Where are all the good cops condemning the actions of their corrupt, brutal and thug colleagues?
A few bad apples?
More like a rotten tree.
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30 Answers
It’s called Fraternal Order of Police for a reason. It’s a fraternity, a brotherhood.
The Blue Wall of Silence.
Police are keenly aware of the difficulties and frustrations of the job. They empathize with those who lose control.
This is not like Muslim clerics (which I am sure you are alluding to), who see some fanatical terrorists blow people up. The police understand the temptations of letting loose, and the damage it can do to their reputations, and the furtherance of their work. The Muslims should see the acts of terrorists as a complete betrayal of their faith. It’s easy to confuse the issues here. There is a subtle divide.
@filmfann
” They empathize with those who lose control.”
To the point of falsifying reports ,“losing” evidence, and bullying/threatening the extremely few cops that do report corruption.
Give me a break.
Police are keenly aware of the difficulties and frustrations of the job. They empathize with those who lose control.
Normal people empathize with victims of summary execution and abuse, not the perpetrators.
Infernal affairs, feel the heat.
Cops are in a bad spot. The only civil service profession less appealing (in my mind) is teaching. What they both have in common is that they are unfortunately at the place in our society where that society’s defects hit the fan. And the fan is taking a sho’nuff beating.
Defending murders is just going to make it worse for the rest of the police. There’s a LOT of fixing needed. Putting it off is like the Catholics defending priest molestation.
Cops and a good number of the people they deal with are almost living in a sort of breakaway society. I have a cousin who is one and while I don’t know him that well I think he’s completely f’ed in the head. I have met a total of two who I thought were rational and sane. To be fair I have only known about 15 or so.
@stanleybmanly: Where I live, the teachers in public school make over 100k annually. To me, that’s not too unappealing.
@jca where is that? They make ~50K here which is still pretty good for the area.
I’ll pm you. I’m always leery of someone figuring out who I am based on where I live.
That sounds like an exceptionally high figure for a public school teacher. The 50k figure is about 10 grand higher than I would have thought average.
I wonder if that $100K is the total cost to the schools, including benefits.
Seems like they are doing exactly what they should be doing. Protecting and serving. Not getting involved in the drama. They have a job to do. Waving a sign that vilifies their own isn’t productive.
if they are not weeding out the scum from their own ranks, then they are not doing their jobs, but abetting and aiding criminals, just like when the church actively protected child raping priests.
Part of the problem appears to be that there is no protection for whistle-blowers. Until good cops can talk to their superiors or an independent body about abusive cops, they are not going to risk their jobs or their safety.
•A few bad amongst the thousands of police? Not a stressful job at all. I’m surprised there aren’t more problems for the oodles of fun they get to experience every day.
•Funny, I don’t remember any nuclear physicists, taxi drivers, artists, nor stock traders running towards the building with active fire, getting so many out of the building under seige, or the SUV- again underfire. Oh, and how about those pilots, bakers and professional athletes checking for bombs before anyone entered all of the buildings involved? I do belive I saw some elected senators, engineers and computer techs facing those double armor-piercing bullets! No, wait. My bad. Not them.
Just like at Planned Parenthood. Those who ran towards. I wouldn’t have -that’s for damn sure.
•Major fuck-ups within the ranks nationwide? I’d be surprised if there weren’t.
We strive for perfection here in the US of A.
•Teachers earning a great deal of money? I found constantly updating certificates and schooling$, paying high insurance rates, and supplying the student’s ‘extras’ $$$ when needed, saving for emergencies, and carrying on with life’s bills- on an average (or below) teaching salary?
• Shee-it, how much? Well hell’s bells! They must’ve mailed those checks to someone else! Perhaps to a Presidential campaign fund or the Koch Brothers program for the poor and women’s reproductive services.
•Firefighters, Nurses, Police and Teachers: You have no idea. It’s the best -worst jobs ever.
The lowest paid of the four? Guess.
Pshhh.
Police pay sucks so bad I can’t believe they can even eat anything other than ramen.
Chicago police make a base salary of $65,000 after 1 year service and $80,000 after 4.5 years.
1,500 police (sergeants and above) make over $100,000.
Also the city will spend about $100 million on police overtime this year.
Each time I read this question I get no further than the first five words, then I start belting out the Bonnie Tyler song… “I need a hero…”
Just thought i’d share that, no good reason.
The discussion of salaries (both of teachers and police) is missing something crucial: locality and cost of living. Teachers near @jca make $100,000 because she lives in an extremely wealthy area of the country (in fact, telling us that fact about local teacher salary reveals that she lives in one of a very small number of locations in the US, though I won’t name them out of respect for @jca‘s privacy). Police in her area follow a similar (though lower) distribution curve. Police and teachers in @ARE_you_kidding_me‘s area also paid similarly, though in that case it is the teachers who are on a slightly lower distribution curve.
If you look at the whole picture, teachers and police officers tend to make roughly similar amounts by region (with variations largely depending on local politics). And both tend to make relatively low-to-moderate salaries that are disproportionate to what they are expected to deal with. Therefore, we see similar problems with both: a small number of dedicated people who do their best and stay out of the news, a large number of mediocre workers who are just trying to get by and vacillate between doing a decent job and abusing their power, and a small number of people who seem dedicated to ruining it for everyone.
We also see the same sort of code of silence, with the large group of mediocre people protecting the terrible people in order to keep their own asses covered (since they also abuse the system—just not as often or as flagrantly), and the small number of dedicated people frequently being intimidated into staying silent (and often being driven out of the institution when they finally do speak up). You get what you pay for, and these are two professions where Americans have more or less decided to roll the dice. Both professions are in need of various reforms, but better pay and increased selectiveness is key to each.
@jaytkay: The dollar amount reported is for the teacher’s salary alone, excluding benefits. I know because I’m a public employee too (government worker) and so when I put my own name in, my precise salary comes up. Health insurance and the cost of other benefits are not included in the total.
Whatever the salaries, both professions increasingly bear the unhappy burden of being expected to remedy endemic societal failings over which they have no control. It’s a situation that’s particularly pronounced on the expanding lower rungs of our society’s ladder where the impossibility fulfilling such misplaced expectations is most obvious and the rot most visible and extensive.
@stanleybmanly Worse yet, their ability to mitigate the results of those societal failings is being systematically undermined by the way in which they are increasingly forced to address them. The militarization of police and the increasing focus on testing in education takes away the best tools of police and teachers, alienating them more and more from the community by placing them outside of it.
Agreed! So the question is: why should a smart young person choose a career in either field?
@stanleybmanly To be the change they want to see in the world, I guess. But if the state isn’t going to let them do the job right, that’s not much of an incentive. We may be doomed to worse and worse results until we can roll back some of the changes that have been made from on high. I wish the complete abandonment of these professions by competent employees would be enough to bring about a quick turnaround, but it’s not. There are too many incompetent employees ready to fill the gaps, and too many employers willing to let them. So I think it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
May I add something about many outspoken police supporters, at least the ones I know…
They all have friends or family that are police officers. Police officers get PBA cards that they give to friends and family.
These can be somewhat of a “get out of jail free” card, or will at least make your experience with a police officer much different than those who do not have one. My point is that friends and family of police officers are very rarely treated as poorly as someone “not in the club.”
This helps keep the blue wall strong as well.
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