alt Hacker NewsRight, there’s clearly a problem, and I think even a systemic problem. I just don’t think it follows that literally every officer is therefore culpable. I think I would say that probably almost every police union leader is culpable.
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And who votes for those union leaders? The cops. They vote for corrupt people to protect their own corruption. It's a corrupt system from top to bottom.
I explicitly stated that it was "more than one" and in no way intimated that it was all cops.
One of the simplest things we could do as a country to help mitigate this is to end the War on Drugs. It was never about protecting people, and was always about enabling oppression of "others".
The other simple thing to do is to stop using cops for "welfare checks" and mental health crises -- those situations are uniformly better handled by social workers. This has tragically been put under the category of "defund the police", but the idea itself is sound. The "defund" slogan is so bad it's almost like it was created to sabotage the effort.
The good cops, such as they are, get run out if they try to challenge the institutional problems in police forces. This radically restricts how good a cop can be while still being a cop.
Can good cops speak up about bad cops and keep their job, or do they have to remain silent? How many bad things can you see in your workplace without quitting or whistleblowing while still being a decent person? Can they opt out of illegal but defacto ticket quotas and still have a career? Does writing a few extra tickets so you can stay in the force long enough to maybe change it make you part of the problem?
Many people look at the problems in policing and say that anyone working inside that system simply must have compromised themselves to stay in.