With great power comes great responsibility. If a cop KNOWS if he screws up, if he short cuts the system, because he can, he will spend the rest of his life in general population, first offense, no appeal, no plea bargaining, no possibility of parole, THEN we will see some small improvement. You will either have better LEOs, or MUCH more clever blue suited political goons.
The Sheriff Of Nottingham had the same men, and they are always men who will cut off ears. Today they wear blue coats.
I go back and forth on this. Of course I want to support the police. I believe in law and order, so I support the police over the criminals.
But sometimes the police are the criminals.
I think that if an officer is proven to have made a mistake which they ought not to have made, then judgment should be made directly against the pension of the police union. All the cops should see their retirement get a little less bright because Officer Skippy got “one of his rages” and threw an old lady to the ground (again).
The police do need to police themselves. Some of the officers are bad and they are known to be bad. The Union needs to get rid of the bad cops before they do something really bad.
That said, I do believe that anyone can make a mistake and I do not believe that we will achieve perfection. Both citizens and officers sometimes make errors in judgment. We need some wisdom on both sides of that equation.
Example: If an officer has been on the force for 10 years and always done everything by the book, if the day comes when a motorist lunges at the cop with something in his hand, if the cop shoots him, and if the motorist turns out to be unarmed, we can say that this “shouldn’t have happened” but I don’t think we’re necessarily looking at a bad cop who needs to be destroyed by the legal system. They have a very tough job to do.
Cops are like any other para-military organization, conditioned to “just follow orders.” When the orders come down to confiscate guns, they will confiscate guns. When the orders come down to herd people into camps, they will herd people into camps. Don’t think our cops would do that? Don’t think that can happen here?
That’s what the average German of 1927 thought.