This kind of stuff really makes me sick to my stomach.
I mean, I don't have anything against cops on principle or anything like that. My girlfriend's dad is a cop, and it's a hell of a difficult job, deserving good compensation, recognition, training, and whatever measures are possible to prevent the job from completely wearing down and desensitizing those in the position (I know that I'd want a shrink available if I had to babysit dead bodies sometimes).
However, in turn, they need to be held to some pretty high standards. Yet, stuff like this happens all the time:
- Some cops, particularly in small towns where not much is going on, don't seem to respect the position or treat it with any gravitas at all. We're not talking Andy Griffith style "helping out people around town and making sure things are in order" small-town cops, we're talking "crew of 27-year-old smug jerkasses with authority complexes who want to hold a gun and hassle kids on the street for no reason". This undermines the job and the respect it should deserve, not to mention these people make horrible candidates if something serious does happen. The cops in my town are like this (I swear every single one looks the exact same). My dad tried to break up a fight once (some 18-year-old punk was beating on a girl in a nearby yard), the cops showed up, my dad tried to get the cop's attention, and he was rewarded with eyes full of pepper spray (note: You're not really supposed to use it like that) and a couple punches from the violent dude. Oh, and then the officer lied about it on the report. Hell, I've been hassled two or three times just for walking down the street, and I'm as harmless as they come. Obviously, this isn't as serious a problem as the kind of thing discussed in the article, but it sure as hell doesn't help matters.
- Crooked cops. I have no idea how common these are, but I can definitely see this happening in tougher cities and the like. Basically, I'm referring to police officers who are flat-out corrupt rather than simply incompetent or those who disrespect the position or get away with too much. I can see cops getting too desensitized to violence/crime/the suffering of others through their work in areas like this, and my relatively-uneducated opinion is that perhaps the departments need to treat their members a little better in the psychiatric sense, and that they need to be decently compensated.
- Cops who get away with murder. I don't know if it's a lack of oversight of the police departments, or the fact that public opinion is too lenient (perhaps because police are glorified without exception made for the ones who are total dicks), the justice system being too lenient with them (being "inside men" of sorts), or what, but police officers can effectively get away with anything is they can pull a bogus justification out of their ass (I swear I had to tase that old woman!), or claim that the stresses of the job made them do it, or get the department to put them on paid leave or some-such instead of ever actually being tried for a crime. Hell, when things like this end up in court, it seems like it's usually civil court and that normally the result is a settlement. If a cop kills someone, and a reasonable person could have been expected to not have done so (as opposed to a more legitimate mistake, which we have to admit can happen, albeit more rarely), then he needs to be tried and convicted of a criminal offense. If anything, committing a crime as an on-duty police officer should carry greater penalty because he's abusing the public trust and his position.
All of this leads to a situation where the common man no longer feels protected, served, or looked after by his local police force. Instead, the police are seen as brutes, or incompetents, or some sort of abusive parental figure you have to hide from. Obviously, this situation is very fucking far from ideal, and is getting rather unsustainable, especially when things like the
reckless death of a seven-year-old girl are involved. Hell, a cop can commit an entirely unnecessary violent act, be surrounded by evidence, and still get off with virtually no punishment simply because he's a cop, and that's awful. When shit like this is going down, I can't help but feel the gap between the populace and the law (law enforcement especially) growing wider.
Hell, incompetence alone can be just as bad sometimes: I remember a story where a mentally-unstable individual had a knife, was in some room by himself not posing an immediate threat to anyone, and another person in the house called the police out of fear of the guy's safety. Now, what's the appropriate solution to this? Maybe negotiators? Try to calm the guy down somehow? Engage in nonlethal restraint/violence if necessary? Nope. The officer who arrived on scene shot him dead. I forget the exact details of what happened, but they totally botched the job and just wound up shooting him.
What's the lesson we learn from all this? When you can't trust the police to actually serve the interests of the community, what do you do? Who do you trust? This situation is not going to stay like this forever. The way I see it, things will probably reach some breaking point where enough public outcry accumulates to get the courts/legislature to do
something, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later.
Apologies for the wall of text. I just hope that, at some point in my life, I don't live in a world where people feel the need to treat on-duty police officers as people you have to
avoid rather than trust, and for that matter, where people have no
reason to feel that way. This is to say nothing of the gang-ridden cities, where expecting people in certain areas to follow the law doesn't even make
sense, leading to a situation with no real clear or simple solution.
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Topic: Cops burn and kill a 7-year-old girl while being filmed by a reality show (Read 6988 times)