alt Hacker NewsThe main thing that people snag on is scale and frequency.
If you are super into "ACAB" (all cops are bastards) you can easily "research" this all day for weeks and find so many insane cases of police being absolute bastards. You would be so solidified in your belief that police as an institution are fundamentally a force of evil.
But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is almost always where people run aground. Stats are almost always obfuscated for things that people develop a moral conviction around. Imagine trying to acknowledge the stat there are effectively zero transgender people perving on others in public bathrooms.
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If someone had this experience I’d encourage them to look into how police departments across the US consistently fight against any accountability for the cops who perpetuate those relatively few awful encounters. “Most interactions are harmless therefore the negativity is overblown and cops are trustworthy” is one takeaway if you stop your research at the right point. “if you have a bad experience with a cop the entire department will turn against you; they are not to be trusted” is a more accurate takeaway.
As you say, stats very often obfuscate.
"If you research police corruption you'll probably find out the police are corrupt."
Large corporations and the police both have statistically significant problems to be a concern to the average person.
Frequency isn't the issue it's recurrence across municipalities. That's what makes it clear there is a systemic issue.
Imagine if we didn't make laws about murder because "It's not that frequent of a problem only 1 in 500,000 people are murdered"
>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.
This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.
pedantic, but "ACAB" doesn't necessarily mean every (or most) cops do horrible things all the time (that's the strawman version).
one, more nuanced, sentiment is something more like "all cops are bastards as long as bad cops are protected."
another sentiment is "modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers; thus, all of policing is rooted in bastard behavior, therefore: all cops are bastards".
there are plenty of other ways to interpret the phrase. "acab" is shorthand for a lot of legitimate grievances.
You picked a terrible example as a counterpoint, because ACAB is about police protecting bad police (or generally, authorities defending each other as a gang themselves).
Which is seen in every group of authorities around the country. They literally give out get out of jail free cards for cops’ friends and family in many parts of the country, that is systemic, and has nothing to do with frequency of cops committing crimes.
ACAB is not about the proportion of bad encounters to good encounters. It is about the police system as a whole that defends and provides cover for the bad ones.
If you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and the other 500,000 actors are good but also protect the 1, then you have a system with 500,001 bad actors.