Clearly this is a very heavy topic here in the United States, and I'm sure those of other countries have a stance on it as well. It's also a touchier subject that people jump about, so yes I'm aware of how threads like this can be. On that note, since I haven't personally met anybody in the Archives, yet regularly converse with many of you, I wanted to drop this discussion here, rather on Facebook, since usually I avoid issues like this. Kinda overstepping my own boundaries, if you will.

Essentially, one conversation I had with someone sparked this. There's a handful of people that hate cops and think that every one of them is corrupt. There are people (like myself) who see many problems with the police state and know there are good and bad cops, but think police are necessary to a degree. And then there are those who have utmost respect for cops no matter what. What are everyone's thoughts on this, and more importantly, why do you feel the way you do? I'm not starting this as an argument, so much as to just gather perspectives, since ultimately I'm a bit torn on a lot of these issues myself.

On the flip side, what I've noticed is that a handful of people that absolutely hate police are also those who think that only military/law enforcement/security personnel should be able to have easier access to firearms, which to me, is extremely contradicting and flat out silly. So to extend upon my initial question, how does everyone feel about guns in relevance to law enforcement vs. citizen accessibility? And if you DO actually feel the way described in the first sentence of this paragraph, can you clarify or clear up any misconceptions that I may have?

Again, this is all informative, not persuasive. I'm mega curious, so please don't get hostile (FUCKING HOSTIIIIIIIIIIILE)

I'm in the camp where I do think police is necessary to some extent and that there's a mix of good and bad cops out there. That said, the bad has infected the entire system to the point where a complete overhaul is looking to be even more of a necessity. It seems like police want to have all the perks of the military without the proper training and rules of conduct while civilians are the ones told time and time again to be on high alert and super conscientious of our actions. Not to mention the bullshit regarding the war on drugs and half-assed responses to serious issues. Even at my most favorable, my views are often distrustful.

I'm also in 100% belief of racism is inherent in the system, if only because I've experienced the opposite. I've been pulled over nearly ten times in the last ten years, a couple times without proper paperwork, and have mostly driven off with half-assed warnings. I find myself if I'd have gotten away with it or would still even be alive if I had been black or Hispanic.

I 10000% agree with this, and I've had one similar incident. A few months ago I got pulled over and was almost definitely over the legal limit and I didn't even get so much as a ticket. I'm almost positive being white was part of it (needless to say, this was my wake up call to stop risking tipsy driving).

As for an overhaul, I can definitely see that as well. I think the fact that a lot of us (mostly innocent) people even getting nervous just by seeing them somewhat indicates a problem.

I come from a family of cops, and I can tell you every family gathering was basically a smorgasbord of every gross cop stereotype you can imagine. Power-tripping, trigger happy racist rednecks. Agreed with T_P, total overhaul is needed.

At the same time, I do understand that it's not the greatest job - often pretty thankless, needlessly dangerous due to our nation's love affair with guns and violence, low standards for new hires and shit pay. Without the War on Drugs and rampant firearms access we'd need far fewer cops, we could hire more competitive people, pay and train them better, and the populace might actually trust and respect them. Pipe dream, probably, but I've seen that sort of relationship exist between civilians and police in other countries, so it's possible, if highly improbable, that the U.S. could eventually become that way.

That's a really great point. With what you said in mind, I do try and thank the ones that have serviced me or people with me in any good way.

I have an anti-authoritarian slant to everything I do. Through whatever combination of personal experiences and philosophical questions I've been involved in or been privy to, I maintain an inherent distrust of anybody who yearns to have power over another human being. I'm saying that from the get go.

Police are necessary in society, and any who say otherwise either live sheltered existences or bask in delusions of grandeur as to their own abilities.

My girlfriend's family is full of police and courtroom clerks. Her aunt is a magistrate, uncle a retired state trooper, cousin a cop, etc. I can safely say that their cop friends may be fine human beings, but when conversations changing laws or the idea of racial profiling arise? They tow the thin blue line. Her uncle and cousin find Black Lives Matter to be ridiculous, for example, and her aunt is currently dating a cop who is the quintessential "pig": racist, chauvinist, and a complete pussy when he's not on duty. He's avoided eye contact with me since he made a blatantly racist and misogynist joke toward a family friend and his fiancee and I called him out on it.

As Twisted has said, there's an obvious amount of racism inherent in the current system, with police departments existing more to maintain the social status quo than to truly serve and protect the public, let alone uphold their trust. A friend of mine whose family immigrated from Turkey was charged with resisting arrest and assault because he tripped while handcuffed and bumped into the arresting officer (nevermind that the initial charges were fabricated and dropped). My friends who are POC and/or LGBTQ (specifically trans) have also encountered enough trumped up charges within just these past few years - in liberal Massachusetts, mind you - so as to erode even more of my faith in the current system.

