> People like to complain about the "few bad apples" that make everyone look bad.
People who use this phrase to complain about poor treatment of police officers drive me nuts, because they're completely ignoring what it means. The saying is, "A few bad apples spoil the barrel". As in, if you don't immediately get rid of the bad apples, it causes the rest to rot. Which is exactly what has happened with most police departments.
This is exactly correct, and honestly it galls me every time I read it because it's like the entire society has somehow forgotten not only this saying in its entirety, but this very simple fact about apples. Do people not eat apples any more? Judging by how many big packs of them I see at Costco, or the huge piles of them at every other grocery store I've been to, I find it really hard to believe that much of the American population somehow doesn't know what happens when apples go bad in proximity to other apples, because they keep trotting out the phrase "a few bad apples" as if it's no big deal or something you just have to expect with any group of people.
>I find it really hard to believe that much of the American population somehow doesn't know what happens when apples go bad in proximity to other apples ...
It's because the grocery store removes the bad apples.
The grocery removes the old, unsold apples, which includes both bad apples and good apples.
They--or at least the grocery businesses around here--do not take proactive measures to remove bad fruit of any kind. That is why I frequently see mold on fruits that have been purchased earlier in the same day.
I have seen enough of this to know not only that one bad apple will [eventually] spoil the whole bag, but also that one bad orange will ruin its bag, and one bad strawberry will embadden all the strawberries touching it, but that melons, potatoes, and pomegranates are still mostly good after you remove and throw out all the moldy parts.
Cops are more like oranges than apples. They go bad a lot faster in the presence of corruption.
People already don't get it when you say "bad apple", so it couldn't hurt to throw the old metaphor down to the ground, handcuff it, and then beat on it for a little while afterward for "resisting".
They're probably working off of the 1970 Osmonds song, that completely flipped it: "One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch, dear."
You can't expect such a person to know anything about Bobby Peel's 9 Principles. [0] If anybody on this site knows a US cop that can name even a single one of them from memory, I would be very surprised, even though they form the ethical foundation for the entire profession of modern policing, along with some of Jeremy Bentham's work.
Peel organized the Metropolitan Police in 1829. Boston copied it in 1838. New York City followed suit in 1845, and Chicago in 1851. It spread fast to all northern cities (southern policing being largely based on the slave patrol instead). The "thin blue line" that seems to be endemic among professional cops in the US is a blatant violation of number 7, and severely undermines number 2.
That cultivation of an "us versus them" mentality, and the erosion of public trust and cooperation with the police, makes the force a decidedly non-modern police force--more like that military occupying force Peel wanted to avoid.
People who use this phrase to complain about poor treatment of police officers drive me nuts, because they're completely ignoring what it means. The saying is, "A few bad apples spoil the barrel". As in, if you don't immediately get rid of the bad apples, it causes the rest to rot. Which is exactly what has happened with most police departments.