And people want to know why I don’t trust cops and other “authority figures.” Abuse of position ought to rate a automatic tripling of jail time and fines.
I think ex-cops have a pretty hard time in prison, if that’s where they end up…
Wouldn’t those things in the property room be evidence? Especially guns/drugs/money? Am I missing something here? Or has the murder weapon gone missing in more than a few cases?
Did their actions in any way affect the ability to prosecute or convict?
To say you don’t trust “cops” and “authority figures” because of cases like this seems a bit extreme. If it wasn’t other “cops” and “authority figures” that busted these bad ones, then who did?
What group do you trust? I’m willing to bet you can’t name a single group that hasn’t had egregious examples of people abusing their position.
In every single group there will always be those that abuse the power granted to them. That is why we need to keep diligent and persistant watch over these groups so this type of abuse is the exception and not the norm.
Hardly.
Completely? No one. There are only degrees of trust.
I’m glad to see this bust happen.
Outlaw cops got stopped.
Shows that the system can work.
I’d feel better if there wasn’t a culture of… ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ is the best I can describe it right now.
Last year there was an incident here where a bunch of police under investigation wore t-shirts saying ‘no rats’, meaning you’re not supposed to ‘tattle’ on a fellow police officer. I got over that type of thing in elementary school; if there’s a police officer abusing their authority or similar, we should expect their colleagues to report them and stop it, not demand that they stop protecting them and do so.
I didn’t use the word completely. I asked what group can be trusted. As used in the OP, “don’t trust” implied 0 trust to me in either in binary or a continuous spectrum.
Given that, I simply asked which groups, as a whole, the OP DOES trust. For any group in which trust is non-zero (binary or continuous scale), I wonder what the difference is between them and cops and authority figures. Surely any group as large as “cops and authority figures” will have examples of authority abuse within them. I sure can’t think of one that doesn’t: Priests, doctors, teachers, parents!, lawyers, defense contractors, ministers, mods all have examples of abuse.
If the only criteria needed to drop the trust level for an entire group to 0 are some examples of abuse of power, then surely any large group can’t be trusted in the same way cops and authority figures can’t be trusted as described in the OP.
As I said, abuse will always be an issue. We need to keep diligent watch to be sure it is rare, especially in authority figures such as cops. To say the entire police force deserves 0 trust is a bit extreme, in my opinion (shoot, wrong forum!).
I don’t trust anybody in authority, and that includes me.
The attitude surivives in some adult cultures, such as the Mafia.