Police work is hard, it’s dangerous, and it’s usually underpaid. I have a ton of respect for anyone who takes on the job and who does it to the best of his or her ability. Cops deal with lots of shit, and with lots of shitty people, and the way that some cops are able to maintain their equanimity and their professionalism in very difficult situations is always a marvel to me.
I saw a video a few years back where a cop in some midwestern state (Iowa? I can’t remember) was involved in a car chase with what turned out to be a mentally unstable woman. The woman pulled into a driveway, jumped out of the car, and brought both hands up as if she were about to fire a gun. It was dark, and while you could see that there was something in her hands, it was not clear what the object was.
If i were the cop, right about then i probably would have put four or five shots into her torso. But the cop in the video hid behind his car, didn’t fire his gun, and gave himself time to ascertain that the woman was holding a wallet. He jumped out and grabbed her and placed her under arrest without hurting her. It’s always struck me as an incredible example of calm under pressure. People who can do this stuff deserve all our respect and more money than they currently earn.
And, even when they’re not facing down crazy and potentially-armed suspects, many cops do an excellent job keeping the peace in their day-to-day work.
But…
As kingbighair notes, let’s get out of fantasyland with that 99.9 percent number.
The problem with so many big-talking cop defenders like the OP is that they are so keen to stomp all over any criticism that they turn from defenders of good cops into apologists for bad ones. That’s the only way to explain numbers like “99.9%.”
A cop doesn’t have to shoot someone in order to act like a bully and overstep his or her authority. And cops acting like bullies happens far more than simple-minded morons like the OP are willing to admit. Because if 99.9 percent of cops were, in fact, great cops, we’d hear virtually no stories about police intimidation or brutality or illegal activities.
While i firmly believe that truly bad cops are a minority, they are a much more significant and troubling minority than the OP and his ilk would have you believe, and in some departments they constitute a large enough group to poison the whole culture of the force. We should be working to weed out assholes like this, so that we are safer in our streets, and so that they don’t tarnish the reputations of the cops who really are doing their job properly.
Like I said, the 99.9 thing was not meant to be taken literally. I agree that something has to be done to lower the numbers of bad cops, probably something drastic. I never said there were no bad cops. But I do believe that the media portrays cops as much, much worse than they actually are. At the end of the day, when you are the victim of a crime, the cops (generally) are the ones you want at your side.