Grumpy Old Dude at 12 O'Clock! or "What if it was your kid?"

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