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Personally I understand and appreciate the need for police to exist, they serve a valuable societal role and you get significant problems if you don't have them. But at the same time I side with a lot of the ACAB people because the police force where I live is shockingly, astonishingly corrupt - to the point that they actually awarded an "excellence in policing" medal to a famously corrupt cop who made the news later on because he murdered a young man in cold blood over a drug deal gone wrong. At the same time I've seen video recordings of a huge police officer bodyslamming an old woman to the ground, then trying to lie about how she "tripped" and pulled him down - and that same police officer coaching witnesses and committing serious offences in court (witness tampering). Another scandal that made the news recently was when the police released the private diary of a rape victim to hostile press in order to make sure that a politician friendly to them wasn't prosecuted. You're totally right when you say that the police force or something equivalent needs to exist, but I think that ACAB actually does apply, at least in my case (and I'm sure there are parts of the US where this is true as well). There's so much naked, visible corruption and abuse that I do actually consider all of the cops here bastards because they do nothing about the blatant criminality and corruption taking place right next to them. When your policing body says that incredibly corrupt cops who go on to become murderers are the kind of police officers worth recognising, rewarding (and hence emulating) then I don't have any problems making judgements about the people who stay in the role.
The assertions "All Cops Are Bastards" and "Some Cops Are Bastards" are vastly different. I don't think there's a man alive who would dispute the latter. The claim that all cops are bastards in parts of the US (i.e. certain jurisdictions) by definition implies that there are some cops who are not bastards (or some jurisdictions not staffed entirely by bastards).
My apologies for being unclear. I was speaking in terms of my local context - "cops" here meant exclusively the ones from my country, as my brain considered the local police force 'cops' and ones in America 'American cops'. I don't know enough about US policing to talk accurately about the subject given that I've never actually been to the place. Although with all that said, I absolutely disagree with a lot of defund the police rhetoric etc - I just think that there are serious problems with our current police force. I'd much prefer to have a complete and total lack of financial privacy for law enforcement agents (if they do not wish to make their finances public they can simply leave the force) than simply removing the police and not replacing them.
I think I understood you right the first time around, you think Australian cops are institutionally corrupt but don't know enough about the American situation to comment if it's the same there.
The word "all" is kind of interesting. Taken 100% literally, the slogan "all cops are bastards" means that literally every cop in the entire world is a bastard. But it could understandably be taken to mean "all cops [in this country] are bastards" or similar. I remember one instance seeing a person expressing some ACAB-esque sentiments on Facebook, and then having to hastily qualify that statement by assuring their friends that they were only referring to cops in the UK, not Ireland.
If I was going to steelman the ACAB claim, it would be something along the lines of "There is enough police corruption and malfeasance that it is not plausible that any individual cop would be unaware of it. Hence, all cops are aware of corruption and malfeasance but refuse to do anything about these problems. This means that even cops who are not themselves personally corrupt are tacitly endorsing and supporting those that are, and hence deserve disapprobation."
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Yes, evil bastard cops and good noble cops are very different. The bastard cops are doing their bastardly deeds, and the good cops look the other way and close ranks to defend their brothers at any cost. Such great difference.
Why do you assume that the good cops are even aware of the corruption? It's not like the corrupt cops are telling the other cops about their misdeeds. And if an accusation of corruption appears, it's appropriate to give the accused the benefit of the doubt. If an accusation of inappropriate force comes to light, the appropriate response is usually "Look, I wasn't there. I'm not gonna Monday morning quarterback what he did based on hearsay. If the investigation reveals misconduct, then by all means he should be held accountable."
People seem to think corrupt cops are telling all their cop bros about the shit they're getting away with and they all snicker together about it or something. And they think that the non-abusive cops hide and protect the power-trippers (for reasons that are seemingly never specified by ACABers - somethingsomething brotherly solidarity?) Do they not realize how much harder it is for cops to do their job when a power-tripping asshole shows up at the scene? Cops hate those sorts of cops!
I could see isolated incidents in very small departments (e.g., tiny towns and counties) of things like this happening, but mostly because of the tight social and kin networks in places like that and the far more limited resources and oversight. But it's rarely those departments that ACABers express issue with; it's almost always the big city departments.
