I can see where this is going already. It's gonna become a "pro-cop v. anti-cop" argument. Ultimately ending with it becoming a righty v. lefty argument. Or not. WE'll see.
As for my attitude (I know you were referring to another guy but I'll answer for myself) I justify it simply because as a good citizen I can't help but question police. Police are the ultimate symbol of authority for the establishment. And we all know that we're supposed to question authority. I don't care if most cops are professional or well meaning. People in general are the same but we don't walk around after dark through alleys and down skid row saying "why should I fear people? They are by and large well intentioned and honourable". The problem with cops is that they are in a position of power and power is constantly at risk of being abused. I know many people who have told me stories of how cops have treated them poorly. Granted these guys, not quite my friends, were either drunk or high or something which would attract the police but that doesn't justofy the way they have been treated many times.
Police are the paradox of a democratic society. We are supposedly free and guarenteed rights yet the only way to guarentee just that is to have a force of armed men charged with denying selectively certain rights under parrticular circumstances. As my father has described it they are a "necessary evil". Police are a threat to all that we value but their presense is simply favourable to that of a world in which criminals reign.
I don't trust police because they don't trust me. It is their job to be suspicious and to infer guilt prematurely with innuendo and heresay. If you think about if police are so trustworthy why do we need the trial system to confirm guilt? police cannot be trusted because we can't afford for them to be able to become corrupt.
Don't get me wrong we need them. But only just. They keep the greater evils at bay. But how easily they become that evil.
A perfect example of why police are always a threat goes back to the 1970s in Canada. It was 1970 and the FLQ crisis was in full swing. A domestic terrorist group had taken the British ambassador hostage.
Our Prime Minister declared "War Measures", a highly unorthodox thing given that those measures were intended for war time. It essentially laid all law and liberty aside for a time and gave the government ultimate power. So for some more context the FLQ was a seperatist group in Quebec and the crisis was occuring there. However all accross the country where ever police were present people were being rounded up and put in jail. The police decided that if they now had ultimate power they would arrest without charge or due process anyone whom they did not like. So every pinko and lefty adjitator was rounded up and locked up until war measures were suspended. My father was 14 at the time and was hanging out with a group of older teenagers at a park. This was in Niagara Falls Ontario. The police came accross the field like an army and grabbed all the teens and loiterers and hippies. My dad got away only cause he was 14.
This is Canada, a country known for being leftist. Yet our own police force was no better than the SA of pre-war Germany when Hitler began his march to power.
I have no delusions about what the true nature of my country is. I don't trust police because of what they symbolize and what I know they would do given the freedom.
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