Police are fallible because they are human. That shouldn't be a controversial opinion to have, but it seemingly is. The further militarization of smaller departments without the proper training in de-escalation techniques or even proper usage of weaponry/tools is what leads to cops shooting unarmed citizens who are complying, APCs rolling down otherwise quiet suburban streets, and prolonging a goon-like attitude among those who wear the badge.

Am I saying that police need to be disarmed? No. They just need to be trained better for an ever-changing world and held accountable for their transgressions.

Reminds me how a few weeks ago, I was watching those DUI/getting pulled over stops where guys will film the whole thing. Theyre very uncooperative with the police, literally spending at least 10 minutes at a DUI checkpoint/pulled over, when most of it could have taken a few minutes.

The thing is that they're doing that because of the exposure they've had to people doing shit like Facebook Live streaming their own murders at the hands of the police, plus a litany of other times the cops have been complete bastards, and because the cops themselves often don't have dash cams or body cams recording incidents of police brutality.

I mean, I enjoy a nice sampling of those ridiculous sovereign citizen assholes getting what's coming to them as much as anyone, but in recent times I can totally understand why Joe Average, especially Black Joe Average (sorry, accidental Brad Pitt reference) would want to film their interactions with the police.

It's funny that here in Brazil, where people can't have firearms (unless in very special cases) and violent crimes are epidemic, most of the people are actually supports police brutality and draconian punishments for criminals, even if that means violation of citizen laws.

People support police? Or police brutality?

I know this isn't as serious a concern as others being levied here, but I really think all the traffic laws and vehicle regulations are what make the USA a bonafide police state. Every day I drive to work I see anywhere from 10-15 cops, at LEAST. They are fucking e v e r y w h e r e these days and it's gross and they all love nothing more than fucking up your life royally over stupid, trivial shit. Fuck cops.

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See, this is where some of my biggest issues with it lie. Making others lives a HUGE hassle just as a source for money is ridiculous.

Leave it to capitalism to make law enforcement a business with sales quotas.

I hear there are even some countries where there are for-profit prisons, too. I mean... how crazy is that?

Word brah, also check out some feminist rekt compilations while you're at it, paints a very vivid and sincere picture of the women's suffrage movement in the US and abroad.

I fall into the " cops are necessary but aren't necessarily great " camp as well and I don't have too much else to add to the subject , besides the fact that I think certain cops have it in for other lesser known minorities/easy targets as well in certain regions of the States .

To clarify what I'm saying , there has long been a significant amount of dislike between the ( mostly ) Philadelphia metro transplant community and the local " swampneck " community in Southern Delaware . Cops in that area tend to be from the former community as opposed to the latter and many of them have it in for swampneck males , especially if they happen to have long hair and cutoff vests .

Of course things may have changed in the past 10 years or so , but growing up my group of friends and I were constantly in trouble with the cops , especially in our middle and high school days when we got into metal and started hanging outside biker bars . We weren't innocent babes in the woods by any means , but they certainly focused a lot more of their attention on us as opposed to our delinquent transplant counterparts , in spite of the fact that we never committed crime for profit and they did .

As for the issue of cops being better armed than citizens , I say a very fine line must be tread between giving cops good equipment and turning them into an oppressive paramilitary force . And I've never heard anti cop people argue in favor of cops having easier access to firearms , so I must say I'm surprised to read that , though I don't doubt that claim since people can be extremely contradictory .

When I watched them, when they refuse to answer questions(basic, regular ones at that), it just reeks of suspicion. The part where they roll down the window an inch gets me all the time. It's like, theyre just being pricks.

Without a doubt. A lot of the furniture at the college I graduated from came from the local prison since they could work everyone for basically no pay, and then sell it to colleges for a slightly cheaper price. If prisons could sell stuff just anywhere, imagine how many things would go out of business. This is probably one of my biggest issues for the whole "for profit prisons".

There's a documentary on either Netflix or Amazon (or both) about a judge who was sending kids--fucking kids--to lengthy prison sentences as part of a dirty kick-back deal. It's called Kids for Cash and it's fucking depressing.

I'm all for capitalism, but there are some things no one has any business capitalizing on. The problem with turning something like this into a for-profit business is that you are then dependent on crime getting worse, punishments getting worse, or judges and lawyers getting more corrupt. Because if society ever actually gets fucking better, your business suffers.

I don't entirely trust anti-cop sentiment from people in the country (and the region of Europe in general) I live in, since a substantial amount of it is from far-right football hooligans. It's rather annoying to see Western anarchists on the internet show uncritical support for them. That said, police here still share much of the same power-tripping shit as American cops do, and it's atrocious, above all, that their abuse of refugees who have been going the Balkan route has been met with absolute silence from national media.

Oooh this sounds interesting. I’m gonna go out and say I think a government sponsored police force is pretty much entirely unnecessary and the amount we (at least here in America) spend on it each year in taxes is fucked up, not to mention the ingrained mob mentality most of said police departments have in protecting their own when they find out one of their employees happens to be a bad cop that pulled the “I feared for my life” defense when confronted with a 12 year black kid in a park and unloaded on him before they got out of the cruiser. Cop is one of the few professions in this great nation that have the luxury of being almost entirely union, unfortunately.

