Let's be realistic. You are only expressing a realistic OPINON based on a mentally calculated statistic of your experience. Until you have had negative dealings with every enforcement official everywhere then it stays an opinion.
Wrong. I have had enough bad experiences and know enough things about the forces - and believe me, I know them and am not guessing - to know that I need to approach cops CAUTIOUSLY and
not trust them until its been proven that the individuals involved are decent, competent, reasonable or hopefully some mix of those three. Most of the time, when I contact police, all I care is if they're competent and that's been quite a gamble, too.
I too have had some nasty experiences with cops including Professional Standards. Unlike you I have made many friends who are cops and good people. Enough to know good ones ARE out there.
Congratulations, you have pet cops. See my note about friends and family and how they relate to cops. They're the best kind of cops to know, but they're still cops, so don't give them a reason to make life hard for you... if you care to, you can read some stories from my friend who worked HR for a nearby force - they're either on the forum or in the archive.
Cops are people who give themselves privileges that other people don't have, and most of them regularly abuse these privileges extended by their fellow cops and management. Trust them at your peril, because this makes them act differently under stress or in anger than most of us would. This is the point people seem to be missing. This is not my opinion, either - there is a good reason why cops have to undergo counselling whenever they are in an encounter with violence leading to complaints or injuries.
Sadly they normally just deal with the scum of humanity who only wish them dead.
But they don't. Very little of a regular "beat cop's" duties involve this. It was estimated that 2% of police duties in Ontario involved some sort of criminal investigation (not to mention the number of charges), whereas the rest was primarily related to the HTA. I got this figure from a recent article about OPP costs, and if I could lay my hands on it quickly enough I'd have posted it here. So the vast, vast majority of police interaction is with the productive middle or upper-middle class "regular Joes" who can afford to use vehicles as transportation.
Jail guards also are emotionally affected by this phenomenon.
Jail guards moreso. At least the cops who actually do the work to catch criminals (get my detective acquaintances started on this subject and prepare for a long rant) get satisfaction when they apprehend and jail the perpetrators. Guards just have to deal with the inmates and rarely hope to ever see change... and they often see the same offenders again, shortly after they've left the jail; they're right back in. Real criminals are sad for everyone involved, but law enforcement doesn't care much about real criminals anymore. Do remember, I live in Jail Central. I had the union chief of Corrections pull a .45 pistol on me for saying something he didn't like to his daughter about 20 years ago (I told her she wasn't her dad, so stop trying to act like him), so I am most familiar with the stress of that job.
Just tonight walking to my car from the gym, I watched a local prostitute (see her all the time walking Montreal street) buying hard drugs from a local junkie not 15 steps from the methadone clinic. The cops know where the clinic is, and they know exactly who the people are. How is it that I see these same people all the time walking free on the street? How is I see the same people at the clinic year after year?
What you are expressing is an inability to see beyond your own world and place yourself in their shoes.
Wrong again. I've worked with law enforcement multiple times - even as my job. I didn't say exactly how, but I've had my feet firmly in those shoes. I can see their world and it frankly stinks from many angles, but more importantly what really stinks is how so many of them choose to deal with that.
But it's not your fault if you have been badly hurt by policemen in life
I've never said that. You're reading something into this that hasn't been the case. The fact is, I have no criminal record and my dealings with the police have been relatively mild. That doesn't change the fact that I know a great deal about the forces, and how they act both in public and in private. I've even outlined multiple times that I have worked with police previous to this, and that I have had a longtime friend who worked in HR on the forces - not to mention friends, family and acquaintances who are cops. Then I can point at the G20 in 2010 and things I overheard the week before it as well as after it from local police (again, see the archives if you want) as well as many other extremely negative police experiences
that did not involve me directly. When you have had years and years of it as well as the input from police themselves who are good people and feel intense frustration at the way their co-workers handle themselves... well, I'd be an idiot to blindly trust any cop. You would be, too.
We don't mention many good experiences, but we shout vitriol from the mountaintop with every single bad one.
Hypocritical, much?
