Quote:
Originally Posted by mynameisjim
I have seem some of your other posts and you are way too smart to make this argument.
You have to know that if 10% of a group are wrongdoers and the other 90% are silent, you have a terribly corrupt system. It's the silence that allows corrupt systems to flourish. Have you ever heard the phrase "All evil needs to do to succeed is for good people to stand by and do nothing"?
Secondly, we are not talking about "friends" protecting other friends. These are police officers, people who have taken an oath and accept a paycheck in return for upholding the law and enforcing it equally. When they choose to be cops, they accept to be held to a higher standard.
BTW, do you want to defend the off duty Chicago cop who got drunk and crashed head on into another car and killed a kid, the cop was unharmed. How did his fellow cops respond? They held a fundraiser FOR THE COP that killed the kid. Not only that, they organized the fund during work hours, on the taxpayer's dime and held it at a police owned location. What kind of perversion is it when a parent loses a child as the result of a drunk cop and the parent's own tax dollars are used to raise money for the cop that killed their son?
These examples show that police officers see themselves as infallible and above any blame or wrongdoing. Maybe other cops see it as wrong, but their silence is a tacit endorsement of the behavior and culture.
I'm not saying all cops are bad and in smaller communities where the police live among the people they serve, it's much less common. But in big cities, it's a real problem.
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In the end I think what it boils down to is that you think they are far more corrupt than they probably are and I think they are less corrupt than they probably are.
To respond to your point about the drunk cop driving, hitting someone and killing them then his fellow cops throwing a fundraiser for him while on duty. That sounds bad if that is how it really went down. However, I don't think they were trying to justify or defend what he did, they were most likely raising money for a friend/co-worker and made a stupid decision about how and when to do this. I'm sure there have been other cases where this kind of thing has happened, but because they aren't cops we don't hear about it. Still, I have always felt that cops should be held to a higher standard so if this really happened as you say it did something should be done about it.
One last point. I don't see the silence of most cops as their endorsing this behavior, but as a mode of both self and career preservation. When a normal person goes to work they have a pretty black and white job, when a cop goes to work often much of their day involves judgement calls. If they get a reputation as the guy who will call you out if you do something wrong a lot of people won't trust or want to work with that person and it could put them in harms way. Most cops spend their entire day being lied to so when something goes down they typically are going to side with a fellow cop. That said, when it is obvious corruption and there is obvious wrong doing they should speak up and say that they don't endorse that and I know that often do, but that isn't a sexy headline that makes for a good Youtube video or a front page story so we only hear about the ones that are truly fucked up.