The alternative though, would never actually work out with the way this society functions, the idea of community watch and defense programs like what the black panthers achieved but on a gradually larger scale just wouldn’t work out because we’re so damn lazy and entitled.

If individual firearm ownership is still a part of this topic, I’m all for the second amendment for everyone living in this country, following the election of y’all know who, I’ve seen a drastic rise in non uhhh.. stereotypical gun owners, basically going back to the whole “an armed society is a polite society” at least for now

The majority of my interactions with the cops has been overwhelmingly positive. Nice people whom just want to do a great job but there were one possibly two instances I have had were my experience was on the opposite side. I am not going to go in any kind of detail about what happened but one of these instances my dad and I were accused of a home robbery type of deal. We fit the profile the cop[s] said or something very similar to that I don't recall exactly because this was many years back now. Anyone who knows me knows I am incapable of ever robbing a home. Doing something like this would never occur to me in the fucking first place. Of course the cops did not know this but still.....on the street after we were arrested we ended up with a warning [I think] and were let go and that was that. Of course they didn't have any thing on either of us. We were never charged in the first place. Sad if you ask me. Pretty sad.

This for sure, especially the taxes part. People have talked about raising taxes to make international health care doable, but that's so unnecessary. If we dropped tax dollars on a bunch of other ridiculous things such as this, and funneled it towards healthcare, that would pretty much solve the problem.

I was a correctional officer for 16 years and was even upper level management (Captain) and have always been dead set against for profit private prisons. I worked for the state of Maryland, not a private prison. Believe it or not there are standards. Dollar signs should not be based on human lives. That said, most cops I had to interact with when I was a CO were undercover racist assholes.

Our legal system is failing and not all because of the police. The overwhelming tendency for our government to create laws against victimless crimes plays a huge part. The failed war on drugs is one example.

Editing to say that most of the cops I had to interact with were Baltimore city cops so....just wanted to point that out. I did not want to paint to wide a stroke.

It's on Youtube, actually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxpNynnYwC0

As for my own thoughts on this, I think it's wrong and fucked up that cops are basically allowed to do whatever they want and get away with it because the system is rigged in a way that lets them. They can shoot people, terrorize people, plant evidence on you, racially profile, and be generally terrible to other people, usually those less privileged in life, and you know they won't be punished for it if they get caught or found out. What's worse is that we as a country pretty much let them get away with doing bad shit too, either out of fear of retaliation from the cops or having just resigned ourselves to the fact that it's never gonna get any better with them. Hell, it's only gotten worse as the decades have gone on.

That being said, cops are necessary in the same sense that a government is ultimately necessary; there needs to be some sort of oversight agency in place to make sure things don't totally descend into anarchy and madness. Regardless, the system as a whole needs a complete overhaul to make it actually work towards its intended goal of protecting and serving, but we know that's never gonna happen. It all comes back to the collective citizen mentality, and the people of the United States are so ass backwards about literally everything compared to the rest of the western world and beyond that it's just never going to get any better, and we'll descend further and further into a total police state that everyone will be powerless to stop from happening and be totally fine with it happening.

I'm in favor of providing police with more non-lethal armaments, such as tranquilizer guns.

So we didn't really touch on the gun ownership part of this much. The reason I threw this in is because a lot of people who want to crack down on owning firearms are the same ones that crack down on cops, which are probably the most heavily armed citizens. Thoughts?

I worked around police for over 10 years and now I'm an employee of the NSW Police Force officially.

From what I can see from Australian cops, most of them are good people and want to do good. The culture within the police is changing for the better (from what I've heard within the force) but there are always problems with funding and resources.

However, you couldn't pay me to be a front line police officer. Screw that. The cops are just normal people and they don't want to have to deal with idiots all day, but they do. I have seen people leave due to stress or PTSD. One guy was forced to retire after being beaten senseless. They have a hard job and now that I'm working in an official stance within the force, I'm seeing it more and more.

A couple of months ago I did a ride-along with them so I was in the privileged position to see them do their job in the field. The amount of crap they have to deal with is incredible. People that weren't involved in one of the things we were doing were shouting "FTP!" at us. It was insane, and the police just brush it off. I couldn't do it. Never ever ever.

Not really sure what my point is here, but I have huge respect for police. There's always a few bad apples in the force and I can't speak for police overseas, but in Australia I have a lot of respect and time for them. Their job is difficult and thankless and now that I'm an employee I will always do my best to help them.

I can't speak for Australia, but here in the states, they spend a lot of time going after petty, victimless crimes to generate revenue, so fuck 'em.

Speeding tickets on the highway are one of the most irritating things.

This is pretty much what happened to me and dad.