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No you did not misread... my statement is 100% true but it's also true that police reduced crime both are true.
I have first-hand experience because my cousin caught his fellow cops dealing drugs after stealing them from dealers and when he turned them in he himself was blackballed instead of those dirty cops.... the culture is rotten to the very core. There is a deep rooted cultural problem with policing. Police departments are filled with criminals and bullies and the cowards who don't report them.
And police presence on the streets also reduces crime... we just need less scumbag type of cops with way more education doing a much better job from a more educated place.
But a deep cultural shift like that is not going to happen from within it's going to have to be imposed from the outside.
I agree with your last part. We need better cops with better education. The problem there being that in most departments, police are not paid well enough to attract real talent. And you’re partially right on the pressure from the outside. The police and how they police changes as the culture around it changes. It also changes from within. But, police also adapt the environment they are in. Hard areas call for hard cops. Soft cops do not do well in tough areas and need to remain in the suburbs. I probably couldn’t be a cop in NYC for example. I was simply too nice and too polite and give most people the benefit of the doubt and I would have been taken advantage of, possibly even targeted for attack because some people take that as weakness. They would have been very wrong about that. And I hope if I was there, it wouldn’t have changed me to much.
Where you’re wrong is assuming because your relative had a bad experience that it is like that everywhere. It’s not. I turned a fellow officer in for excessive force and I wasn’t blackballed. And not all cops are bullies or cowards. When you work with someone and get to know them, you don’t want to believe they are capable of shit they are accused of. Cops also see use of force much differently than citizens do because they are trained based upon constitutional rights and Supreme Court cases and most cops adhere to those. You may see a video where a suspect resists arrest and the cop strikes him in the thigh (common perineal) with a baton and they scream and cry “abuse!!” And it’s not. It’s what is taught and that is based on Supreme Court cases. Cops see that and simply say it’s proper and the most vocal opponents will say it is abuse and formulate the opinions like you have.