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I have a big issue with your statement. It sounds correct but in my mind doesn't stand up to scrutiny. What is reality? Who decides that exactly? How can you decide whether an institution , whether that is the police or whoever , did their job correctly? Are you capable or even interested in judging each and every move they make ? And what do you do with that judgement? Do you just use your judgement ( whether right or wrong) to fuel hatred and distrust? Because you are probably not using it to make a a practical change. So what is it? What is the goal? The cornerstone of society is trust. Trust has to be blind up to a logical point.
Yes, but I'm not concerned about whether it stands up to scrutiny in your mind; I am only concerned about whether it stands up to scrutiny in reality.
Let us say the institutions claim there is definitely no train coming down a set of railroad tracks. Reality is what decides whether someone standing on the tracks when that train arrives gets crushed or not.
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That which does not go away when you stop believing in it.
No one decides it. It happens regardless. If you do a bad job planting your crops, people starve. If you do a bad job enforcing the law, chaos and violence reigns. If you do a bad job protecting your borders, foreign armies victimize your populace.
For the police, you derive a general understanding of what their job is by examining the laws they're supposed to enforce, and their actual enforcement of those laws, measure it versus the costs of maintaining them and the general realities that add friction to the system.
Random sampling and statistics help a great deal here.
That is certainly a thing people can do. For example, the BLM movement spun out of a coordinated attempt by Blue Tribe to generate hatred and distrust by pushing misinformation about the actual performance of law enforcement, resulting in a very large and quite partisan disconnect between public perception of police misconduct and actual rates of misconduct. And the result is that tens of thousands of additional black Americans are now dead, and hundreds of thousands of additional Black Americans have been victimized by serious crimes. That was a practical change of the sort you are describing.
Alternatively, one can do one's best to verify that trust, and to withdraw it when one perceives that it has been repeatedly violated. It is always possible that one has been deceived, though, so it's best to keep an open mind to new evidence when it arises.
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