Let
me put forth a scenario for you all to ponder.
Your
Daughter is sitting at the mall food court, talking about stuff and
just generally being teenagers. They are being loud and maybe a
little disruptive. (Teenagers remember?) The family at the next
table over suffer through this for awhile and finally get tired of it
all so the father gets up and comes over the kids table. He asks the
teenagers to keep in down and stop being so disruptive. Your
daughter, being annoyed that some old dude is telling her what to do,
mouths off and refuses to quiet down. With me so far?
Okay
so now you've got grumpy older dude and confrontational teenager.
Both are annoyed and both aren't really feeling the spirit of
cooperation. Grumpy older dude decides to literally take matters
into his own hands, so he grabs your daughter and proceeds to drag
her around the food court until she calms down.
Now
if anyone saw a video of some random guy physically assaulting some
teenager just because that teen had a smart mouth, they would be
outraged. (Well most of you would, judging from some commentary I
have seen, some of you are perfectly okay with people assaulting
children when they mouth off.) Most people would be screaming for
the man to be arrested for child abuse. If the old dude in question
happened to be the kid's dad, he'd probably be arrested and his kids
taken away from him.
So,
why pray tell is everyone somehow okay when a man does that to a kid
in a school just because he is wearing a police officer's uniform?
The man has a badge and suddenly it is okay that he grabs a non
violent kid and drags them all around the room? Why is what would
normally be a horrific act okay because he is a Cop?
Being
a cop does not make you into some mythical being that can do whatever
they want or never do the wrong thing. Cops are people, people are
fallible and cops make mistakes. Just like when everyone else is
caught making a mistake, they should be held accountable for their
actions. Instead people try to enshrine them and take any attacks
against bad individuals as an attack against the whole. Why is that?
I
think one of the main reasons we don't want to admit that bad cops do
bad things is the same reason people try to dismiss horrific,
racially motivated acts of terrorism such as the Church Shooting as
something else other than racism. People like to pretend that the
world is a magical little place where things like violent cops and
racism no longer exist. They want to believe that we have moved past
all of that even when the evidence proves them wrong.
If
bad cops exist then people actually have to think whenever someone
claims police brutality. If they don't exist, then all of those
claims are lies meant to make cops look bad. Whenever an innocent
person is assaulted or murdered by bad cops, it threatens the
imaginary world view that so many people seem to have built up about
how far we have grown and evolved.
Things
will never improve or get better till people stop hiding from the
truth and start working to fix things. I fully believe that 95% of
all cops are good cops. I also believe that of the “bad” cops,
well over half of them aren't bad. The stress of the job and perhaps
stress in their own lives make them make mistakes. However, they
still make mistakes and the mistakes they make can hurt a lot of
people. If they cannot do their job without hurting innocent people,
they need to find another kind of work.
End of Rant
