One has to question the motivation of those willing to throw the baby out with the bath water, those willing to cut off their nose to spite their face. Are there bad cops out there jdog? Yes, unfortunately there are and simple minded people use them as examples to smear an entire profession.
Law enforcement itself goes to great lengths to police itself and oust those who have no business among its ranks. By definition, engaging in police work isn't going to win you friends. This is to be expected. Cops are under constant scrutiny even more so today than ever before. They act in real time and do not have the luxury of dissecting every scenario post incident viewing two dimensional cell phone video. When they get it wrong, or even when the perception may be that they did, it sells because the populous buys scandal more often than it is exposed to the quiet heroics of the largely untold story.
I happen to known of one such cop who went to a disturbance call. One spouse was taken away leaving a female to fend for herself and child in a one room motel not fit for rats to live in much less a place to call home and raise a child. An hour or so after the call was cleared, the lady heard a knock at the door. To her initial horror it was the same policeman. What now she must have thought as she opened the door. The officer, seeing the desperate situation and living conditions, had gone to the store, and bought a couple bags of groceries to help this woman care for herself and her child. There were no cell phone videos being taken of this. There was no press conference called. I am almost certain you will not find it on youtube. It was simply done in the generous name of humanity. More often than not, this is the type of unreported behavior cops I know engage in. So remembering you can't always judge a group by the misguided or perceived misguided actions of a few, it would behoove you to employ your mental faculties and realize you know little to nothing about a culture of people you learn about from the news at six. And because of such things, you fail to understand or care not to understand why the men and women of the profession do not take so kindly to smear campaigns. Sometimes you only see what you are looking for if you are too narrow minded to have your eyes wide open. It is pretty clear there is a deeply engrained hatred omitting as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story, when someone is bent on throwing mud at one solitary group. As I have said, yes there are bad cops. There are many who have been ousted, some sent to prison, and even a few who slip through the cracks. Now it begs the question why this mantra for police all the time. Are there not examples of equal gravity from Judges, lawyers, airline pilots, military brass, politicians, doctors, school teachers, accountants, ivy league coaches, ect., and so forth? And remember which of any of these groups spends the most time working under the scrutiny of a camera.
It is as simple as the guy who complains about people speeding up and down "his" street and complaining that the police aren't doing anything about protecting his kids... then when he gets stopped for speeding on "somebody else's" street inquires, "don't you have anything better to do than harras me?". It is the impossible job. It is much easier as jdog has so eloquently demonstrated, to sit on the sidelines and say, coulda shoulda woulda.
