cases they presided over). But to pretend that this is what marks the end of our current civilization and is the pinnacle of corruption is a bit much don't you think?
We already had a peaceful revolution just a year ago: Occupy Wall Street. Did anything change? No, because the state can and will exert its violence against anyone trying to reform it.
Things need to get much worse for people to be willing to take on a violent revolution. I'm sure this will happen at some point, but then the best thing you can do is leaving the country. Most violent revolutions end in tyranny. Think of the Russian or Cuban revolutions. The US Revolution was a lucky exception.
Canadian anarchists are not the right group to jump-start a broadly carried demand for change.
The US revolution was more akin to a war for independence.
The French had a revolution, and it came off pretty good. Unless you were rich, of course.
That's the worst you can think of? Well, lucky you. Even so, a few bent cops don't mean all police officers are like that. Plenty of them are doing the best they can.
> So, what is to be done?
Well, now that you've laid it out this clear, the way forward is obvious: Revolution!!