Good Cop/Bad Cop? Nope. All Good.

[Rev. Rye]

Back to the OP, I doubt that a lot of cops come into the job with the express purpose of fucking with people... at least as long as they're not bad. That said, we have a lot of police brutality, and it's a big button issue. And the sad thing is, that, the more I look at it, the more convinced I become that nothing short of a utopian re-ordering of society and likely several generations of cops dying off is likely to even do anything about it. And even then, the latter part might not work properly. On the one hand, we have a system that still shafts black people, sustaining the cycles that kept them in poverty, even as the laws that ensured that most would be stuck in a shitty environment got struck down as a result of the civil rights movement. This ends up leading to a disproportionately large amount of black people ending up in trouble with the law.

On the other, we have cops who are trained to do what they can to protect their societies, up to, and including lethal force. Ideally this lethal force should be done as a last resort, but this clearly isn't the ideal world. We send them into areas with high crime, and, due to the aforementioned forces that keep a disproportionately large amount of black people in poverty, they start to unconsciously associate black people with more crime, either creating or reinforcing racial criminal stereotypes. It doesn't take a genius to figure out where that leads. It leads to snap judgements where people get shot 19 times for standing outside their own homes and taking out their wallets. I would highly recommend anyone who wants to know the sort of process that leads to police brutality read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which has an entire chapter about how snap judgements led to cops killing an innocent man. It may be tempting to think, maybe they should have just stopped for a minute, they might have avoided all of this, but, bear in mind, if the guy's actually taking out a gun in front of some cops, there's a very good chance that they'd be dead in the time it takes to make that distinction.

If anyone's ever seen Over the Edge, and if you haven't, I highly recommend it because it's damn good, there's a scene where one kid gets shot by a cop, Officer Doberman. It's clear he's not a good person, especially since he hassles the kids who are the focus of the movie, but when he kills that kid, it's probably the only thing he can reasonably do. The kid is pointing an unloaded gun at him, but Officer Doberman has no way of knowing the gun's not loaded. There's no way of ascertaining whether or not it's loaded except taking it and checking for yourself (and even then, there's no guarantee you didn't miss something). Since that's not an option, he ends up shooting him. With regards to real cases, yes, most of these people getting beaten up and killed aren't using real guns, and in at least one case, the "gun" was actually a toy train. But at the time, there's a very real possibility that they saw it as a gun. The problem is that the nature of the racial prejudices that help drive it, as long as we have lots of black people in shitty parts of town committing crimes and as long as the school-to-prison pipeline is still a thing, are essentially self-reinforcing. Anything we do to stop it, short of radical changes to social stratification and decades' worth of time, is a band-aid. And its adhesive doesn't work. Why yes, that does suck.