Not really. You (and others) specifically raised deaths on duty as one of the reasons for increasing militarization and violence; it’s a perfectly reasonable response to note that deaths in custody have not increased during the same time period that militarization and violence have increased, and nor have increasing militarization and violence seemed to decrease deaths in the line of duty.
My point was also precisely that the police themselves are to blame in some of the other areas that you cite, such as the War on Drugs, and the number of former military in the police forces. You seemed to be suggesting that these factors somehow mitigate police responsibility for militarization and violence. I concede that police don’t write the laws regarding drug policy, but they choose how to enforce them, and police departments themselves are also responsible for who they let into the force in the first place.
Is this a real question? Do you truly not understand the difference between institutional responsibility in an organization like the police force, on the one hand, and personal responsibility of individuals in the overall society, on the other?
A general principle of our society, with limited exceptions, is that one individual is not responsible for the actions of another. The non-looters in society are not responsible for the behavior of looters. Those who do not commit acts of violence are not responsible for those who do. If people actively excuse violence, or protect those who commit violence, i’m happy to criticize those people, but i don’t hold individuals responsible for the actions of others.
Police officers are part of an institution, and work together within the constraints and the protections of that institution. They have responsibilities within that institution that exceed their responsibilities as individual citizens. They are supposed to uphold the law, as part of their job, and if they know of or see other officers violate the law, they have an active moral and legal duty that citizens do not have to do something about it.
Moreover, my comment about good officers protecting bad was not simply about the lack of active intervention; it was about active lying, cover-ups, refusal to testify, and pressure on leadership and politicians not to hold police accountable for their actions. While police unions and individual officers do everything in their power to prevent accountability, and to support and retain and even actively hire officers who have been found derelict in the past, they all have to accept the burden of what the shittiest officers do.
The cop who shot the 12-year-old kid in Cleveland recently had been found unfit for duty by a different department, and that department was in the process of firing him when he resigned. Yet he ended up with another police job. In another case, currently under discussion in the omnibus “Controversial encounters” thread, two cops in Jasper, Texas, were fired after beating the crap out of a civilian and costing their town $75,000 in a civil judgment. The Jasper police department, after a vote by the city council, did the right thing, and yet one of those cops is now working for the Jasper County Sheriff. It’s sort of like the Roman Catholic Church paying off victims and moving all those child molesters around to other parishes. In a better world, the police in that department would say, “We don’t want a violent bully on our force.” They all bear some responsibility for every violation of citizens’ rights committed by that man while he’s employed by their force.