Community Policing

Divemedic has a couple of relevant posts. Go and read them, if you haven't already.

My 2¢ to those who defend the police and policing we have, and have had, for some good time:

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"The media lies" is a cop out. (No pun intended.)

We know - because we've seen the videos - what happens when a citizen screws up; anything from a quick concrete tune-up up to and including sidewalk execution (and frequently justified).

But when it isn't, the commensurate number of videos and stories of police officers getting walked out of their department like Chuck Connors at the opening of Branded, 

                         

and subsequently frog-marched into a squad car, convicted at trial, and ass-raped to death in prison afterwards should be similarly legion for the times when they screw up.

They are no such thing, nor anywhere close, because that almost never happens. You should police yourselves more harshly than the rest of us, but instead you don't do so, or do so barely at all, and only when the transgression is so egregious and virally seen as to be a virtual white-hot fireplace poker up administration's ass to push it forward.

And before Rodney King, it was twenty times worse.

The only thing that should be scarier than an ordinary citizen breaking the law, should be the spectacle of the mills of justice grinding an officer who's transgressed. Punishment should be draconian, and more fearsome than being kidnapped by drug cartels.

Instead, it's mainly wrist slaps, if it happens at all, and even then, mainly only honored in the breach. That's why departments have lists of officers with 10, 20, 50 verified major screw-ups, and even fired officers just drift to other departments, and rack up serial bad conduct rap sheets without the hammer falling until they kill somebody or make the national news, rather than being black-balled from the profession for life.

What sticks in everyone's craw isn't that the media gives cops a bad rap, it's that every police department in America uses the Catholic Church's example for dealing with child-molesting priests as their disciplinary model: sweep it under the rug, and pretend it never happened. The lump is now the height of Mt. McKinley, and that plan isn't working for you like it once did.

If it were otherwise, the blogs and YouTube videos of the hazing other officers would deliver, let alone official (metaphorical) floggings-around-the-fleet by management would be more numerous than the bad cop videos, by orders of magnitude.

That they aren't shows that the whole blue gang is in on the con, and the availability of anyone with a cell phone camera to be Paramount Pictures and CNN has shown the truth of the matter.

So has the dearth of officers going on strike for cleaner departments, or quitting and/or whistleblowing because they can't stand the corruption and mollycoddling of their fellow thugs and crooks in blue. 

That behavior is what earns Divemedic's percentage: misprision of felony, accessory after the fact, criminal conspiracy. In the penal codes of 50 states and 7 US territories.

But apparently, they don't cover this in any police academy in the nation, except with a wink and a nudge.

(And telling me about one or two exceptions doesn't disprove the other two million that never happened. Statistics are a bitch like that.)

You guys are a blue gang, pure and simple, with a Mafia-like code of silence regarding in-house problems, from simple screw-ups to criminal conspiracies and organizational corruption, and when confronted, you shrug and mumble, and walk away. If nobody got caught, it never happened.

Frank Serpico remains a cautionary tale, from coast to coast, bottom to top, and even then, only for people old enough to remember the story.

That's why nobody trusts you, and why nobody likes you. Your entire profession has squandered any trust and integrity you ever had, collectively, and you'll never get that back, short of figuratively (or literally, at this point) putting the heads of defaulters on pikes at the doors of the station house.

That would be a good start. And I'm not exaggerating.

And at the rate things are going, the people - all of them, good and the bad - are going to start doing that for you, to drive the point well home, even knowing what that means for society for some good time. You're a cure that's become far worse than the disease.

That truth may hurt, but the sting doesn't disprove the thesis.

"90% of cops are bad" is wrong.

It's probably 9% too low.

Your profession has made its bed.

Very soon now, they're going to see what it feels like to lie in it.

And the entire society will pay.

It's always the people you trust the most who fuck you the worst, and stab you in the back the hardest.

Because they're the only ones who can.

Et tu, Flatfoot?

GMTA Dept.: Hot off the presses - Evolution Of The American Police State