You babble. Honorable soldiers, honorable police officers, honorable teachers, honorable governors, honorable mothers and honorable fathers know the difference between abuse of power and honorably exercised power.
Take your cheap, anarchic shots. People like you are the problem. Here we have a clear example of abuse of power you you take a shotgun blast at all exercise of power.
It’s the hard work of distinguishing between abuse of power and honorable exercise of power (which all mothers, fathers, policement, soldiers, business owners have to exercise) that makes a society healthy.
Office Lopez abused power. Some others covered for him. He deserves to have the book thrown at him. But only if it is possible for honorable police officials to do that, honestly and honorably, can proper law enforcement take place.
It was the same in the particular period when “feudum” was the label. I’m a hell of a lot more hardheaded and unomantic about it than you are. You are the romantic because you limpwristedly wave your hand at the problem instead of analyzing it.
I want honor and loyalty and virtue and decency in my government today and I have studied carefully how this has and has not functioned under various systems of political and social and economic organization in the past. And among the worst of those systems are a number of the post-1500s systems. One of the best is post-1500 (ours, from 1750-1900 or thereabouts).
But grandiose dismissals like yours are part of the reason we are in the shape we are in. People don’t want to do the hard work of distinguishing the good from the bad. It’s easier to broadbrush.
>All that honor and loyalty nonsense is probably what the officers who demand the tapes thought they were doing. Honor and loyalty are/were often used for ‘cover your buddies misdeeds’.<
Some of what you say is true. Many cops have the us / them mentality. But I think you would be surprised at how many would also refuse to cover up for anything remotely illegal.
It has degrees of variance. A very few would go along and try to cover it up like the two that asked if the tape would be erased and for the clerk to testify on the cops behalf and “help him out”
More would walk away and not want to get involved one way or another because of fear of being branded a rat, not getting back up when they needed it or even having evidence planted on them by this bad cop at his first opportunity to screw them for not helping.
Then you have the majority, who would try to rectify the situation by removing the cop before anything escalated like it did. Report what they must with very heavy hearts knowing that they ill be unpopular, but that it was HIS misconduct and that they should not make another mistake to correct his.
Then there are a few who would hold him 100% accountable like anybody else, neither better or worse than the average Joe.
Lastly a small group would do everything that they could to ram it so far up his moon that he would need to see a proctologist on a regular basis for years to come.
Mainly it depends on the amount of training that they get from the very beginning in the academy, what they are exposed to and how the department treats it’s officers and how the public treats them that dictates which rough group that they fall in.
But again, I think you would be surprised on how many guys would not stand for this in one way or another.