Quote (bogie160 @ Jan 8 2021 10:37pm)
The authority figures are stuck at odds between lionizing the police and demonizing them. Police are human. There are many bad and some good, and corruption rife throughout all of it. Anyone who has spent time in a large organization can and should be able to speak to it.
What is hard for some to accept is that organizations filled with sometimes mediocre, corrupt men are necessary. We can't do without police any more than teachers, or doctors, or lawyers. Teachers are poorly trained, poorly educated, prejudicial twats, and yet they're absolutely essential in astoundingly large numbers.
The thing you're missing is that the corruption isn't a result of average people being average. It's purpose-built to serve the interests of the powerful.
Take Ferguson, where the police department was repurposed to be a revenue generator. They had a perverse incentive to pile on as many infractions as possible onto the poorer parts of the population so they could avoid having to raise taxes on the part of the population with money. This didn't happen by accident or because of corruption by the mediocre. It happened because powerful people took a neutral system and changed what degree those otherwise neutral rules were enforced.
Basically, the corruption of law enforcement is a feature, not a bug.