The “thin blue line” culture is so incredibly unhealthy, and you get an oddly perverse version of it with suburban cops. You kind of always get a bunch of macho assholes who join up with delusions of grandeur that they’re Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men and use that to justify their own biases and bloodlust and savior complexes. Then in places like Antioch, California, you don’t even get a critical mass of the “best” macho assholes who can take pride in working for a department that has prestige in their world, so you just get small-town bullies getting their rocks off by being dangerous. Unfortunately, when you give a bully a badge and a gun (and a 40mm launcher and a trained attack dog), then he is dangerous.
“Civilians can’t understand,” is probably true in a certain way, but just as equally, it’s the fucking point! People who are self-selecting for the position of wielding the government’s monopoly on violence and then living that life every working day will not have a complete perspective either, and they need to justify their behaviors and resources. Hero worship of police in particular (though there are also issues with “first responders” generally… firefighters are… weird) erodes meaningful oversight as “unpatriotic.” American policing seems to have attracted the same personalities for generations. It’s known.
If you aren’t going to try to completely rethink law enforcement (and there’s a lot of good god-damn reasons why we should), you at least have to watch them closely, and fire them and their bosses whenever they are too anti-social or power-hungry. We should do so a lot more often than we do now. I think ACAB is a dangerous oversimplification, but even in modern America the wielding of public violence should be viewed as nothing more than a necessary evil, and it should be closely controlled by those who have to answer to voters for its abuses.
The “thin blue line” culture is so incredibly unhealthy, and you get an oddly perverse version of it with suburban cops. You kind of always get a bunch of macho assholes who join up with delusions of grandeur that they’re Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men and use that to justify their own biases and bloodlust and savior complexes. Then in places like Antioch, California, you don’t even get a critical mass of the “best” macho assholes who can take pride in working for a department that has prestige in their world, so you just get small-town bullies getting their rocks off by being dangerous. Unfortunately, when you give a bully a badge and a gun (and a 40mm launcher and a trained attack dog), then he is dangerous.
“Civilians can’t understand,” is probably true in a certain way, but just as equally, it’s the fucking point! People who are self-selecting for the position of wielding the government’s monopoly on violence and then living that life every working day will not have a complete perspective either, and they need to justify their behaviors and resources. Hero worship of police in particular (though there are also issues with “first responders” generally… firefighters are… weird) erodes meaningful oversight as “unpatriotic.” American policing seems to have attracted the same personalities for generations. It’s known.
If you aren’t going to try to completely rethink law enforcement (and there’s a lot of good god-damn reasons why we should), you at least have to watch them closely, and fire them and their bosses whenever they are too anti-social or power-hungry. We should do so a lot more often than we do now. I think ACAB is a dangerous oversimplification, but even in modern America the wielding of public violence should be viewed as nothing more than a necessary evil, and it should be closely controlled by those who have to answer to voters for its abuses.