@MrGeezer said:
@GazaAli said:
Police officers are not supposed to trust people lol. The police corps is founded by the state to protect civilians from criminal activities perpetrated by society's degenerates and maintain public order. Policemen's frequent encounters with that sort of people is no excuse to police brutality and ill-advised use of power. If a policeman is going to respond to the inherent perils of the job by becoming trigger-happy and "preemptive" then he shouldn't have become a policeman to begin with. He ought to look for a safer and more timid profession.
While that may be the case, police officers are human beings and fear gets people to do stupid things. That's not a defense of their misconduct, that's just stating that there WILL be more misconduct once you increase the level of fear. The bottom line is that a lot of people really do believe that it's cops vs everyone else. And that's a recipe for death and tragedy because it will result in people on both sides fucking up. Once non-cops believe that all cops are out to get them, once there's the believe that all cops are evil oppressors, then shit like this is gonna happen. And once cops believe that the rest of the world is out to get them, you're gonna have more police misconduct. Both sides are helping to reinforce the other side's narrative, thereby creating a shitty situation that just feeds on itself and keeps growing stronger. And that's bad for EVERYONE, be they police officers or not.
Again, that's not a defense of ANYONE'S actions. That's just a recognition of how people act.
Well yea policemen are people too so it is expected that they will **** up, albeit occasionally if a police force is any good at what its delegated to do. And when they do **** up they ought to be held accountable just like everybody else of any profession is held accountable to damage of any kind caused by them rather than being protected at all cost.
The issue is too convoluted to be accounted for thus simplistically I concede. The nature of the profession of a policeman is inherently hazardous and life-threatening; after all, he's dealing with society's garbage on daily basis. However, a preemptive mentality is not a valid tactic to deal with that. The domain of the policeman profession is also subject to great abuses of authority and downright corruption and criminal activities even. The American society seems to be highly violent with violent crime rates of an alarming nature for a decent society at least. So policemen there operate in volatile and dodgy environments.
In my very humble opinion, the root of all of this tension between the police force and civilians in the U.S boils down to high crime rates and easy access to firearms. Tackle these two issues seriously and decisively and the police force will have little pretext for excessive use of force and will be compelled to behave itself and hold its members accountable whether they like it or not. What I'm trying to say is that regardless of the actual pretext for police misconduct, be it police officers' genuine fear for their lives or morbid sadism and corruption, the police force will behave properly towards the civilian population either because of a sense of trust and security, of being in control of the crime scene in general, or out of fear of legal prosecution and accountability that wouldn't have a problem establishing culpability under conditions of limited firearms access and curtailed crime rates.
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