If the good cops aren't aware of the naked criminality that is so publicly well-known that it is a major news story and there are entire netflix tv shows being made about it, they're bastards anyway because they are so manifestly incompetent and unfit for the duty they've taken on that they're effectively defrauding the government. A lot of this stuff is front-page news and despite the ugly conclusions this leads to about police bastardry, it is actually more insulting to assume that they're blind idiots who are unable to read newspapers or even listen to public news broadcasts. This stuff doesn't even have a figleaf to protect it - the head of a heavily politicised police department can just have footage of undeniable witness tampering posted to youtube and nothing happens. Sitting senators on government commissions into police misconduct can bring it up and nothing happens!
No, the reasons that get brought up are simple - professional retribution(how eager are you to report the person who decides whether or not you get promoted for being corrupt when there's a decent chance his boss is also on the take), the culture of policing(thin blue line, brotherly solidarity as you mentioned, etc) and mutual blackmail (you aren't going to report me for being on the take because I will then report you for being on the take).
Actually this happens in the larger state and federal departments here and that's where all of the stories I've been talking about have come from. Very small departments have, in my experience, been slightly better (my intuited explanation for this is that those ones tend to be more strongly tied to their local community).
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Because it's ubiquitous. In many cases they've literally seen it, because it was done in their presence. And yes, cops talk -- look at the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore, every cop in the department knew what a "rough ride" was and that it happened.
There might be isolated instances of small departments which don't have brutal cops, or only have one who keeps his mouth shut about it. But any sizable department has significant brutality and essentially all the cops know about it.
I strongly dispute that. I don't know a ton about the Freddie Gray incident or the Baltimore department, but my understanding is that neither state nor federal prosecutors allege what you have about Freddie Gray.
More importantly, while I think isolated examples of brutality like you're alleging do occur, given the tens of millions of annual police encounters, I would fully expect that even an America full of the most perfect police forces our fallible world could ever muster would nonetheless still present an endless number of examples of egregious misdeeds across the country.
The point is that it's not a systemic problem (I argue). The conduct of these abusive officers is not tolerated by their fellow officers and superiors (why would it be? It makes their job that much harder and opens them up to criminal/civil liability). Further, these abusive officers are are regularly fired, as well charged and convicted, with the obvious caveat that it's not always easy to pass the bar of guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt (just look at non-cop criminals!)
However, I don't expect the vast gulf between our intuitions and experiences about this problem/nonproblem is going to be bridged within the limits of the intersection of our patience and free time in this already waning comment thread, I think you'll agree.
It's not so much a systemic problem as it is an intrinsic problem. Any group of enforcers will develop an us against them mentality. They have to, enforcement isn't possible if the enforcers give their opponent's arguments the same weight as their allies. The corrupt ones don't have to brag about their excesses, they just have to deny them and ask the clean ones if they are really going to believe this meth-head/loser/nazi over them.
And even if the loser convinces one clean cop of his innocence it doesn't matter, because the whole department needs to be convinced. A department which is a mix of corrupt and clean no less - the corrupt will never believe him, so the department will always be weighted heavily against him. A clean cop who took a stand would just get fired, so they reason they should tolerate a small amount of corruption so they can help the greatest number of people.
This happens at every level of society, at every level of enforcement.
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The point is exactly the opposite of this. Abusive officers do whatever they like. Everyone knows about it -- other cops who may not be so abusive themselves, defendants, defense lawyers, supervisors, prosecutors, even judges. But defendants aren't considered credible, and cops support each other unconditionally in the "blue wall of silence". Occasionally there's physical evidence and maybe a cop gets fired (and then later quietly re-instated with back pay when the union sues), but they nearly always get away with it.
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Obviously you believe that All Cops are Bastards. I'm not even arguing that that's not the case. I'm arguing that what /u/FirmWeird is describing explicitly contradicts the assertion that All Cops are Bastards. If the assertion "all cops are bastards" is only true in parts of the US (as they said), that logically implies that there are parts of the US in which that assertion isn't true i.e. NACAB.
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Where do you live?
I don't like getting too specific but I've already revealed that the answer is Australia. The police officer I mentioned is named Roger Rogerson, there's actually a netflix series about the murder.
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