Just like all developers are 'evil hackers'.

If people realistically want the situation to get better, they need to embrace the 'good' police officers, rather than automatically ostracizing all police officers equally. Many still really do want to improve their communities.

There's always been a strong connection between punk subculture and anarchist thinking (which is specifically opposed to this type of "legitimate violence"), so its actually a somewhat reasonable thing to bring up.

Yes. That's what law enforcement is by definition. Non compliance results in (eventual) violence, regardless of the severity of the crime.

P.S. Nice edit. Both "hacker" and "cop" carry some negative connotations without the qualifying "evil" in front of it.

So what you're basically saying is the price for having any policing is that we have to accept a morally and legally corrupt police force.

There is something funny about that phrase though... it is not complete. The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel". This is to say that if you do not take an aggressive stance towards weeding out all of the bad apples, the rot will spread like an infection (rotting apples will release ethylene gas which acts as a ripening agent, accelerating the rot of nearby apples) and corrupt all of the apples.

So if we trust our apples:cops metaphor then what we are really saying is that if we overlook the a few bad cops for any significant amount of time, before we know it, all cops will be bad. Obviously crooked cops don't release ethylene gas in significant quantities... instead the Blue Wall is the most commonly cited mechanism of transmission.

I like this idiom.

For anyone else who might not have heard of it (by name).

They don't even have to actually spoil the barrel. Since dramatic events stand out in the human mind, it's possible for a few bad actors to completely change people's perception of groups or their place in society.

This is part of the reason why it's so hard for privileged groups to understand how minorities see things and vice-versa. What's a dramatic, salient event for one group is not so much for the other.

Gordon: There's nothing wise in what you do, Flass.

Flass: Well, Jimbo, you don't take the taste... makes us guys nervous.

Gordon: I'm no rat! In a town this bent, who's there to rat to anyway?

That's the very definition of law enforcement.

>Just like all developers are 'evil hackers'.

No, because that's not the very definition of developer.

A cop is an agent of the state that (and is) ordered to arrest, take down, put in jail, etc people and is authorized to use force for that -- including his gun.

Yes.

Personally, I agree with Bastiat that the State should be more more than the collective extension to our own individual, inate right to self-defense, so any violence which goes beyond that, I consider improper.

But I've said too much already, HN really isn't the best place for these discussions...

But taking a negative attitude so general as "all police officers are agents of state violence" has no positive outcome. You just decided every interaction you have with cops will turn out bad (or violent), so of course you're going to have issues! The rest of us try to treat each other fairly and as a result 99% of the time don't have problems with cops (unless we're breaking the law, wherein naturally problems do arise).

Also, your job isn't the only thing that may make one have personal problems with someone else. I tend to get pissed off at immature anarchopunks who think the world revolves around them. I guess it kind of goes both ways.

But in keeping with "act pragmatically" officers can live in their "own pretend society or [...] can deal with the one [they're] actually in right now", which includes folks who don't particularly like them solely based on the authority they represent.

Hint: How would a sting or other undercover operation work? Do the police lie during interrogations?

Of course police can lie about being police officers. Another person kind-of answered already, but this apparently needs to be stated unambiguously: A police officer can lie to you about being a police officer and get away with it.