US Authoritarianism

That's actually a really good question

I think generally it boils down to an "enemy" mentality. If you're a cop, a decent fraction of your job is getting violent with people who are resisting what you're doing because they don't want to go to jail. I think once someone slots into that "enemy" category, then it immediately becomes comfortable to do something horrendous to them; even if, like this woman, they didn't do a damn thing wrong. So the end result is lending strength to state oppression.

I don't think the solution to that is to get rid of all the cops. What are you going to do if someone tries to murder you? Any city in American that wanted to get its city council together and just disband the police force is able to do that; I don't think it's a unanimous capitalistic plot that they don't; it's that they genuinely fulfill an important function.

I also don't think the solution is to have cops, but make them the enemy and be hostile to them all the time and defund them to punish them and decide that they're a part of your city's infrastructure that's just always the enemy all the time. That's part of what I don't like about this meme -- it's like, who cares if it's true, I just know these are always shitty people so any shitty thing I want to believe about them becomes a good thing to feel and so let's get busy on hating them.

I do think strong oversight of the police is a good thing. I think bodycams and the culture of charging police with a crime (sometimes 😕) when they commit a crime changed policing in a massive way that isn't really recognized. There are still big problems for sure. I also think sending people who aren't police to e.g. mental health calls, places where the "let's catch the bad people" model isn't going to be what is needed, is a really good thing.

But I think in general, exactly the same mentality that leads this cop to drag this woman around by her hair ("well fuck it, she's a suspect, she's coming with me and who cares whether it gets done in a humane fashion, because that type of person is always the enemy") actually roots back at the core to a very similar mentality to that that says "I'm going to bitch at the cop on this traffic stop and be antagonistic for no reason" or "all bad statistics about cops are true, all good statistics about cops are false" or etc etc, you know that type of person is always the enemy, you get the idea.

OP shows 2 cops dragging a student by her hair for protesting a genocide In what world are these people not outlandishly and cartoonishly evil?

I have no part in this, because I don't live in the US, but basing your argument on a picture of two (one?) cop being a dick, does not make all cops dicks. They may be, but this picture shouldn't be proof of it as you imply on this comment. No pictures are being taken of cops doing the job properly, let alone being shared online. Besides that, one bad cop does not make all cops bad. This may be turning into a Bear/Man discussion so I will leave it at this

My point is, yeah they might be dicks, but I think that it is fair to point out false facts and arguments even though they support a notion that is true

There's a lot there but I read the cited 2015 paper. From it:

Officers knocked on the door; when no one answered, they kicked down the door and took Diggs, who was bleeding from a small facial wound, outside

, according to Prince George’s County, Maryland prosecutors.

When asked about the recent increase in arrests of District of Columbia police officers, Chief Cathy Lanier noted that

Ninety-eight officers were arrested more than once on domestic violence charges between 2007 and 2010

And then:

Part IV asks why, in contrast, police officers are able to abuse their partners with impunity

Kinda sounds like literally every single example in this paper involves some sort of prosecution of the cops who were involved, i.e. not with impunity. No?

This is part of what I was saying -- I think back in 1992, the culture that if a cop beat up his wife or drove drunk, his co workers would look the other way was almost universal. I know it's definitely not universal now. Is it still common? I honestly don't know. But getting a honest answer to that question seems like a vital step in stopping it from happening in the places where it is still happening. Right? Or no?

There are actually much much worse and more systemic stories than these. I'm just saying that it's good to want to arrive at an actual measurement of how often it happens (because it's way different if it's 40% versus 10% versus 4%), and that it's bad to just pick the highest number you can and say that that's obviously what's going on because cops are terrible people. How do we know they're terrible people? Because 40% of them beat their wives, that's how.