Flagg wrote: ↑2017-08-02 03:43amThey sign up because it gives them power. And plenty of shitheads get through the screening process.
Thing is, that's not a
sufficient explanation. There are a lot of ways to get power over other humans that involve much lower exposure to violence than being a police officer.
I'm not saying there are NO police officers who don't have some basic minimum of physical courage.* But even if you really get off on being able to boss people around, if you don't have at least
average levels of physical courage... police work really shouldn't be your first choice as a job description. That would be something more like, say, working for the IRS, or as a prosecutor in immigration courts or something.
There you can go after people who are in no condition to fight back.
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*That is, the willingness to risk physical injury and enter situations where violence or serious bodily harm is a possibility.
In *most* of these cases, we are not looking at Terrible People, we are looking at decent people who make mistakes. Those mistakes can be due to implicit bias (that no one is immune from) that affects threat assessment, they can be due to inadequate training, or they can be due to inappropriate/out-dated training that leads to poor decision making, or due to inexperience or situational awareness failures. Very rarely is it malice or cowardice (though there are exceptions like Baltimore and Ferguson PDs).
And the NYPD, the LAPD, and on and on and on and it still keeps happening.
See, what you're brushing past here is that even when you acknowledge that police abuses are terrible and the responsible policemen should be locked up, most of them
make sense.
...
When the police hit the wrong house and shoot a dog that barked at them, we agree it's terrible and someone should be in deep shit... but it
makes sense. The chain of fuckups is comprehensible in terms of real people doing things normal people do. Going to the wrong address is a comprehensible fuckup. If you assume for the sake of argument you're at the right house, and have a right to be there, and you're keyed up, a barking dog CAN seem aggressive. A split-second decision to shoot the dog may well be obviously wrong and stupid, but it's comprehensible stupidity. It's within the envelope of things biologically functional humans might do.
You don't need "cops are orcs created out of pure evil and stupidity for the sole purpose of hurting good people" as a working hypothesis to explain how such a thing could happen.
...
When the cops cuff a guy in the back of a van and give him a rough ride and his skull cracks and he dies, that's horrible and wrong and people SHOULD have gone to jail. But it's
comprehensible, in that we know there are assholes who think that way, who don't see a problem with using physical violence to 'punish' someone for bruising their ego. And who are too reckless and negligent to consider a 5% probability of the victim of their beating getting crippled or killed, or who don't realize that when they do that shit once a year for twenty years, someone's going to get crippled or killed. Every gang beating that's ever happened is supporting evidence for the fact that people do this.
You don't have to imagine some kind of nonhuman creature doing it;
people do shit like that. It's criminal and wrong and terrible. But, again, it's within the envelope of things that biologically functioning human brains do. That is NOT excusing it, that's just describing it.
...
So the point is, if you see a cop committing some kind of criminal abuse that
makes sense, it's safe to attribute it to a combination of motives that make sense and can plausibly fit together in a human brain. This can include nasty motives like sadism, a sense of
narcissistic injury at being "disrespected," and so on... but these are, again, motives that a functioning human brain can have, and not be clinically insane.
But if you see a cop committing an abuse that just leaves you going "wait what the fuck were they even thinking," it is very possible that they were high, that they've got an undiagnosed mental problem, or otherwise something was fucking up their thinking in a comprehensive way.
That's all there is here.
