Police in the small US college town I live in is pretty much part of the community. I personally know many of the officers - and they are fine people. Even so, they are still a target for antifa agit-prop tactics. The playbook is always the same, catch the one cop that said or did, or appeared to say or do, the wrong thing, once, and you can tarnish the entire department, the entire profession, forever. And it works. Somehow we lost all perspective and have come to expect that our officers, whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature, will always display the same perfect virtues we carefully signal everyday on Facebook.
You are presenting people exposed while doing wrong as victims of the citizens risking their safety to expose them.
If the police have an image problem then perhaps they need to promote a culture of restraint, civility, and justice by enforcing the law against their own at all times not just when the criminals behavior makes it onto television and sparks riots that threatens to burn down the nation.
> Somehow we lost all perspective and have come to expect that our officers, whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature, will always display the same perfect virtues we carefully signal everyday on Facebook.
We can work on the them becoming paragons of virtue after they stop executing citizens in the street, attacking people peacefully protesting, planting drugs on people, and raping them.
After we get we stop raping, framing, and murdering people yes I do in fact expect those charged with serving law and order to deal with bad people without themselves becoming bad people. People in most of the developed world seem to be managing this so I don't agree that it is an impossible dream.
Many people expressed and believed that automotive fatalities were just an inevitable consequence of the the mode of transport while others insisted on pushing for systematic reforms that drastically reduced fatalities.
Its a very large country. Bad stuff happens every day. For any group of people you can support any narrative by cherry picking the right events. Using that technique, you could "prove" anything you wish about any group and then proceed to demonize that group. This isn't to say we could not do better, we always can, and criminals should go to jail whether they happen to be police or not. But the idea that America is some sort brutal police state where the cops specifically hunt black people for being black I find absurd.
> whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature
Police officers in the US face 12.9 fatalities per 100,000 workers. In comparison, construction workers see 14.3, agricultural workers see 17.7, farmers and ranchers around 24 and truck drivers 26.9.
As for the rest of your argument, if the 'fine' police officers don't do anything to stand up to the bad police officers or adhere to the blue wall of silence: Then they are not fine people.
Also, the average homicide of working age males (87% of police are male) is about 10 per 100,000. This is slightly higher than the rate for police (about 8-9 per 100,000). The remaining 4.9 per 100k police fatalities are mostly car accidents, which is also pretty small considering how many miles they drive every day).
I can understand how it might feel scary, though. Just because they don't have much worse outcomes than the average American of their demographic doesn't mean that they don't have more terrifying experiences than average. That's not an excuse, though. Abusive parents are often reacting to past trauma that was inflicted on them, but we still shouldn't allow them to abuse their children. Protecting the public in a constitutional way needs to be the top priority. Officer safety and wellbeing come close behind, but they should still always be in second place.
Its not about the mortality rate, its about the psychological toll which is unparalleled: cops commit suicide at higher rates than any other profession. On a daily basis they deal directly with more violence and horror then most of us are ever likely to encounter over a lifetime. They do this for low pay, on behalf of people they do not know, in a society that increasingly despises them. Most of them are fine people indeed and no one is arguing that the ones who are not should be protected.
The actual accountability and check on power+conduct is important for any group of people. Exposing cops who did something wrong, even if they are fine people to their friends is important.
>Somehow we lost all perspective and have come to expect that our officers, whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature, will always display the same perfect virtues we carefully signal everyday on Facebook
I don't know about you but I don't have to "carefully" display not killing people who are on the ground unarmed. You're depicting people with 6 months of training as if they were in a fucking warzone every day.
